Winner of the Best Picture Oscar 2011 Award One man saved the British Royal Family in the first decades of the 20th century – amazingly, he was an almost unknown, and certainly unqualified, speech therapist called Lionel Logue, whom one newspaper in the 1930s famously dubbed ‘The Quack who saved a King’....
It was wonderful to be young and working on Wall Street in the 1980s - never had so many 24-year-olds made so much money in so little time. In this shrewd and wickedly funny audiobook, Michael Lewis describes an astonishing era and his own rake's progress through a powerful investment bank. From an unlikely beginning (art history at Princeton?) ...
Listed as one of the essential 50 books of all time in The Guardian Inspired the Academy Award-nominated film, The Imitation Game It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that the British mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954) saved the Allies from the Nazis, invented the computer and artificial intelligence, and anticipated gay liberation by de...
Miles Halter is fascinated by famous last words - and tired of his safe life at home. He leaves for boarding school to seek what the dying poet Francois Rabelais called the "Great Perhaps." Much awaits Miles at Culver Creek, including Alaska Young. Clever, funny, screwed-up, and dead sexy, Alaska will pull Miles into her labyrinth and catapult him ...
In her own words, here is the captivating story of Julia Child’s years in France, where she fell in love with French food and found “her true calling”. From the moment the ship docked in Le Havre in the fall of 1948 and Julia watched the well-muscled stevedores unloading the cargo to the first perfectly soigne meal that she and her husband, Paul...
A thrilling chronicle of the tragedy-ridden history of climbing K2, the world’s most difficult and unpredictable mountain, by the best-selling author of No Shortcuts to the Top. At 28,251 feet, the world’s second-tallest mountain, K2 thrusts skyward out of the Karakoram Range of northern Pakistan. Climbers regard it as the ultimate achievement i...
This lyrical, evocative, thought-provoking journal of a man’s quest for truth – and for himself – has touched and changed an entire generation, and is ready to reach out to a new one. At its heart, the story is all too simple: a man and his son take a motorcycle trip across America. But this is not a simple trip at all, for around every corner, thr...
There’s little debate that Robert De Niro is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, screen actors of his generation, perhaps of all time. His work, particularly in the first 20 years of his career, is unparalleled. Mean Streets, the Godfather Part II, Taxi Driver, the Deer Hunter, and Raging Bull all dazzled moviegoers and critics alike, display...
Vincent van Gogh is best known for two things – his sunflowers and his ear-cutting. But there are many other ways of knowing this remarkable son of a Dutch pastor, who left his chill homeland for the sunshine of Arles in the South of France; and left us over a thousand frank letters of struggle and joy, to help us glimpse his inner world. Vincen...
Ranging far from his adopted Provence, Peter Mayle now travels to every corner of France, armed with knife, fork, and corkscrew. He takes us to tiny, out-of-the-way restaurants, starred Michelin wonders, local village markets, annual festivals, and blessed vineyards. We visit the Foire aux Escargots at Martigny-les-Bains – a whole weekend devote...