A tale of sportsmanship, chance and obsession, The Penalty Kick by Robert McCrum explores both the addiction of risk, and a doomed father-son relationship that could have been torn from the pages of a late-Victorian novel, inspired by the edgy, ruthless and egalitarian spirit of Northern Ireland.
In What We Talk About When We Talk About Crime, criminologist Jennifer Fleetwood examines seven infamous crime stories to make sense of the modern confessional impulse, including Howard Marks’s outlandish autobiography Mr Nice, Shamima Begum’s controversial Times interview, Prince Andrew’s disastrous Newsnight appearance and Myra Hindley’s unpublished prison letters.
Following on from the huge success of Beneath My Feet: Writers on Walking and Sauntering: Writers Walk Europe, in Globetrotting: Writers Walk the World, Duncan Minshull brings together over fifty walker-writers who have travelled the world’s seven continents.
Louisa May Alcott is best known as the author of Little Women. But she was also a noted essayist who wrote on a wide range of subjects, including her father’s failed utopian commune, life as a Civil War nurse and her experience as a young woman sent to work in service to alleviate her family’s poverty. Blending gentle satire with reportage and emotive biography, these essays show Alcott to be one of the sharpest wits in American literature.
First published in 1964, Modern Buildings in London is a celebration of the city’s post-war architecture by the famously untrained critic Ian Nairn. Written ‘by a layman for laymen’, Nairn’s take on 260 buildings that were instantly recognisable as ‘modern’ includes descriptions of classic designs such as the Barbican, the former BBC Television Centre, as well as schools, ambulance stations, car parks and even care homes.
An urgent final work from the award-winning author whose writing, fieldwork and mentorship inspired generations of writers and activists. With an introduction by Rebecca Solnit that speaks to Lopez’s keen attention to the world, including its spiritual dimensions, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World opens our minds and sounds to the important of being wholly present to the beauty and complexity of life.
Taking us on a journey from the court of Louis XIV to TikTok’s avant apocalypse, Fashion: A Manifesto scrutinises fashion from a number of angles: historically, psychologically, politically, environmentally, even linguistically, to open up questions about the ways in which it works, both for and against us, and looks forward to a future where our clothes treat us – not to mention the planet – a great deal more kindly.
Todd McEwen grew up in Southern California. As the son of relatively normal people, he had no in with Hollywood, a mere thirteen miles away, try as he might. This is a kid who loved the movies so much, he got up at 4.30 in the morning to watch Laurel and Hardy. A kid who made his father project 8mm cartoons onto the family’s dining room curtains so they could be slowly parted, just like at a real cinema. A guy who based his philosophy of life on Captain Nemo, and has watched Chinatown over sixty times. So far.
Todd McEwen grew up in Southern California. As the son of relatively normal people, he had no in with Hollywood, a mere thirteen miles away, try as he might. This is a kid who loved the movies so much, he got up at 4.30 in the morning to watch Laurel and Hardy. A kid who made his father project 8mm cartoons onto the family’s dining room curtains so they could be slowly parted, just like at a real cinema. A guy who based his philosophy of life on Captain Nemo, and has watched Chinatown over sixty times. So far.
