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Books > Fiction > True stories
A searing account of corruption, racism and mismanagement inside
Britain's most famous police force Barely a week goes by without
the Metropolitan Police Service being plunged into a new crisis.
Demoralised and depleted in numbers, Scotland Yard is a shadow of
its former self. Spanning the three decades from the infamous
Stephen Lawrence case to the shocking murder of Sarah Everard,
Broken Yard charts the Met's fall from a position of unparalleled
power to the troubled and discredited organisation we see today,
barely trusted by its Westminster masters and struggling to perform
its most basic function: the protection of the public. The result
is a devastating picture of a world-famous police force riven with
corruption, misogyny and rank incompetence. As a top investigative
reporter at the Sunday Times and The Independent, Tom Harper
covered Scotland Yard for fifteen years, beginning not long after
the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent
Brazilian killed by Met Police officers after being mistaken for a
terror suspect in 2005. Since then, reporting on Scotland Yard has
been akin to witnessing a slow-motion car crash. Using thousands of
intelligence files, witness statements and court transcripts
provided by police sources, as well as first-hand testimony, Harper
explains how London's world-famous police force got itself into
this sorry mess - and how it might get itself out of it.
The true story of a young lady's escape to better things. Of love,
marriage and children. A tale of death and despair in a foreign
land. Of fate taking a hand and joining two people in a deep and
lasting love. The author has used letters and anecdotal evidence
from family members who are the lead players in this story. He
hopes he has done justice to the tale of their lives.
Farley is an elderly Dublin man, frail in body but sharp as a tack. Waking in the middle of the night, he finds himself lying paralyzed on the cold bathroom floor. And so his mind begins to move backwards, taking us with him. As Farley unravels the warp and weft of his life, he relives its loves, losses and betrayals
with the darkly comic wit of a true Dubliner. For this is also Dublin's story, the city Farley has seen through poverty and prosperity, boom and bust - each the other's constant companion during his seventy-five years.
Maud West ran her detective agency in London for more than thirty years, having starting sleuthing on behalf of society’s finest in 1905. Her exploits grabbed headlines throughout the world but, beneath the public persona, she was forced to hide vital aspects of her own identity in order to thrive in a class-obsessed and male-dominated world. And – as Susannah Stapleton reveals – she was a most unreliable witness to her own life.
Who was Maud? And what was the reality of being a female private detective in the Golden Age of Crime?
Interweaving tales from Maud West’s own ‘casebook’ with social history and extensive original research, Stapleton investigates the stories Maud West told about herself in a quest to uncover the truth.
With walk-on parts by Dr Crippen and Dorothy L. Sayers, Parisian gangsters and Continental blackmailers, The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective is a portrait of a woman ahead of her time and a deliciously salacious glimpse into the underbelly of ‘good society’ during the first half of the twentieth century.
The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire celebrated its
centenary year in 2017. In the past one hundred years, the order
has gone from a way of rewarding men and women of all walks of life
for service during the Great War to one of the most recognisable
orders in the world.
'Gow reinvents what it means to be a guardian of the
countryside.'-Guardian 'This authentic, impassioned
manifesto-cum-memoir will hopefully have a major impact on what is
likely to be a long-running controversy.'-The Spectator 'Gow has a
fire in his belly. We need more like him.'-BBC Wildlife Magazine A
Waterstones Best Nature Writing Book of 2020 'Bringing Back the
Beaver is a hilarious, eccentric and magnificent account of a
struggle . . . to reintroduce a species crucial to the health of
our ecosystems.'-George Monbiot Bringing Back the Beaver is
farmer-turned-ecologist Derek Gow's inspirational and often
riotously funny first-hand account of how the movement to rewild
beavers into the British landscape became the single most dramatic
and subversive nature conservation act of the modern era. Since the
early 1990s - in the face of outright opposition from government,
landowning elites and even some conservation professionals - Gow
has imported, quarantined and assisted the reestablishment of
beavers in waterways across England and Scotland. With a foreword
by bestselling author of Wilding, Isabella Tree, Bringing Back the
Beaver makes a passionate case as to why the return of one of
nature's great problem solvers will be critical as part of a
sustainable fix for the UK's growing flooding problems, whilst
ensuring the creation of essential landscapes that enable the
broadest spectrum of Britain's wildlife to thrive. 'It is wonderful
to see that beavers are now officially back on the list of native
species, having been absent for so long . . . far too long!'-Dame
Judi Dench
The area known as Dogtown--an isolated colonial ruin and
surrounding 3,000-acre woodland in seaside Gloucester,
Massachusetts--has long exerted a powerful influence over artists,
writers, eccentrics, and nature lovers. But its history is also
woven through with tales of witches, supernatural sightings,
pirates, former slaves, drifters, and the many dogs Revolutionary
War widows kept for protection and for which the area was named. In
1984, a brutal murder took place there: a mentally disturbed local
outcast crushed the skull of a beloved schoolteacher as she walked
in the woods. In this award-winning debut, Elyssa East evocatively
interlaces the story of the grisly murder with the strange, dark
history of this wilderness ghost town and explores the possibility
that certain landscapes wield their own unique power. Winner of the
2010 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award in nonfiction and named a
Must-Read Book by the Massachusetts Book Awards, "Dogtown "takes
readers into an unforgettable place brimming with tragedy,
eccentricity, and fascinating lore, and examines the idea that some
places can inspire both good and evil, poetry and murder.
A full and frank account of a unique case and one of the most
notorious in our criminal history. The detail comes from the
personal knowledge and recollections of one who was closely
involved in the prosecution of the accused, Gordon Park, who was
eventually convicted of the crime nearly thirty years after its
commission. The author is a former solicitor and Crown Advocate who
prosecuted cases in the criminal courts for more than thirty-five
years.
After losing his wife to cancer and suffering mental health
problems, Jamie Rogers knew that things could be made better.
Sharing stories of other bereaved fathers, interleaved with
information regarding hospice help, this book is designed to dispel
some of the myths surrounding hospice care.
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