Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

Once a barista in a small cafe making $6.50 an hour, Andrew Wilkinson built a business valued at over a billion dollars by the time he was 36—and yet, his path to success was anything but a straight line. In Never Enough, Wilkinson pulls back the curtain on the lives of the ultra-rich, sharing insights into building a successful business that has been called a “Berkshire Hathaway, but for internet companies,” and a surprising first-person account of what it's actually like to become a billionaire.

Metternich has a reputation as the epitome of reactionary conservatism. Historians treat him as the archenemy of progress, a ruthless aristocrat who used his power as the dominant European statesman of the first half of the nineteenth century to stifle liberalism, suppress national independence, and oppose the dreams of social change that inspired the revolutionaries of 1848. Wolfram Siemann paints a fundamentally new image of the man who shaped Europe for over four decades. He reveals Metternich as more modern and his career much more forward-looking than we have ever recognized.

In August of 1914, the British ship Endurance set sail for the South Atlantic. In October 1915, still half a continent away from its intended base, the ship was trapped, then crushed in the ice. For five months, Sir Ernest Shackleton and his men, drifting on ice packs, were castaways in one of the most savage regions of the world. Lansing describes how the men survived a 1,000-mile voyage in an open boat across the stormiest ocean on the globe and an overland trek through forbidding glaciers and mountains.

Whether it’s Julius Caesar, Buffalo Bill or Henry VIII, the lives of history’s greatest heroes have long dominated the history books, and bored generations of high school students in the process. But what about the side characters waiting in the wings of humanity’s defining moments? Who will tell the tale of the pirates who kidnapped Caesar? Of Bill’s horse who thrilled Queen Victoria. Or of Henry’s toilet attendants, who may have caused a wife or two to lose their heads? Adrian Bliss won’t rest until these forgotten heroes are as well-known as their glory hogging contemporaries.

A true crime podcast covering listener-suggested British murder cases and featuring interviews with high-profile guests in the true crime industry. Do you have a case suggestion? Please send it to contact@britishmurders.com or fill out a Contact Form at britishmurders.com.

Victoria Coren Mitchell meets some fascinating women to explore the journeys they have made in the cars that they have known - and the sorts of things they shout in traffic. Hear what Dawn wrote on the back of her first car; find out which comedian totalled her beloved Cortina; and discover the advantages of the refrigerated glove compartment. Sarah Millican describes a traffic jam that lead to some desperate measures, Sheila Hancock explains how the trick of getting older is actually to speed up and Jo Brand recounts how her car became an impromptu counselling couch for comedians.

On a summer evening in 2002, ten-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman left the house to go to buy some sweets, but they never came home. For weeks after they were declared missing, an image of these smiling young girls dressed in their matching Manchester United kit, taken just a couple of hours before they went missing, was plastered across the British press as a nationwide search began to take place. When the bodies were discovered in a ditch, the final ray of hope for their safe return was extinguished as it became clear that both girls had been murdered.

In Me Elton writes powerfully about getting clean and changing his life, about finding love with David Furnish and becoming a father. In a voice that is warm, humble and open, this is Elton on his music and his relationships, his passions and his mistakes. This is a story that will stay with you, by a living legend.

Bailey Sarian, known for her massive success with “Murder, Mystery & Makeup,” has taken her true crime expertise to new heights with her podcast Dark History, where she proves history doesn’t have to be boring. This award-winning series, delves into the untold stories of history—from psycho dictators to shocking corporate scandals—that were never covered in school. With its gripping drama, Dark History consistently tops the charts in the history category, solidifying Bailey as a powerhouse in both the true crime and history spaces.

Fresh out of Glasgow Veterinary College, to the young James Herriot 1930s Yorkshire seems to offer an idyllic pocket of rural life in a rapidly changing world. But from his erratic new colleagues, brothers Siegfried and Tristan Farnon, to incomprehensible farmers, herds of semi-feral cattle, a pig called Nugent and an overweight Pekingese called Tricki Woo, James finds he is on a learning curve as steep as the hills around him. And when he meets Helen, the beautiful daughter of a local farmer, all the training and experience in the world can’t help him.

What makes you a heretic? Journalist Andrew Gold believes that, in an age of group-think and tribes, we need heretics - those who use unconventional wisdom to speak out against their own groups, from cancelled comedians and radical feminists to cult defectors and vigilantes hunting deviants. Learn from my guests how to rebel, think differently and resist social contagion. From Triggernometry's Francis Foster and the world's most cancelled man Graham Linehan to ex-Hasidic Jew Julia Haart and gender critical atheist Richard Dawkins. These are the people living with the weight of their own ...

Jane was planning a golden retirement with her beloved partner Ed, when a shocking cancer diagnosis changed everything. Ed was terminally ill. Jane nursed him at home until the end, on her own, with the UK in lockdown. At first she was overwhelmed, but slowly gathered strength from caring for her loved one, and now sees that it was a privilege to be there for him.

Through extensive research, expert sourcing and interviews with insiders, Britain’s most celebrated investigative biographer, Tom Bower, has unearthed a succession of revelations that give surprising insight into the reality of ‘Brand Beckham’. Exploring the couple’s relationship, and the truth about their football and fashion careers, their finances and their new life in Miami, The House of Beckham unravels the extraordinary reality of the business-savvy cultural icons to tell an engrossing, often astonishing story of money, sex and power.

Over the next ten years, we watch through Michael's eyes as the world reels from the successive shocks of September 11, the 7/7 bombings and the global financial crash. With the warmth and gentle empathy that have endeared millions of fans to him over the decades, Michael documents the day-to-day detail of living in a world buffeted by such powerful winds of change.

At seventeen, Gia Carangi was working the counter at her father's Philadelphia luncheonette. Within a year, she was one of the world's top models, gracing the covers of Cosmopolitan and Vogue, partying at Studio 54, and redefining the fashion industry's standard of beauty. But behind the glitz and fame, Gia was a young woman in pain, desperate for her mother's approval and facing a drug addiction that quickly spun out of control

Told in his inimitable style, Karma will reflect on Boy George's life as a kid growing up in sixties London, through the hedonism of the seventies and the glam rock and punk rock revolution that birthed Culture Club, and the heydays of the nineties meeting musical legends like David Bowie, Madonna and Prince - as well as addressing all those rumours. The book will reveal the highs and lows of love, loss, addiction, recovery, prison, and celebrity on Boy George's journey through fame to finally embracing the man and artist that he is today.

Matt Rife is well aware that he’s both the most loved and the most controversial comic in America today. And honestly, he thinks that’s your problem. In his very first book, Matt reveals without apology everything that led him to becoming comedy’s biggest lightning rod before he reached thirty, in a story full of bold and hysterical takes on everything from Justin Bieber tramp stamps and rap battles with ex-cons to Matt’s battles with depression and his many brushes with failure before finally hitting it big.

The fifth volume of memoirs from the author who inspired the BBC series All Creatures Great and Small. During his decades spent as a country vet in Yorkshire, James Herriot has seen huge advances in medical science, technological leaps, and a world irrevocably changed by war. Yet some things have always stayed the same - gruff farmers, hypochondriac pet owners, and animals that never do quite what you expect them to.

A vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators but also of everyday heroism, The Gulag Archipelago is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's grand masterwork. Based on the testimony of some 200 survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn's own 11 years in labour camps and exile, it chronicles the story of those at the heart of the Soviet Union who opposed Stalin, and for whom the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair.

All those years you tried your best to break me, and I'm still here. One day you'll see, I'm going to make something of myself. These words were Dave Pelzer's declaration of independence to his mother, and they represented the ultimate act of self-reliance. Dave's father never intervened as his mother abused him with shocking brutality, denying him food and clothing, torturing him in any way she could imagine. This was the woman who told her son she could kill him any time she wanted to—and nearly did.