On the way to a show in Skipton, in North Yorkshire, I noticed a road sign to a town called Keighley. So later, during the show, I mentioned this, asking the audience, ‘Is that your rival town?’ And the room went chillingly quiet, until one woman called out with understated menace, ‘Keighley is a sink of evil.’
From the author of ‘The Prehistory of Sex’ – a coruscating, insightful history of the human soul.
On a switchback ride through the USA, riding pillion with America’s founding fathers, Jonathan Freedland searches out the qualities that made America the land at the end of his childhood rainbow, the place his grandfather and he conspired to run off to because of its open promise and unbounded potential.
Following the success of ‘You Look Awfully Like the Queen’, this is a second anthology of hilarious and touching royal anecdotes, collected by Thomas Blaikie.
Francis Wheen’s brilliantly comic portrait of one of the 20th-century’s great characters, Tom Driberg: wit, parliamentarian, serial cottager, alleged communist spy and friend to the Kray brothers.
