Showing titles in Memoirs, Diaries & Correspondence

After a live performance at the Hollywood Bowl, The Pythons made their last performance together in 1983 in the hugely successful Monty Python's Meaning of Life. Writing and acting in films and television then took over much of Michael's life, culminating in the smash hit A Fish Called Wanda (for which he won a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor) and the first of his seven celebrated television journeys for the BBC.

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.

Alan Rickman remains one of the most beloved actors of all time across almost every genre, from his breakout role as Die Hard's villainous Hans Gruber to his heart-wrenching run as Professor Severus Snape, and beyond. But Rickman's artistry wasn't confined to just his performances. Fans of memoirs at large will delight in the intimate experience of Rickman detailing the extraordinary and the ordinary in a way that is 'anecdotal, indiscreet, witty, gossipy and utterly candid'.

A radio broadcaster and journalist for Edward R. Murrow at CBS, William L. Shirer was new to the world of broadcast journalism when he began keeping a diary while on assignment in Europe during the 1930s. Shirer’s Berlin Diary, which is considered the first full record of what was happening in Germany during the rise of the Third Reich, appeared in 1941. Shirer returned to the European front in 1944 to cover the end of the war. End of a Berlin Diary chronicles this year-long study of Germany after Hitler.

The late Dr. Michihiko Hachiya was director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital when the world's first atomic bomb was dropped on the city. Though his responsibilities in the appalling chaos of a devastated city were awesome, he found time to record the story daily, with compassion and tenderness. Dr. Hachiya's compelling diary was originally published by the UNC Press in 1955, with the help of Dr. Warner Wells of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In this book I have attempted to solve each and every one of life's problems. And I have succeeded. Dear Listener, Using letters, emails, tweets and telegrams I will show you how the things in your life that make you sad, low or anxious can soon appear trivial, insignificant and like a fish. In short, I will butter your parsnips.

Joan Collins has been a diarist from the age of 12, writing enthusiastically over the years. She dictated most of these entries in real time into a mini-tape recorder at the end of the day, and now she is spilling the beans - well, nearly all of them. What you will discover was written when Joan 'felt like it' between 1989 and 2009. Whether it is an encounter with a superstar or a member of the royal family, or her keen and honest insights into other celebrities at dinner parties and events, Joan is honest and unapologetic.

Drawing from the author's original, uncensored journals, Fire follows Anaïs Nin's journey as she attempts to liberate herself sexually, artistically, and emotionally. While referring to her relationships with psychoanalyst Otto Rank and author Henry Miller, as well as a new lover, the Peruvian Gonzalo More, she also reveals that her most passionate and enduring affair is with writing itself.

As Assistant Private Secretary to four monarchs, 'Tommy' Lascelles had a ringside seat from which to observe the workings of the royal household and Downing Street during the first half of the 20th century. These fascinating diaries begin with Edward VIII's abdication and end with George VI's death and his daughter Elizabeth's Coronation. In between we see George VI at work and play, a portrait more intimate than any other previously published.

Michael Palin's diaries begin when he was newly married and struggling to make a name for himself in the world of television comedy. But Monty Python was just around the corner...Enjoying an unlikely cult status early on, the Pythons then proceeded to tour the USA and Canada. As their popularity grew, so Palin relates how the group went their separate ways, later to re-form for stage shows and the celebrated films The Holy Grail and Life of Brian.

For several months, Didion recorded conversations with the psychiatrist in meticulous detail. The initial sessions focused on alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and the heartbreaking complexities of her relationship with her daughter, Quintana. The subjects evolved to include her work, which she was finding difficult to maintain for sustained periods. There were discussions about her own childhood and the question of legacy, or, as she put it, 'what it’s been worth.'

The 38 letters written by Rockefeller to his son imparting his perspectives, ideology, and wisdom to his son.

Told in a series of letters, this true story of the correspondence between a New York writer and a London bookseller has touched the hearts of thousands.

Eddy de Wind, a Dutch doctor and psychiatrist, was shipped to Auschwitz with his wife, Friedel, whom he had met and married at the Westerbork labour camp in the Netherlands. At Auschwitz, they made it through the brutal selection process and were put to work. Each day, each hour became a battle for survival. For Eddy, this meant negotiating with the volatile guards in the medical barracks. For Friedel, it meant avoiding the Nazis’ barbaric medical experiments.

Helen Garner’s third volume of diaries is an account of a woman fighting to hold on to a marriage that is disintegrating around her. Living with a powerfully ambitious writer who is consumed by his work, and trying to find a place for her own spirit to thrive, she rails against the confines. At the same time, she is desperate to find the truth in their relationship - and the truth of her own self.

Beginning in 1987, as she embarks on an affair that she knows will be all-consuming and ending in 1995 with the publication of The First Stone and the furore that followed it, Garner reveals the inner life of a woman in love and a great writer at work. With devastating honesty and sparkling humour, she grapples with what it means for her sense of self to be so entwined with another - how to survive as an artist in a partnership that is both enthralling and uncompromising.

Published in their entirety, Sylvia Plath's journals provide an intimate portrait of the writer who was to produce in the last seven months of her life some of the most extraordinary poems of the 20th century. Faithfully transcribed from the 23 journals and journal fragments owned by Smith College, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath includes two journals that Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, unsealed just before his death in 1998.

Seeing self-possession as the key to an existence lived 'in accordance with nature', the Stoic philosophy called for the restraint of animal instincts and the importance of upright ethical ideals and virtuous living. Seneca's writings are a profound, powerfully moving and inspiring declaration of the dignity of the individual mind.

In 2013, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani was illegally detained on Manus Island. He has been there ever since. This book is the result. Laboriously tapped out on a mobile phone and translated from the Farsi. It is a voice of witness, an act of survival. A lyric firsthand account. A cry of resistance. A vivid portrait through five years of incarceration and exile.

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 the book trade, from struggles with eccentric customers to wrangles with his own staff, who include the ski-suit-wearing, bin-foraging Nicky.