'Deeply moving, darkly funny and hugely powerful' Robert Macfarlane 'A brave, lit-up account of going mad and getting better' Jeanette Winterson After a lifetime of ups and downs, Horatio Clare was committed to hospital under Section 2 of the Mental Health Act. From hypomania in the Alps, to a complete breakdown and a locked ward in Wakefield, this is a gripping account of how the mind loses touch with reality, how we fall apart and how we may heal. 'One of the most brilliant travel writers of our day takes us now to that most challenging country, severe mental illness; and does so with such wit, warmth and humanity' Reverend Richard Coles

The Illustrated Police News cost just a penny, providing an affordable illustrated roundup of `all the startling events of the week' from its first issue published on 20th February 1864. Promising to educate the people with fantastic features such as `BURGLARIES OF THE WEEK' and its bountiful, often outlandish, illustrations, the paper was also a-perhaps unexpected- champion of social change. With crime historian Linda Stratmann as guide, the articles and special reports of the newspaper provide a fascinating view into the reading tastes and daily lives of its readership throughout the decades. Led by the newspaper's bombastic imagery sourced from the Library's extensive archive, this new book revels in the infamy and social significance behind the exuberant headlines of this extraordinary periodical.

The son of one of the greatest writers of our time-Nobel Prize winner and internationally best-selling icon Gabriel Garcia Marquez-remembers his beloved father and mother in this tender memoir about love and loss. 'It enthralled and moved me.' Salman Rushdie In March 2014, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century, came down with a cold. The woman who had been beside him for more than fifty years, his wife Mercedes Barcha, was not hopeful; her husband, affectionately known as "Gabo," was then nearly 87 and battling dementia. I don't think we'll get out of this one, she told their son Rodrigo. Hearing his mother's words, Rodrigo wondered, "Is this how the end begins?" To make sense of events as they unfolded, he began to write the story of Garcia Marquez's final days. The result is this intimate and honest account that not only contemplates his father's mortality but reveals his remarkable humanity. Both an illuminating memoir and a heartbreaking work of reportage, A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes transforms this towering genius from literary creator to protagonist, and paints a rich and revelatory portrait of a family coping with loss. At its centre is a man at his most vulnerable, whose wry humour shines even as his lucidity wanes. Gabo savours affection and attention from those in his orbit, but wrestles with what he will lose-and what is already lost. Throughout his final journey is the charismatic Mercedes, his constant companion and the creative muse who was one of the foremost influences on Gabo's life and his art. Bittersweet and insightful, surprising and powerful, A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes celebrates the formidable legacy of Rodrigo's parents, offering an unprecedented look at the private family life of a literary giant. It is at once a gift to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's readers worldwide, and a grand tribute from a writer who knew him well.

It's 1979 in Communist Czechoslovakia, ten years into the crushing period known as normalization, and Ludvik Vaculik has writer's block. It has been nearly a decade since he wrote his powerful novel, The Guinea Pigs, and it was in 1968 that he wrote his anti-regime manifesto, Two Thousand Words, which the Soviet Union used as a pretext for invading Czechoslovakia. On the advice of his friend, the poet and surrealist painter Jiri Kolar, Vaculik begins to keep a diary, "a book about things, people, and events." This marks the beginning of A Czech Dreambook. Fifty-four weeks later, what Vaculik turns out to have written is a unique mixture of diary, dream journal, and outright fiction-an inverted roman a clef in which the author, his family, his mistresses, and the real leaders of the Czech underground play major roles. Undisputedly the most debated novel among the Prague dissident community of the 1980s, it is a work that Vaculik himself described as an amalgam of "hard-boiled documentary" and "magic fiction," while Vaclav Havel called it "a truly profound and perceptive account. . . . A great novel about modern life and the crisis of contemporary humanity." A Czech Dreambook has been hailed as the most important work of Czech literature in the past forty years. And yet it has never before been available in English. Flawlessly translated by Gerald Turner, Vaculik's masterpiece is a brilliant exercise in style, dry humor, and irony-an important portrait of the lives and longings of the dissidents and post-Communist elites.

Every time you try to say 'Africa is...' the words crumble and break. From every generalisation you must exclude at least five countries. And just as you think you've nailed down a certainty, you find the opposite is also true. Africa is full of surprises. For the past three decades, Richard Dowden has travelled this vast and varied continent, listening, learning, and constantly re-evaluating all he thinks he knows. Country by country, he has sought out the local and the personal, the incidents, actions, and characters to tell a story of modern sub-Saharan Africa - an area affected by poverty, disease and war, but also a place of breathtaking beauty, generosity and possibility. The result is a landmark book, compelling, illuminating, and always surprising. Updated for 2018, Africa remains one of the most comprehensive, intelligent and responsive works on the continent ever written.

Event structures are central in Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence research: people can easily refer to changes in the world, identify their participants, distinguish relevant information, and have expectations of what can happen next. Part of this process is based on mechanisms similar to narratives, which are at the heart of information sharing. But it remains difficult to automatically detect events or automatically construct stories from such event representations. This book explores how to handle today's massive news streams and provides multidimensional, multimodal, and distributed approaches, like automated deep learning, to capture events and narrative structures involved in a 'story'. This overview of the current state-of-the-art on event extraction, temporal and casual relations, and storyline extraction aims to establish a new multidisciplinary research community with a common terminology and research agenda. Graduate students and researchers in natural language processing, computational linguistics, and media studies will benefit from this book.

Juliet Jacques was one of the first trans writers in the UK to contribute broadly to both British and foreign media, writing widely about the trans experience. Spanning over a decade, Jacques' ground-breaking journalism about selfhood, society, art, politics, freedom, and gender identity, tracks the backlash against emerging trans rights and the rise of a new and more explicit form of media transphobia. Front Lines is a seminal collection of writings on trans and queer art, politics, and media, from a period in which the relationship between trans and non-binary people and the British media was exceptionally turbulent. Jacques navigates the tension between wanting to simply write about art and culture and needing to counter the dishonest, damaging rhetoric being published about trans people in virtually every national newspaper in the UK. 'I never believed any journalism was objective, nor that there was any point in even trying to be,' writes Jacques in her introduction. 'Above all, activism is needed to fight this, with journalism to support it: there is no point in pretending to be objective in our work, as the stakes remain just as high as they were back in 2010, perhaps even higher... We're entering a new phase of collective struggle, with new fronts and new tactics needed: I hope this book can help to inform that.' This crucial collection asks what we can learn from the last decade and, importantly, what we can do now. How can new writers take up the struggle for trans liberation? And what will the future of trans writing look like?

Three francs will feed you till tomorrow, and you cannot think further than that... As a young man struggling to find his voice as a writer, George Orwell left the comfort of home to live in the impoverished working districts of Paris and London. He would document both the chaos and boredom of destitution, the eccentric cast of characters he encountered, and the near-constant pains of hunger and discomfort. Exposing the grim reality of a life marred by poverty, Down and Out in Paris and London, part memoir, part social commentary, would become George Orwell's first published work.

My father, the monster of the Springs house of horrors

“I kneel on the foot piece next to the bed and lower my head. A piercing, burning pain engulfs my entire face. Dad has kicked me. Blood is gushing from my nose. Then I feel cold water being poured all over my body. Electrical wires shock me, I can’t see through the blood. God, help me.” (Translated)

Landi is the eldest of five children who were rescued from the so-called Springs house of horror. She is now 21 years old and tells her astonishing story for the very first time. In May 2014, police raided the house where a sadistic father had imprisoned, abused and tortured his wife and five children in a rat-infested den of sleaze.

In chilling detail, Landi recalls how their father assaulted them by tasering them, shooting them with a gas pistol and burning them with a blowtorch, how he researched torture methods and nearly drowned them in a bathtub.

She relates her memories to Susan Cilliers, an experienced journalist, who documents it with compassion, skilfully combining it with facts that emanated from the police investigation and court case.

House of Horrors is the shocking tale of a father who took everything from his family in the cruellest possible way, but it is also a story of hope about a brave young girl who eventually finds happiness and healing.

'A true genius of comedy' Grayson Perry As a Metropolitan Elitist Snowflake, Stewart Lee was disappointed by the EU referendum result of 2016. But he knew how to weaponise his inconvenience - and the result is March of the Lemmings. Drawing on three years of newspaper columns, a complete transcript of the Content Provider stand-up show, and Lee's caustic footnote commentary, this is the scathing record the Brexit era deserves. With a riotous cast of characters (including a Lemming-obsessed Michael Gove), a dramatic chorus of online commenters and Kremlin bots, and Lee himself as our unreliable narrator-hero, this is the ultimate companion to the Brexit horror show.

This book is a collection of non-fiction by the prolific author Zakes Mda. It showcases his role as a public intellectual with the inclusion of public lectures, essays and media articles. Mda focuses on South Africa's history and the present, identity and belonging, literary themes, human rights, global warming and why he is unable to keep silent on abuses of power.

A controversial and important book by BBC reporter and terrorism expert Peter Taylor. Newly updated to mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and to include the death of Osama Bin Laden. During his 40-year career, award-winning journalist Peter Taylor has come face-to-face with some of the world's most notorious terrorists. In 1972 he was sent to Northern Ireland to report on 'Bloody Sunday' and in the aftermath of 9/11, he focused on Al Qaeda, breaking stories in the period up to the July bombings and the plot to blow up passenger planes mid-Atlantic. In Talking to Terrorists Taylor wrestles with a range of complex questions: What are terrorists like? What motivates them? Should governments talk to them? When does interrogation become torture? In this journey from Northern Ireland's Bogside to the notorious Guantanamo Bay, he uncovers this deadly phenomenon, unavoidably at the centre of our lives. Newly updated to mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11, and in the aftermath of the death of Osama Bin Laden, Talking to Terrorists is controversial, revelatory and an unquestionably important book for our times.

_______________ '[An] acutely observed collection of occasional pieces that pick at absurdist life and reveal him to be a quiz, a cultural critic gifted with precise comic timing' - The Times 'Yes, Jacobson is an entertainer ... And he does indeed entertain, but in a way that stimulates rather than simply amuses' - Sunday Telegraph 'Nobody does it better than Jacobson' - Observer _______________ It takes a particular kind of man to want an embroidered polo player astride his left nipple. Occasionally, when I am tired and emotional, or consumed with self-dislike, I try to imagine myself as someone else, a wearer of Yarmouth shirts and fleecy sweats, of windbreakers and rugged Tyler shorts, of baseball caps with polo players where the section of the brain that concerns itself with aesthetics is supposed to be. But the hour passes. Good men return from fighting Satan in the wilderness the stronger for their struggle, and so do I. The winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize, Howard Jacobson, brims with life in this collection of his most acclaimed journalism. From the unusual disposal of his father-in-law's ashes and the cultural wasteland of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to the melancholy sensuality of Leonard Cohen and desolation of Wagner's tragedies, Jacobson writes with all the thunder and joy of a man possessed. Absurdity piles upon absurdity, and glorious sentences weave together to create a hilarious, heartbreaking and uniquely human collection. This book is not just a series of parts, but an irresistible, unputdownable sum which triumphantly out-Thurbers Thurber. _______________ 'The no-nonsense tone, coupled with a coherent defence of truth, even in uncomfortable circumstances, shows the essayist as a natural comedian' - Prospect 'Jacobson is one of the great sentence-builders of our time. I feel I have to raise my game, even just to praise ... In short, he is one of the great guardians of language and culture - all of it. Long may he flourish' - Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

A wide-ranging collection of interviews and profiles from twenty years of Jonathan Cott's remarkable writings "All I really need to do is simply ask a question," Jonathan Cott occasionally reminds himself. "And then listen." It sounds simple, but in fact few have taken the art of asking questions to such heights-and depths-as Jonathan Cott, whom Jan Morris called "an incomparable interviewer," one whose skill, according to the great interviewer and oral historian Studs Terkel, "is artless yet impassioned and knowing." Collected here are twenty-two of Cott's most illuminating interviews that encourage readers to listen to film directors and musicians, actors and writers, scientists and visionaries. These conversations affirm the indispensable and transformative powers of the imagination and offer us new ways to view these lives and their worlds. What is it like to be Bob Dylan making a movie? Carl Sagan taking on the cosmos? Oliver Sacks doctoring the soul? John Lennon, on December 5, 1980? Elizabeth Taylor, ever? From Chinua Achebe to Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel), Federico Fellini to Werner Herzog, and Oriana Fallaci to Studs Terkel, Listening takes readers on a journey to discover not ways of life but ways to life. Within these pages,Cott proves himself to be, in the words of Brain Pickings's Maria Popova, "an interlocutor extraordinaire," drawing candid insights and profound observations from these inspired and inspiring individuals.

'It was a farewell to all my pleasant life, a farewell to the enjoyment of summer. My theme was that we were all about to undergo a change. The hills and the streams would remain, the sun would set as redly on the western sea, but they would not ever be quite the same for us again.' In the 1930s, Norris Davidson was based in London, where he was involved in pioneering work on film, radio and documentaries. By the start of the 1940s, he was working in the wartime Marine Service. Davidson's informative account of his experience in the Irish Marine Service during the Second World War gives a refreshing insight into many aspects of the defence forces preparing to defend the state to the best of its ability. Often humorous and sometimes moving, it is an engaging account that will appeal to all who are interested in Irish maritime and military history, as well as day-to-day life in 1940s Ireland. Before his death, Norris entrusted the manuscript to ex-naval officer Daire Brunicardi, who has added to the manuscript with a foreword to set the scene, as well as providing some fascinating photos and wartime ephemera.

'Determination, grit and humour shine through' Lindsey Hilsum, Observer Nineteen Arab women journalists speak out about what it's like to report on their changing homelands in this first-of-its-kind essay collection. A growing number of intrepid Arab and Middle Eastern sahafiyat - female journalists - are working tirelessly to shape nuanced narratives about their changing homelands, often risking their lives on the front lines of war. Here, nineteen of these women tell us, in their own words, about what it's like to report on conflicts that (quite literally) hit close to home. Their daring and heartfelt stories, told here for the first time, shatter stereotypes about the region's women and provide an urgently needed perspective on a part of the world that is frequently misunderstood. With a foreword by CNN chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour. INCLUDING ESSAYS BY: Donna Abu-Nasr, Aida Alami, Hannah Allam, Jane Arraf, Lina Attalah, Nada Bakri, Shamael Elnoor, Zaina Erhaim, Asmaa al-Ghoul, Hind Hassan, Eman Helal, Zeina Karam, Roula Khalaf, Nour Malas, Hwaida Saad, Amira Al-Sharif, Heba Shibani, Lina Sinjab, and Natacha Yazbeck

The sixth and final instalment in our series of small, inspirational books from the editors of O, the Oprah Magazine, O's Little Guide to the Big Questions is a collection of thought-provoking stories and essays on the wisdom to be gleaned from asking (and answering) life’s biggest questions.

What matters most?

What is my purpose?

When is the right time to make a change?

Who is most important to me?

Asking (and answering) the big questions can be terrifying – but it is the only way to put yourself on the path towards living your best life. Big questions can be forces of empowerment, motivation and clarification. The editors at O, The Oprah Magazine have combed through the magazine’s extensive archives to assemble O’s Little Guide to the Big Questions, a collection of stirring, motivating, thought-provoking pieces from great writers and celebrated thinkers, that offers wise guidance and inspiration to anyone feeling lost or in need of a reset.

The Joseph Roth revival has finally gone mainstream with the thunderous reception for "What I Saw," a book that has become a classic with five hardcover printings. Glowingly reviewed, "What I Saw" introduces a new generation to the genius of this tortured author with its "nonstop brilliance, irresistible charm and continuing relevance" (Jeffrey Eugenides, "New York Times Book Review"). As if anticipating Christopher Isherwood, the book re-creates the tragicomic world of 1920s Berlin as seen by its greatest journalistic eyewitness. In 1920, Joseph Roth, the most renowned German correspondent of his age, arrived in Berlin, the capital of the Weimar Republic. He produced a series of impressionistic and political essays that influenced an entire generation of writers, including Thomas Mann and the young Christopher Isherwood. Translated and collected here for the first time, these pieces record the violent social and political paroxysms that constantly threatened to undo the fragile democracy that was the Weimar Republic. Roth, like no other German writer of his time, ventured beyond Berlin's official veneer to the heart of the city, chronicling the lives of its forgotten inhabitants: the war cripples, the Jewish immigrants from the Pale, the criminals, the bathhouse denizens, and the nameless dead who filled the morgues. Warning early on of the dangers posed by the Nazis, Roth evoked a landscape of moral bankruptcy and debauched beauty a memorable portrait of a city and a time of commingled hope and chaos. "What I Saw," like no other existing work, records the violent social and political paroxysms that compromised and ultimately destroyed the precarious democracy that was the Weimar Republic."

'See my hand up-tipped, learn the secret of my human heart...' Soaring, freewheeling snapshots of life on the road across America, from the Beat writer who inspired a generation. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

The war against ISIS and the so-called caliphate it declared across Syria and Iraq was a battle to define not just the Middle East but the wider world. Growing from the aftermath of the U.S. war in Iraq and a brutal civil war in Syria, ISIS sought to usher in a new era of conflict as it launched terrorist attacks across Europe, while inflicting a savage extremism on the population in controlled. And the U.S. developed a new kind of war to stop it - one that that relied heavily on the sacrifices of local soldiers who fought on behalf of the American cause. This struggle came to a climax in the Iraqi city of Mosul, the crown jewel of the caliphate, in the deadliest urban combat the world had seen in a generation. Few journalists got as close to the war, and to protagonists on both sides of it, as Mike Giglio, who spent six years reporting on the rise and fall of the ISIS proto-state. He travelled along the Turkey-Syria border with the smugglers and operatives who worked in ISIS's criminal and financial networks, accompanied antiquities traders to visit stolen artefacts that helped to fund the ISIS war effort, sat with human traffickers at the heart of the migrant crisis, and met with ISIS defectors as they tried to free their minds from its grip. He also embedded often with the local soldiers on the front lines of the international effort to stop ISIS, tracking a war effort that saw these soldiers take heavy casualties as U.S. special forces worked in the shadows and U.S. pilots and drone operators dropped bombs. In Mosul, the war's central battle, he travelled in the attacking convoys of elite Kurdish and Iraqi commandos as car bombs plunged into their ranks and ISIS drones dropped grenades. Behind the drama on the battlefield, the suspense was in how much ISIS might change the world before its cities fell and how many of America's allies it could kill along the way. The story is a chilling portrait of the destructive power of extremism and of the tenacity and astonishing courage required to defeat it.

This book concentrates on Russia-related Pulitzer Prize-winning reports and editorial cartoons from leading American newspapers. The reports cover the span from the early stages of the Soviet Union under Lenin through to the Russian Federation under Putin. American top journalists and cartoonists show the suppression system of the Stalin era to Gorbachev's Glasnost and Perestroika movement and the events thereafter. Each story is told on the basis of the original newspaper sources, the biography of the award-winners, and the confidential jury reports of the Pulitzer Prize juries, disclosing the decision-making processes. (Series: Pulitzer Prize Panorama - Vol. 5)

In Public Spectacles of Violence Rielle Navitski examines the proliferation of cinematic and photographic images of criminality, bodily injury, and technological catastrophe in early twentieth-century Mexico and Brazil, which were among Latin America's most industrialized nations and later developed two of the region's largest film industries. Navitski analyzes a wide range of sensational cultural forms, from nonfiction films and serial cinema to illustrated police reportage, serial literature, and fan magazines, demonstrating how media spectacles of violence helped audiences make sense of the political instability, high crime rates, and social inequality that came with modernization. In both nations, sensational cinema and journalism-influenced by imported films-forged a common public sphere that reached across the racial, class, and geographic divides accentuated by economic growth and urbanization. Highlighting the human costs of modernization, these media constructed everyday experience as decidedly modern, in that it was marked by the same social ills facing industrialized countries. The legacy of sensational early twentieth-century visual culture remains felt in Mexico and Brazil today, where public displays of violence by the military, police, and organized crime are hypervisible.