Bøker av Tom Quinn

A collection of triumphant angling tales and anecdotes that will appeal to game fishers, coarse or sea anglers.

What really makes the British royal family tick? It's a question that royal watchers have pondered for as long as there has been a royal family. And the answer? Well, surprisingly, it's not the royal family's devotion to duty, it's not their wealth or their status, it's not even their popularity (or notoriety!). No, what really makes the royal family tick is the huge body of servants and staff past and present who feed and clothe the royals, organise their days, polish their shoes, carry the deer and pheasants they shoot, and even put the toothpaste on their toothbrushes. If you want to find out who these servants are, what they do and why, in so many cases, they devote their whole lives to royal service, then this book is for you. Some servants became utterly indispensable to the royals for whom they worked - Elizabeth II's childhood nanny Bobo MacDonald, for example, was closer to the late Queen than anyone in her family, not excepting even her husband Prince Philip and her sister Princess Margaret. At the other end of the spectrum, some members of staff found their royal employers arrogant, overbearing, snobbish and even infantile. As one recent member of the Kensington Palace team put it: 'What you get with one or two members of the royal family is a public angel and a private devil! And only the staff see the private devil!'

In the tense atmosphere of the Cold War, John Fisher, a laid-back Australian, lands a job with a shipping line in Rotterdam, blissfully unaware of the concealed financial and political schemes harboured by some of his new friends and colleagues. He soon finds himself entangled in an international scandal involving influential entities, facing relentless pressure from various quarters. Navigating the challenges of dealing with intoxicated ship captains, irritable harbour masters, and antagonistic customs officers in Rotterdam and Antwerp seems trivial compared to the daunting task of untangling an accounting debacle for his London headquarters. This ordeal culminates in his role as a witness in a fraud trial in Southampton. Amidst this turmoil, a silver lining emerges as he meets and falls for Nina. However, the stakes escalate dramatically with a murder, thrusting Fisher into a maelstrom of political intrigue

For the first time this trilogy brings together Tom Quinn's trio of tragic love tales, "The Islandman", "The Lamp for Lovers", and "The Love Song of the Dying Sperm Whale". Read together the thematic unity of the novels is immediately very evident, revealing an ongoing lyrical and moving quest through shifting landscapes of desire and loss under the distant shining light of fervent and unattainable love.

For as long as the British monarchy has existed, royal children have been brought up in ways that seem bizarre and eccentric to the rest of us. Interweaving exclusive testimonies from palace staff with historical sources, Tom Quinn also uncovers outrageous tales of royal children misbehaving, often hilariously.

George Orwell once said that the British love a really good murder. He might have added that the only thing the British love more than a good murder is a really good scandal, and best of all are the sexual and political scandals that take place behind the gilded doors of Britain's royal palaces. From Edward II's intimate relationship with Piers Gaveston to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's dramatic exit from the royal family, the royal residences have seen it all.This glorious romp of a book contains new information on well-known and not-so-well-known scandals, including those that have only recently been revealed through the release of previously secret official papers. Exploring surviving palaces such as Kensington as well as long vanished residences including Whitehall, Scandals of the Royal Palaces is the first in-depth look at the bad behaviour of not just the royals themselves but also palace officials, courtiers, household servants and hangers on.Delving into the bitter hatreds that generations of King Georges nursed for their eldest sons, Queen Victoria's opium fuelled rages and Edward VII's near-miss perjury conviction, royal expert Tom Quinn reveals that scandal and the royal family have always been bedfellows. And if the behaviour of today's royals is anything to go by, the glittering palaces will continue to house intriguing, embarrassing and outrageous scandals for centuries to come.

Kensington palace has been described as a royal menagerie, a hive of industrious freeloaders, an ant heap and even a lunatic asylum. Tom Quinn takes the reader behind the official version of palace history to discover intriguing, sometimes wild, often scandalous, but frequently heart-warming stories.

Test your London knowledge with this fascinating book, packed with fun and challenging quiz questions based around the weirdest events from the illustrious history of this wonderful city.

More extraordinary but true tales from London's history, featuring a mysterious mummy housed in a City church, a TARDIS at Earl's Court, and why the mulberry tree in the gardens at Buckingham Palace isn't quite what it was supposed to be.

A quirky collection of stories from London's stranger side, featuring a tiny prison cell in Trafalgar Square, a train disguised as a ship, and a church that's completely the wrong way round.

Kathleen Clifford was born in 1909. Her family lived in a tiny flat near Paddington Station and her earliest memories were of the smell of horses and the shrill whistle of steam trains. For a girl from the slums there was only really one option once school was over - a life in service. She started work on 1925 as a lowly kitchen maid in the London home of Lady Diana Spencer's family. Here she heard tales of the Earl's propensity for setting fire to himself, as well as enjoying the servant's gossip about who was sleeping with whom. The Spencers were just the first in a line of eccentric families for whom she worked during a career that lasted more than thirty earrs and took her from a London palace to remote medieval estates. But despite long hours, amorous butlers and mad employers, Kathleen always kept her sense of humour and knew how to have fun. On one occasion she was almost caught in bed with her boyfriend who had to jump out of the window and run down the drive in his underwear to escape the local bobby.

During more than thirty years in a variety of houses, Bob Sharpe managed to rise from garden boy to valet and butler.As a boy he had to kill pheasant chicks, boil rabbits for the estate dogs, carry the wood up and down stairs every day for thirty fires and sleep on the floor outside his master's room. He cleaned shoes, ironed underwear and socks and once had to stand all night in the hall waiting for a late visitor to arrive.But as a butler he was the best paid servant in the house, waited on, feared and respected by the other servants.Bob Sharpe knew the real world of upstairs downstairs and the secrets of the landed gentry - even to the point of incest and attempted murder!

Praise for Lives of the Servants: Reading this fascinating book is likely to unleash almost anyone s Inner Bolshevik !' Daily Mail ...a fascinating portrait of the drudgery and servility of a domestic's life.' The Age ...captures the subtleties of the English class system to an extraordinary degree.' Midstate Observer'If the Brothers Grimm had ended Cinderella where she was being forced to clean the house by her stepsisters, they might have accidentally been writing Rose Plummer's biography. The maid's story makes for harsh, heartbreaking, fascinating reading. The Daily Telegraph, NZBorn in 1910, Rose Plummer grew up in an East End slum, where she and fought an unending battle with hunger and squalor.At the age of fifteen, Rose started work as a live-in maid, and despite the poverty of her childhood, nothing could have prepared her for the long hours, the backbreaking work and the harshness of a world in which servants were treated as if they were less than human. But however difficult life became, Rose found something to laugh about, and her remarkable spirit and gift for friendship shines through in her memories of a now-vanished world.