Search Results: Biography from The Real Book Shop

What an enjoyable and engaging book. I loved all the granular detail of boat living, the portraits of the various characters who live on the water, and the moving story of Danie's family and her teenage years. The way she describes feeling powerless when in thrall to older boys will be painfully resonant to lots of women. Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of The Last Act Of Love
Danie Couchman grew up on the move, her family never staying still long enough for her to say where she's from. At twenty-five, and living in her seventeenth home, she finds herself drowning in the rush of London life, and makes an impulsive decision: to buy a narrowboat and make it her home.
Surrounded by an eclectic and itinerant community in the uncharted territory of the capital's urban wilderness, Danie becomes fully immersed in this hidden world. Each day onboard her boat Genesis is an adventure full of disaster and magic. Over five years of living off-grid, nomadic Danie learns to survive the many highs and lows of boat life… Read More

A portrait of the work and character of the esteemed writer, critic, and composer assesses his personal struggles while separating out the facts from the fiction surrounding his famous antic disposition and tracing the creation of such pieces as A Clockwork Orange.

Autobiographical by Henry Williamson Publisher: Faber & Faber
Date published: 1939 FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING
Format: Hardback with dust jacket
Condition: Dust jacket: dirty and worn; has been reinforced inside. Book: green cloth boards - bumped and worn around edges. Pages: ownership inscription on front free end paper; edges of pages grubby; pages clean and readable; binding good.

Love, Nina meets Black Books: a wry and hilarious account of life in Scotland's biggest second-hand bookshop and the band of eccentrics and book-obsessives who work there'The Diary Of A Bookseller is warm (unlike Bythell's freezing-cold shop) and funny, and deserves to become one of those bestsellers that irritate him so much.' (Mail on Sunday)'Utterly compelling and Bythell has a Bennett-like eye for the amusing eccentricities of ordinary people ... I urge you to buy this book and please, even at the risk of being insulted or moaned at, buy it from a real live bookseller.' (Charlotte Heathcote Sunday Express)Shaun Bythell owns The Bookshop, Wigtown - Scotland's largest second-hand bookshop. It contains 100,000 books, spread over a mile of shelving, with twisting corridors and roaring fires, and all set in a beautiful, rural town by the edge of the sea. A book-lover's paradise? Well, almost ...In these wry and hilarious diaries, Shaun provides an inside look at the trials and tribulations of life in… Read More

"You can't beat this story for drama. . . . An omnibus of everything ever known, spoken, or written about Doc Holliday."—Publishers Weekly
"An engagingly written, persuasively argued, solidly documented work of scholarship that will surely take its place in the literature of the Old West."—Booklist
In Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend, the historian Gary Roberts takes aim at the most complex, perplexing, and paradoxical gunfighter of the Old West, drawing on more than twenty years of research—including new primary sources—in his quest to separate the life from the legend. Doc Holliday was a study in contrasts: the legendary gunslinger who made his living as a dentist; the emaciated consumptive whose very name struck fear in the hearts of his enemies; the degenerate gambler and alcoholic whose fierce loyalty to his friends compelled him, more than once, to risk his own life; and the sidekick whose near-mythic status rivals that of the West's greatest heroes. With lively details of Holliday's… Read More

"Finally, the Freud biography we have long been waiting for. With the history of Europe in the background, we follow with fascination Freud′s journey from an impoverished childhood filled with losses to worldly fame, ending in exile in England. We come to understand the impact of Freud′s difficult personality on the development of his brilliant as well as questionable theoretical ideas. Breger writes with compassion and fairness toward Freud as well as toward the many interesting personalities who cross his life, with their complicated relationships to the great man"SOPHIE FREUD, FREUD′S GRANDDAUGHTER AND PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF SOCIAL WORK, SIMMONS COLLEGE

Memoire of an Italian Jewish writer, first published in 1947. Describes his arrest and incarceration at Auschwitz concentration camp. Translated by Stuart Woolf. Etchings by Jane Joseph. In navy slipcase. Navy cloth boards with silver-coloured design. CONDITION: book - new condition. Slipcase - light shelf wear.

Very clean copy in unclipped dust jacket (covered in protective poly cover).

Biography of Thomas Jefferson. No dust jacket. First edition 1942. Original blue cloth boards. Frontispiece of Thomas Jefferson; 459pp. Family tree diagram of Thomas Jefferson in the back.

Since her death, Marilyn Monroe has been the subject of some 600 books, scores of which claim to be biographies, and all of which promise to uncover the "real Marilyn". But the biographies can't agree on many of the most sensational details of the life of the 20th century's most famous woman. Rather than offering another "definitive life", Sarah Churchwell's book looks at the writing of Marilyn Monroe's many life stories, comparing the competing versions of some of the key moments in her life including: her father's identity, her mother's mental problems, her alleged childhood molestation, her teenage marriage, stories of prostitution and the casting couch, abortions, narcissism, her own psychological problems, her marriages to two other legends, her difficulties on the set and with directors, her affairs with one or both of the Kennedy brothers and, of course, the highly charged debates about her death. Churchwell looks at how these stories have continued to trivialize a woman we supposedly "worship"… Read More

Drawing on major new sources hitherto unexamined by western historians, Douglas Smith's Rasputin is the definitive biography of this extraordinary figure for a generation.Nearly a century after his murder, Rasputin remains as divisive a figure as ever.Was he really a horse thief and a hard-drinking ruffian in his youth? Was he a a devout Orthodox Christian, or was he in fact a just a fake holy man? Are the stories of his enormous sexual drive, debauchery, and drunken orgies true or simply a myth? How did he come to know the emperor and empress and to wield so much influence over them? What was the source of his healing power? Was Rasputin running the government in the final years of his life? And if so, was he acting on his own or on the orders of more powerful, hidden forces? Did Prince Yusupov and his fellow conspirators act alone or were they other parties involved in Rasputin's murder – British secret agents or even an underground cell of Freemasons, as has been claimed? And to what extent did… Read More

A discussion of one of the great interpreters of Japan. The Japanese have always revered Hearn and this book shows the West why he is revered. Experts look at his writings and discuss his integrity as an observer and interpreter of Japan and the Japanese.

The life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, a nineteenth century playwright and family, with connections to Dorchester.

Nearing 70, and in what would be the last decade of his life, H.G. Wells fell in love at least three times - once with the much younger Baroness Budberg, and soon thereafter with two well-born Americans, Constance Coolidge and Martha Gelhorn, 25 and 40 years his junior respectively. These would constitute what Wells himself described as his "last flounderings towards the wife idea", and demonstrate in many ways that Wells was driven less by his considerable intelligence than by his obsession to find his ideal lover - what he called his "lover-shadow". This study looks at this very personal side of H.G. Wells. The self-proclaimed Don Juan was said to have "radiated" energy: intellectual, emotional, physical and sexual. Drawing on papers made public by the Wells estate, the author documents Wells' relationship with each of these femme fatales and paints a vivid portrait of the early part of the 20th century in London, Paris and the US.

A portrait of Robert Maxwell by the Foreign Editor of the "Daily Mirror", who was also one of Maxwell's few companions and confidantes outside the immediate family. The author was party to extraordinary events and conversations and provides a dimension to Maxwell's life which is unknown. The author presents Maxwell's life as one of greed, self-indulgence and a ruthless determination to succeed. There were also intense love affairs, set against appalling maltreatment of his long-suffering wife and family. His capacity for extortion, theft and utter ruthlessness was even greater than imagined. The author has also written "Diana: A Princess and her Troubled Marriage".

Eulogised and ostracised, James Butler Hickok was alternately labelled courageous, affable, and self-confident; cowardly, cold-blooded, and drunken; a fine specimen of manhood; an overdressed dandy with perfumed hair; an unequaled marksman; and a poor shot. Born in Illinois in 1837, he was shot dead in Deadwood only 39 years later. By then both famous and infamous, he was widely known as "Wild Bill". Excavating the reality behind the myth, this text delves into the exploits and ego that defined Hickok, and shows how the man was overtaken by his own legend. Rosa exposes a controversial and charismatic man - army and Indian scout, wagon master, courier, frontiersman, gunfighter, lawman, prospector, addicted gambler, and actor - who was elevated from regional fame to national notoriety by inadvertently being in the right place at the right time. Aggrandized in an 1867 "Harper's New Monthly Magazine" article, Hickok reluctantly embraced his exaggerated role in a far-fetched story that has inspired… Read More