The life and times of Middlesex and England wicketkeeper-batsman John 'JT' Murray, one of the acknowledged greats of English post-war cricket. Irresistibly cool, glamorous and apparently unapproachable, Murray was Christopher Sandford's consuming hero at the time the author was confined in an English seaside boarding school in the 60s. Twenty or more years later, the two became friends. In 2017 Murray eventually succumbed to a decade-long campaign and agreed to share in full his lifetime's reminiscences, recounting his experiences of a quarter of a century as a professional English sportsman. Murray proved unfailingly generous and humorous (if by no means uncritical) in his accounts of the great Tests, the tours and the parade of celebrities, sporting and otherwise, he encountered. This treasure trove of stories - described not just in the dry accountancy of scores and averages, but in droll anecdotal detail - lies at the heart of a unique cricket book illustrated by photographs, letters and notes from Murray's own collection.

All 13 episodes of the 1969 BBC adaptation of the classic novel by Charles Dickens. Paul Dombey (John Carson) owns a reputable shipping company and yearns for a son who can take over the business. When his wife gives birth to a boy but dies shortly after, the baby is left fighting for his life and Dombey distraught once more. With only a daughter, Florence (Kara Wilson), to call his own, he seeks a second wife who could provide him with the male heir he desires. The episodes are: 'Dombey and Son, and Daughter', 'Money and Mr. Dombey', 'Blimber's Academy', 'A Voyage for Walter', 'Edith Granger', 'Love and Mr. Dombey', 'The Second Mrs. Dombey', 'The Woman from Beyond the Seas', 'Mr. Dombey Rides for a Fall', 'Flight', 'The Survivor', 'Vengeance' and 'Dombey and Daughter'.

John F. Kennedy carried on a lifelong love affair with England and the English. From his speaking style to his tastes in art, architecture, theatre, music and clothes, his personality reflected his deep affinity for a certain kind of idealised Englishness. Setting his work against a backdrop of some of the twentieth century's most profound events - the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Cold War and its arms race - noted biographer Christopher Sandford tracks Kennedy's exploits in Great Britain between 1935 and 1963, and looks in depth at the unique way Britain shaped JFK throughout his adult life and how he in turn charmed British society.

When Arthur Conan Doyle was a lonely 7-year-old schoolboy at pre-prep Newington Academy in Edinburgh, a French emigre named Eugene Chantrelle was engaged there to teach Modern Languages. A few years later, Chantrelle would be hanged for the particularly grisly murder of his wife, marking the beginning of Conan Doyle's own association with some of the bloodiest crimes of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. This early link between actual crime and the greatest detective story writer of all time is one of many. Conan Doyle would also go on to play a leading role in the notorious case of the young Anglo-Indian lawyer George Edalji, convicted and imprisoned as the `mad ripper' who supposedly prowled the fields around his Staffordshire home by night looking for animals to mutilate; and the equally chilling story of Oscar Slater and his alleged murder of an elderly spinster as she sat in her Glasgow home one winter's night in 1908, a crime with a spectacular denouement 18 years later. Using freshly available evidence and eyewitness testimony, Christopher Sandford follows these links and draws out the connections between Conan Doyle's literary output and factual criminality, a pattern that will enthral and surprise the legions of Sherlock Holmes fans. In a sense, Conan Doyle wanted to be Sherlock - to be a man who could bring order and justice to a terrible world.

Shortlisted for the 2015 Cricket Society and MCC Book of the Year Award. Shortlisted for the Cross British Sports Book of the Year 2015 (Cricket category). August 1914 brought an end to the `Golden Age' of English cricket. At least 210 professional cricketers (out of a total of 278 registered) signed up to fight, of whom thirty-four were killed. However, that period and those men were far more than merely statistics: here we follow in intimate detail not only the cricketers of that fateful last summer before the war, but also the simple pleasures and daily struggles of their family lives and the whole fabric of English social life as it existed on the eve of that cataclysm: the First World War. With unprecedented access to personal and war diaries, and other papers, Sandford expertly recounts the stories of such greats as Hon. Lionel Tennyson, as he moves virtually overnight from the round of Chelsea and Mayfair parties into the front line at the Marne; the violin-playing bowler Colin Blythe, who asked to be moved up to a front-line unit at Passchendaele, following the death in action of his brother, with tragic consequences; and the widely popular Hampshire amateur player Robert Jesson, whose sometimes comic, frequently horrific and always enthralling experiences of the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign are vividly brought to life. The Final Over is undoubtedly a gripping, moving and fully human account of this most poignant summer of the twentieth century, both on and off the field of play.

In 1962 Mick Jagger was a bright, well-scrubbed boy (planning a career in the civil service), while Keith Richards was learning how to smoke and to swivel a six-shooter. Add the mercurial Brian Jones (who'd been effectively run out of Cheltenham for theft, multiple impregnations and playing blues guitar) and the wryly opinionated Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts, and the potential was obvious. During the 1960s and 70s the Rolling Stones were the polarising figures in Britain, admired in some quarters for their flamboyance, creativity and salacious lifestyles, and reviled elsewhere for the same reasons. Confidently expected never to reach 30 they are now approaching their seventies and, in 2012, will have been together for 50 years. In The Rolling Stones, Christopher Sandford tells thehuman drama at the centre of the Rolling Stones story. Sandford has carried out interviews with those close to the Stones, family members (including Mick's parents), the group's fans and contemporaries - even examined their previously unreleased FBI files. Like no other book before The Rolling Stoneswill make sense of the rich brew of clever invention and opportunism, of talent, good fortune, insecurity, self-destructiveness, and of drugs, sex and other excess, that made the Stones who they are.

In the early 20th century, in the English-speaking world, Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini were two of the most feted and famous men alive. And their relationship is extraordinary: As strange as it may seem Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the ultra-rational detective Sherlock Holmes, was a believer in Spiritualism. He came to his belief, that one could communicate with the dead, after his son was killed in World War I, and became an expert in the field. Harry Houdini, the world's foremost magician, was a friend of Conan Doyle's, but was sceptical of his belief in the supernatural. Houdini took every opportunity to use his knowledge of illusion to expose psychics who he thought were fakes, particularly incensed by their exploitation of grief and insecurity. Based on original research, this sensational dual biography of two popular geniuses conjures up the early 20th century and the fame, personality and competing beliefs.

The declaration of war on 3 September 1939 brought to an end a golden age of British cricket, the likes of which has never been repeated. At least 216 of 283 registered British first-class players joined up before the end of the year; fifty-two lost their lives. Here cricket stands as both a statistical and very human representation of the price paid in British blood as a whole. Final Innings will follow characters of unmatched modesty, charm and often endearing eccentricity in their private and public lives, right up to the moment of their deaths. Men such as Yorkshire and England bowler Hedley Verity and the luxuriously mustachioed Maurice Turnbull will be given voices via their diaries and letters, expertly narrated by acclaimed author Christopher Sandford, who will weave a very human tale of the abrupt transition from the world of Lord's and the Oval to that of air raids, Dunkirk, the Blitz and the horror that followed.

In 1962 Mick Jagger was a bright, well-scrubbed boy (planning a career in the civil service), while Keith Richards was learning how to smoke and to swivel a six-shooter. Add the mercurial Brian Jones (who'd been effectively run out of Cheltenham for theft, multiple impregnations and playing blues guitar) and the wryly opinionated Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts, and the potential was obvious. During the 1960s and 70s the Rolling Stones were the polarising figures in Britain, admired in some quarters for their flamboyance, creativity and salacious lifestyles, and reviled elsewhere for the same reasons. Confidently expected never to reach 30 they are now approaching their seventies and, in 2012, will have been together for 50 years. In The Rolling Stones, Christopher Sandford tells thehuman drama at the centre of the Rolling Stones story. Sandford has carried out interviews with those close to the Stones, family members (including Mick's parents), the group's fans and contemporaries - even examined their previously unreleased FBI files. Like no other book before The Rolling Stoneswill make sense of the rich brew of clever invention and opportunism, of talent, good fortune, insecurity, self-destructiveness, and of drugs, sex and other excess, that made the Stones who they are.

The combined forces invasion of the Belgian port of Zeebrugge on 23 April 1918 remains one of Britain's most glorious military undertakings; not quite as epic a failure as the charge of the Light Brigade, or as well publicised as the Dam Busters raid, but with many of the same basic ingredients. A force drawn from the Royal Navy and Royal Marines set out on ships and submarines to try to block the key strategic port, in a bold attempt to stem the catastrophic losses being inflicted on British shipping by German submarines. It meant attacking a heavily fortified German naval base. The tide, calm weather and the right wind direction for a smoke screen were crucial to the plan. Judged purely on results, it can only be considered a partial strategic success. Casualties were high and the base only partially blocked. Nonetheless, it came to represent the embodiment of the bulldog spirit, the peculiarly British fighting elan, the belief that anything was possible with enough dash and daring. The essential story of the Zeebrugge mission has been told before, but never through the direct, first-hand accounts of its survivors - including that of Lieutenant Richard Sandford, VC, the acknowledged hero of the day, and the author's great uncle. The fire and bloodshed of the occasion is the book's centrepiece, but there is also room for the family and private lives of the men who volunteered in their hundreds for what they knew effectively to be a suicide mission. Zeebrugge gives a very real sense of the existence of the ordinary British men and women of 100 years ago - made extraordinary by their role in what Winston Churchill called the `most intrepid and heroic single armed adventure of the Great War.'

In this compelling biography, Christopher Sandford explores the full, inside story of Kurt Cobain. From the disruptive childhood which had such a crucial impact on Cobain's personality to the ambitious career musician who, as a friend said, "lunged for success", and the worldwide breakthrough of Nirvana's Nevermind, Sandford also writes about Cobain's stormy marriage to Courtney Love, his heroin addiction, and how he became more and more of a recluse. Finally, he writes of the crisis when, in April 1994, Cobain turned a shotgun on himself and became a martyr for disaffected youth. The result is a saga of success and corruption which John Peel has called "the ultimate rock and roll morality story".

Shortlisted for the 2015 Cricket Society and MCC Book of the Year Award. Shortlisted for the Cross British Sports Book of the Year 2015 (Cricket category). August 1914 brought an end to the `Golden Age' of English cricket. At least 210 professional cricketers (out of a total of 278 registered) signed up to fight, of whom 34 were killed. Cricket stands as both a statistical and very human representation of the price paid in British blood as a whole. The sunbaked atmosphere of English society's last carefree weeks is graced by some of the Corinthian greats of their day, like Lord Lionel Tennyson and the polymath C.B. Fry, brought alive through the words of their own letters and diaries, both on the sports fields of England and in the bloody trenches of France. This is the very personal story of how some of the greatest characters ever known in English sport performed some of their greatest feats against the ticking clock of events in Europe, and the moving, sometimes tragic, story of how they met the `great adventure'.

Renowned mystery author Arthur Conan Doyle and famous illusionist Harry Houdini first met in 1920, during the magician's tour of England. At the time, Conan Doyle had given up his lucrative writing career, killing off Sherlock Holmes in the process, in order to concentrate on his increasingly manic interest in Spiritualism. Houdini, who regularly conducted seances in an attempt to reach his late mother, was also infatuated with the idea of what he called a "living afterlife," though his enthusiasm came to be tempered by his ability to expose fraudulent mediums, many of whom employed crude variations of his own well-known illusions. Using previously unpublished material on the murky relationship between Houdini and Conan Doyle, this sometimes macabre, sometimes comic tale tells the fascinating story of the relationship between two of the most loved figures of the twentieth century and their pursuit of magic and lost loved ones.

The celebrated and controversial Roman Polanski has long been the object of worldwide fascination. Here, acclaimed biographer Christopher Sandford weaves together the rich and complex life of the film director, Holocaust survivor, and exile, based on 200 firsthand accounts. This unique access includes interviews with actors and writers who worked with Polanski, previously sealed transcripts of his criminal hearings, testimony before the California grand jury following sexual assault charges that led to his exile, and personal reflections on the Manson "family" murders of Sharon Tate and friends of the couple. Sandford also discusses the making of Polanski's classic films from 1962-2005, including such highlights as "Rosemary's Baby," "Chinatown," and the Oscar-winning "The Pianist." This compelling biography of a man whose life has been punctuated by extreme tragedies and triumphs illuminates one of the most important careers in modern cinema.

Based on interviews with family members, colleagues, lovers, and the previously silent William Burroughs, this unsparing yet even-handed biography guides the reader through the many personas, crises, and musical metamorphoses of David Bowie - also known as Davy Jones, the Laughing Gnome, Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke, a drug-addled grandfather of punk, actor, art aficionado, political activist, one of rock's most resonant icons, and a totem of modern pop culture. Nowhere else is the man and musician so convincingly deconstructed and so compellingly humanized.

Born in Paris to Polish-Jewish parents, Polanski dealt with the terrors of his childhood - including internment in Auschwitz - by creating an elaborate fantasy world in which he lived as a film star. He would go on to become one of the very best and most infamous directors in Hollywood's history - with a backlist that includes Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, Macbeth, Chinatown, Tess, Frantic and, more recently, the Oscar- and Golden Globe-winning The Pianist. Yet, it is within his own personal life that the most dramatic story unfolds - he's been at the centre of two of the most lurid crimes ever committed in Hollywood. In August 1969 his wife Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant, and seven of the couple's friends were butchered by the Manson family; Polanski himself, who was in London at the time, was the intended target. Eight years later he was arrested by LA police on charges of drugging and raping a 13-year old model and aspiring actress He fled the country and has since lived in exile in Paris, where he complains of continual harassment by the US authorities. Polanski's latest film was the hit Oliver Twist and, Variety insists, he promises to follow it with his long-awaited version of the Tate killings. Both projects, dealing with child exploitation and murder, can only fuel the controversy that surrounds him. This biography is the first chance his fans and detractors will have to read about him in real depth. It will reveal the brilliant invention, self-destruction, talent, self-destruction, sex, drugs and wild excesses, with names and stories told for the first time. Fascinating, flawed, wildy creative, this is the full, uncut story of one of the greatest directors of our time.

In the early 20th century, in the English-speaking world, Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini were two of the most feted and famous men alive. And their relationship is extraordinary: As strange as it may seem Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the ultra-rational detective Sherlock Holmes, was a believer in Spiritualism. He came to his belief, that one could communicate with the dead, after his son was killed in World War I, and became an expert in the field. Harry Houdini, the world's foremost magician, was a friend of Conan Doyle's, but was sceptical of his belief in the supernatural. Houdini took every opportunity to use his knowledge of illusion to expose psychics who he thought were fakes, particularly incensed by their exploitation of grief and insecurity. Based on original research, this sensational dual biography of two popular geniuses conjures up the early 20th century and the fame, personality and competing beliefs.

Sir Paul McCartney first picked up a guitar as a bereaved teenager in 1956. In the fifty years since he's become the most successful pop music composer in history, enjoying a virtual season ticket to the Guinness Book of Records. McCartney's ballad Yesterday, which he wrote in his sleep, has since been covered by 2,400 other artists - making it the most popular song of all time. Now Christopher Sandford reveals the man behind the myth ... Among the eye-opening stories is the surprising love-hate relationship with John Lennon, not to mention with Lennon's widow, as well as an insider's account of McCartney's controversial marriage to Heather Mills. Likeswise, Sir Paul's restless creativity - both mainstream and avant-garde - his second group and his marriage to the late Linda McCartney are seen here in fresh and stunning detail. This behind the scenes story takes readers right up to today, as Sir Paul passes his 64th birthday. It's a hard, fast, sometimes shocking saga of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll - the true adventure of the last showbiz superstar.

Here is the first biography to explore, with shocking detail, the drama that formed this troubled, tragic rock star. Neither an apology nor a condemnation, Kurt Cobain presents a vivid insider's view of the life and death of a man who galvanized a generation and gave birth to the "grunge" revolution with his band Nirvana. Sandford portrays the provocative, small-town rebel with the talent of John Lennon, and then shows him at work on concert stages in Seattle, New York, and London. Readers follow the struggles of Cobain's emotional life-his tumultuous relationships with family and his fellow band members, his drug addiction and sexual appetite, his stormy marriage to Courtney Love, and the birth of his daughter, who, as Cobain wrote in his suicide note, "reminds me too much of who I used to be." During his research, Sandford has had access to Cobain's family, his colleagues, his former friends and lovers, and even author William S. Burroughs, whom Cobain considered to be his "greatest influence." The result is a graphic account of the life that led to the day in April 1994 when Cobain turned a shotgun on himself and became a martyr to disaffected youth around the world.

Exactly fifty years ago, a young director named Roman Polanski made his first completed film - a two-minute student exercise which he called Murder. In the half-century since, Polanski has become an iconic figure, widely admired for his mordant, sexually charged films and yet derided as - in his own words - 'an evil, profligate dwarf'. In January 1978, facing a possible fifty-year sentence for 'unlawful sexual intercourse' with a 13-year-old girl, Polanski fled the United States and flew to France, where he was a naturalized citizen. Thirty years later, he remains in exile: the much revered eminence grise of filmmakers and a criminal fugitive who complains of harrassement by the US authorities. Others have told pieces of this story, but Christopher Sandford brings it all together in one lucid, gripping account, beginning with Polanski's horrific experience in the Holocaust and ending with his current life in Paris, where he provides a 'living symbol of Franco-American misunderstanding.' The book draws on dozens of interviews with actors, writers and other Polanski collaborators, previously sealed transcripts of his criminal hearings, testimony before the California grand jury and the graphic evidence of former lovers and friends. There is a wealth of unpublished material, too, on what Polanski has called the 'central tragedy' of his life - the brutal murder of his wife Sharon Tate and others by members of the so-called Manson Family - an event which, for sheer savagery, rivals anything in modern criminal history. Amidst the personal tragedy, the focus is also on the professional triumph. Polanski's films are seen here anew, with behind-the-scenes stories on everything from 1962's Knife in the Water to 2005's Oliver Twist. We follow the director through the backstage feuds of Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown, his unflinching version of Macbeth, described by one critic as a 'film exorcism' in the wake of the Manson murders, and his Holocaust masterpiece The Pianist, which won Polanski his first and only Oscar. The generally downbeat themes - betrayal, corruption, satanic worship - are vintage Polanski, but there is also a lighter, knockabout side: this is the man who gave us The Fearless Vampire Killers or Pardon Me but Your Teeth Are in My Neck. Fascinating, flawed, wildly creative, the 'world's most notorious artist' is seen here in full.

A full and frank portrait of the complex man behind the icon of cool. Steve McQueen, one of the first `cool' film stars, remains a cultural icon the world over. His image is used to sell everything from cars, to beer, to a range of dolls. From the Cincinnati Kid to Frank Bullitt, Tom Crown to Papillon, his roles exemplified a certain school of male charm, as well as grit and a hint of menace. McQueen was born in 1930 into a poor Mid-western family to a highly strung mother and truant father. In and out of reform school from a young age, he was eventually made a ward of court and the resulting sense of abandonment never left him. His big break came with the TV Saga Wanted: Dead or Alive and the now cult-classic B-movie The Blob. Just two years later he was one of the leading lights of tinseltown. Sandford goes on to chart McQueen's phenomenal Hollywood career, starring in some of the world's best-loved films, in tandem with his turbulent private life: his marriages, his bisexuality, the drink, the fast cars, casual sex and violence. As a close friend has remarked: `You couldn't peg him. He wanted to be memorable as an actor - but in his private life you got the impression he was trying to speed up, to get into the next hour without quite living out the last one.' As Sandford reveals, McQueen's public demeanour of studied nonchalance hid chronic self-destrutive urges which emerged in his favourite hobbies, including bare-knuckle boxing and porsche-racing, as well as several suicide attempts. His `lost' years at the very height of his fame are illuminated with disclosures of rampant addiction, bizarre health cures, fringe religion and androgyny. McQueen died in 1980 at a `wellness' clinic in New Mexico, having been earlier diagnosed with lung cancer . His last words were `Lo hice' - Spanish for `I did it'. Sandford has spoken to a wide range of McQueen's contemporaries - Hollywood stars, friends and family - and discovered the man behind the myth, the abandoned little boy underneath the movie-god swagger.

In 1975 a pop loving beach boy made his last-gasp shot at stardom - an album called BORN TO RUN! The rest, as they say, is history.

At a time when other ageing rock stars have yielded to burn-out or self-parody, Bruce Springsteen has held his place as a cultural icon. His earth-shattering albums like BORN IN THE USA (which spent 136 weeks in the British charts) still enjoy raucous airplay. Meanwhile, Springsteen has carved out a second career as a social critic, balladeer and purveyor of soundtracks. His work, which has been covered by artists from Frank Sinatra to Sonic Youth, sells a total of 15 million albums annually. His concerts are instant sell-outs the world over. Springsteen's distinctive tearaway anthems and foghorn voice are among pop's most enduring sounds. From cult figure to pin-up (aka 'The Boss') to mega-selling guru, Springsteen is the last true rock star. Christopher Sandford's is the first full-length biography in ten years.