Biografier

"Absolutely fabulous!" - Sir Ray Davies.The Kinks"We Danced On Our Desks offers a window on another lost world, a silver age of journalism when a magazine could please itself and celebrities would wait to be invited into its charmed circle. It's also an unbeatable portrait of a writer finding his voice amid the distractions of a dementedly sybaritic decade." - The Observer"It's wonderful. It intrigued and amused and delighted ... done with wit, verve, charm and self-deprecation." - bestselling author Anthony Quinn"A classic of its genre." - author David TaylorWE DANCED ON OUR DESKS is a compelling, entertaining and thrilling look at acclaimed journalist and writer Philip Norman's experiences working on the Sunday Times Magazine at the height of its popularity in the 60s and 70s. From incredible interviews with the Beatles to Bob Dylan, Gaddafi to Indira Ghandi, and through seismic historical events such as the Vietnam War, Philip provides a vibrant cultural insight into the Swinging Sixties and uniquely documents key events in his own incredible life. provides a unique front row seat to the seminal events and the people who defined a generation and continue to impact us todayit's a compelling story of an extraordinary life, as a young man moves from a provincial existence headfirst into the heady world of the Swinging Sixties in all its provocative glorygives an addictive first-hand account of work and life at The Sunday Times Magazine, one of the world's most influential publicationsIncludes interviews with many icons of the rock, film, political and media worlds, including Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, P.G. Wodehouse, J.R.R Tolkein, Truman Capote, David Hockney, Philip Roth, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Johnny Cash, the Beach Boys, Fleetwood Mac, the Everly Brothers, King Hussein of Jordan, Indira Gandhi, and President Gadaffi.Philip has led - and is leading - an extraordinary life, full of drama, emotion, experience and positivity. His book is not simply a snapshot of a particular time in history, or remembrances of famous people and places, but a genuinely revealing and compelling account of a life lived and lived well.

Motionless now and in absolute silence, she awaited her doom, the moments growing to hours, to years, to ages; and still those devilish eyes maintained their watch. Seen by contemporaries as a natural successor to Edgar Allan Poe but with the added dimensions of a man who had witnessed true horror fighting in some of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War, Ambrose Bierce was one of America's leading convention-defying writers, critics and essayists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - but still remains relatively unknown by many fans of the genre. This new collection not only brings together some of Bierce's best and most unusual stories (such as 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge', 'The Moonlit Road' and 'The Death of Halpin Frayser') but also highlights those aspects of his life which saw him as a loner, someone who stepped aside from society and observed it as some other being. Even in death Bierce was unconventional, disappearing to join the Mexican Revolution, never to be seen again - a mystery editor Mike Ashley explores in a closing essay for the book.

Through eleven stories published between 1851 and 1935, this new anthology revives a throng of undying spirits from a host of unsung and classic authors including Elizabeth Gaskell, M. R. James, John Wyndham, and Edith Wharton.

Steeped in honey, Juventius, your golden eyes, and as sweet too when I press my lips to them - three hundred thousand kisses is not close to enoughFor centuries, evidence of queer love in the ancient world was ignored or suppressed. Even today, only a few, famous narratives are widely known - yet there's a rich literary tradition of Greek and Roman love that extends far beyond this handful of stories. Here, the poet Seán Hewitt and painter Luke Edward Hall collect together, for the first time, forty of the most exhilarating queer tales in the classical canon and bring them newly to life. A ground-breaking anthology that changes the way we see the ancient world - and invites us to reflect on the puritanism of our own - 300,000 Kisses is a riotous celebration of desire in all its forms.

"As a pioneer of ubiquitous computing-the embedding of technology in everyday objects from thermostats to doorbells-computer scientist Mark Weiser's descriptions of smart homes, now thirty years later, might seem to approach our reality. Weiser's views certainly influenced our technology's developers-his 1991 Scientific American article 'The Computer for the 21st Century' was flagged a must-read by Microsoft's Bill Gates and then circulated among the day's digirati, including those Silicon Valley insiders who crowded his beer garden-based 'office hours.' Unlike many of his contemporaries, Weiser's vision was motivated by the philosophies of Michael Polanyi and Martin Heidegger, collaboration with anthropologists such as Lucy Suchman, and insights from artists including Natalie Jeremijenko. He hoped to realize 'tacit computing' as an escape from a single attention-grabbing screen as a portal to work, entertainment, and education. When rivals such as Nicholas Negroponte at MIT's Media Lab championed the development of smart agents (the ancestors of Siri and Alexa) or pervasive sensing in wearable technologies (proto-Fitbits or Apple Watches), Weiser balked. Weiser wanted computers to be something closer to the white cane a person with low vision might use to navigate the world. Good technology, he argued, should not mine our experiences for data to sell or demand our attention. Technology should not rob its users of the hardships that establish their expertise, but instead give them the ability to conceive of the world in new ways. In this compelling biography of a person and idea, digital studies scholar John Tinnell shows Weiser, who died of cancer at 46, would be heartbroken if he had lived to see the ways we use technology today. Informed by deep archival research and interviews with Weiser's family and Xerox PARC colleagues, this book uses Weiser's life to offer a new history of today's technological reality, an inside view of Xerox PARC during its heyday, and a compelling vision of what computers failed to be"--

In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child. This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame.

What does it mean to create, not in "a room of one's own" but in a domestic space? Do children and genius rule each other out? In The Baby on the Fire Escape, award-winning biographer Julie Phillips traverses the shifting terrain where motherhood and creativity converge.With fierce empathy and vivid prose, Phillips evokes the intimate struggles of brilliant artists and writers, including Doris Lessing, who had to choose between her motherhood and herself; Ursula K. Le Guin, who found productive stability in family life; Audre Lorde, whose queer, polyamorous union allowed her to raise children on her own terms and Alice Neel, who once, to finish a painting, was said to have left her baby on the fire escape of her New York apartment. A meditation on maternal identity and artistic greatness, The Baby on the Fire Escape illuminates some of the most pressing conflicts in contemporary women's lives.

"In a world that isn't short of darkness, there could be few more urgent priorities than to spend time rehearsing for ourselves why life - despite all its challenges - still has so much to offer us; why there are still so many reasons to be hopeful. The book is an eclectic collection of anecdotes and arguments, vibrantly illustrated with artworks and photography, that remind us why we should remain hopeful when all else fails. Across a series of short essays, we learn why we still have the right to feel purposeful and buoyant despite everything that is challenging: because there is still so much more to discover, because we can delight in summer days and the light of dawn, and because we don't require perfection for things to feel good enough. In a tone that avoids the pitfalls of sentimentality and cynicism, the book urges us to reconnect with our more resilient selves, bidding us to recover faith in what is still possible. At points funny and always encouraging and kind, here is an ideal friend to guide us back to courage and delight"--Publisher's description.

This book, the first ever biography of the father of philosophy, tracks Plato's life from his childhood in war-torn Athens at the end of the fifth century BCE to his founding of the Academy, adventures in Sicily, death, and immense legacy. Throughout, it sheds light on Plato's many timeless works of philosophy.

"For the first time ever, legendary singer-songwriter Dolly Parton brings you behind the lyrics of 175 of her songs to reveal the personal stories and vibrant memories that have inspired sixty years of songwriting. Lushly illustrated and told in Dolly's inimitable voice, this rich collection offers an intimate, exclusive look at the colorful life, prolific career, and rags-to-rhinestones journey of one of the most revered entertainers of our time"--