Joyce Grenfell Requests The Pleasure

This is the second volume of Joyce Grenfell's autobiography. It follows the entertainer's life from 1954, including accounts of her television appearance with Elvis, a command performance at Windsor and a number of her films and appearances on the television programme Face the Music.

Alastair sim was an energetic character both on and off the screen. His idiosyncratic style of acting in films such as 'The Belles of St Trinian's' endeared him to a cinema-going audience desperate to escape the day-to-day dreariness of an invasive, bureaucratic post-war Britain. In private, he was a curiously contradictory character, prejudiced and yet tolerant, thoughtful but sometimes inconsiderate. to examine the life of this extraordinary man, this biography contains original contributions from around thirty actors and actresses, including Sir Ian McKellen and Ronnie Corbett. It is supported by extensive research, including interviews with the playright Christopher Fry, the television producer John Howard Davies and actors who appeared on stage with Alastair as far back as the 1940s. This book also explore Alastair's life outside of films, including his marriage to Naomi Sim (whom he first met when she was twelve), his career as an elocution teacher, his extensive work on stage (including his theatrical endeavours with James Bridie), his championship of youth and his stalwart refusal to sign autographs.

Michael Olivier has captured the very essence of local cooking and food in this beautifully illustrated and designed book.

From her stage debut in 1922 to her final professional appearance in 1996, Elisabeth Welch was an important figure in the world of popular song. In 1923 she launched the Charleston and throughout the Jazz Age, she was associated with some of the great names of the Harlem Renaissance, including Josephine Baker, Adelaide Hall, Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson, and Ethel Waters. On Broadway she popularized Cole Porter's scandalous song "Love for Sale." After settling in London in 1933, she introduced the classic torch song "Stormy Weather" to British audiences, and that same year she began a career in English musical theatre (Cole Porter's Nymph Errant) that lasted sixty years. In 1930s Britain, Ivor Novello wrote songs for her, Paul Robeson was her leading man in films, and she enjoyed popularity as a cabaret star of London's cafe society. Remaining in her adopted country for the duration of the war (1939-45), Elisabeth entertained the troops and the British public, alongside such theatrical giants as Sir John Gielgud. In the post-war years she reigned supreme in sophisticated revues in London's West End. In 1979 Elisabeth's appearance in Derek Jarman's film version of William Shakespeare's The Tempest (in which she sang "Stormy Weather") won her a whole new legion of fans. At the age of 81, she returned to the Broadway stage and her performance in Jerome Kern Goes to Hollywood earned her a Tony nomination. In Elisabeth Welch: Soft Lights and Sweet Music, author Stephen Bourne celebrates the stage, screen, and radio career of this sophisticated African American actress and singer, who always defied categorization. Spanning almost a century of popular music, she did not fit the definition of jazz, torch, pop or ballad singer but defined her art quite simply as "telling a story in song." Whatever she sang, she demonstrated that she had no peer in the art of interpreting songs by the likes of Cole Porter, No l Coward, Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. Includes more than 25 photos.

'A diary is an assassin's cloak which we wear when we stab a comrade in the back with a pen', wrote William Soutar in 1934. But a diary is also a place for recording everyday thoughts and special occasions, private fears and hopeful dreams. The Assassin's Cloak gathers together some of the most entertaining and inspiring entries for each day of the year, as writers ranging from Queen Victoria to Andy Warhol, Samuel Pepys to Adrian Mole, pen their musings on the historic and the mundane. Spanning centuries and international in scope, this peerless anthology pays tribute to a genre that is at once the most intimate and public of all literary forms. This new updated edition is published to mark the twentieth anniversary of the book's original publication.

Catcalls, wolf whistles, verbal slurs, pinches, stalking—virtually every woman has experienced some form of unwanted public attention by men. Off the street, in semi-public places such as restaurants and department stores, women often suffer the insult of being passed over by employees eager to serve men. How pervasive is this behavior? How dangerous can it be? What, if anything, should be done about it? Passing By, an illuminating, unsettling work, explores the important yet little-examined issue of gender-related public harassment. Based on extensive research—including in-depth interviews with nearly five-hundred midwestern women and men—it documents the many types of indignity visited on women in public places. As Carol Brooks Gardner demonstrates, these indignities cross all lines of age, class, and ethnicity and follow a typical pattern whereby a man or men take advantage of a woman's momentary or permanent vulnerability. Beyond describing the scope and variety of harassing behaviors, the book investigates the different ways women and men respond to and interpret them. Gardner concludes, provocatively, that gender-based public harassment exerts a powerful control over women's feelings of comfort in the towns and communities where they live and work. Further, she defines it as a new category of social problem that shares much in common with sexual harassment and, in its more menacing form, requires legal remedy.

This is a much-needed study of a remarkable life. Elizabeth Goudge was not only a sensitive and acute artist in fiction, but a profoundly insightful commentator on the processes of growing up spiritually and morally. She fully deserves the kind of sympathetic and appreciative exploration provided by this book. Rowan Williams, 104th Archbishop of Canterbury Elizabeth Goudge once said she had done no exciting things - none of the wonderful things that some people do. Yet her achievement was wonderful. From the stuff of her own life even the hard things like depression and nervous breakdown, even the Christian faith that upheld her throughout she created best-selling books that were read, worldwide, throughout the forty years of her career and are still being read today. J.K. Rowling has said that her favourite childhood book was The Little White Horse - recently filmed as The Secret of Moonacre. Beyond the Snow is an appreciation of Miss Goudges life and work that attempts to look beyond her memoires, by linking them to her books and letters and the recollections of family and friends. It examines in particular her Christian faith and its illuminating influence on everything she did, and was. As Alan Walton said, reviewing The Joy of the Snow there is nobody like her.

The third volume of the annotated selected letters of composer Benjamin Britten covers the years 1946-51, during which he wrote many of his best-known works, founded and developed the English Opera Group and the Aldeburgh Festival, and toured widely in Europe and the United States as a pianist and conductor.Correspondents include librettists Ronald Duncan (The Rape of Lucretia), Eric Crozier (Albert Herring, Saint Nicolas, The Little Sweep) and E. M. Forster (Billy Budd); conductor Ernest Ansermet and composer Lennox Berkeley; publishers Ralph Hawkes and Erwin Stein of Boosey & Hawkes; and the celebrated tenor Peter Pears, Britten's partner. Among friends in the United States are Christopher Isherwood, Elizabeth Mayer and Aaron Copland, and there is a significant meeting with Igor Stravinsky.This often startling and innovative period is vividly evoked by the comprehensive and scholarly annotations, which offer a wide range of detailed information fascinating for both the Britten specialist and the general reader.Donald Mitchell contributes a challenging introduction exploring the interaction of life and work in Britten's creativity, and an essay examining for the first time, through their correspondence, the complex relationship between the composer and the writer Edward Sackville-West.