Welcome to an after-dark world of new money, hedonism and excess. A world of luxurious nightclubs where racketeers, gamblers and glamorous women mixed with entrepreneurs, bunny girls, politicians and policemen. Bandit Country is a gripping, atmospheric true-crime noir. It is the story of Britain's 1960's gambling boom, as the country emerged from years of hardship to embrace exotic night-life and entertainment, all supplied by the Mafia. It is an emotional, visceral story of brothers: the Luvaglios, who dreamed of an empire founded among the hard industrial skylines and bridges of Newcastle, built on good times and bright lights - dreams that, for a moment, were lived in technicolour; and the Kray twins, who looked up to this new kingdom from London and saw a slice of action they wanted for themselves. And above all, it is a story of betrayal, murder and a shocking miscarriage of justice, as empires crumble, friends turn on friends, and the good times come screeching to a halt. Sure to be loved by fans of Peaky Blinders, this story - that inspired classic British gangster film Get Carter - isn't quite like anything you've read before. Turn the page and roll the dice. . .

Essays exploring childhood and youth in Scotland before the nineteenth century. Children and youth have tended to be under-reported in the historical scholarship. This collection of essays recasts the historical narrative by populating premodern Scottish communities from the thirteenth to the late eighteenthcenturies with their lively experiences and voices. By examining medieval and early modern Scottish communities through the lens of age, the collection counters traditional assumptions that young people are peripheral to our understanding of the political, economic, and social contexts of the premodern era. The topics addressed fall into three main sections: the experience of being a child/adolescent; representations of the young; and the constructionof the next generation. The individual essays examine the experience of the young at all levels of society, including princes and princesses, aristocratic and gentry youth, urban young people, rural children, and those who came to Scotland as slaves; they draw on evidence from art, personal correspondence, material culture, song, legal and government records, work and marriage contracts, and literature. Janay Nugent is an Associate Professor ofHistory and a founding member of the Institute for Child and Youth Studies at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada; Elizabeth Ewan is University Research Chair and Professor of History and Scottish Studies at the Centrefor Scottish Studies, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Contributors: Katie Barclay, Stuart Campbell, Mairi Cowan, Sarah Dunnigan, Elizabeth Ewan, Anne Frater, Dolly MacKinnon, Cynthia J. Neville, Janay Nugent, Heather Parker, Jamie Reid Baxter, Cathryn R. Spence, Laura E. Walkling, Nel Whiting.

1560 is a crucial date in the development of Scottish education, for it was in this year that the First Book of Discipline set out its ambitious project of providing a school in every notable town. This book, the result of exhaustive archival research and extensive use of the Registers of Deeds (which offer evidence of schoolmasters so described, as witnesses to legal documents), provides an indepth and wide-ranging analysis of education during the period, considered in its full religious, social and cultural setting. The curriculum receives particular attention, with its emphasis on music drawn out. The volume also presents a list of all identified Scottish schools and schoolmasters from the Protestant Reformation down to 1633. The late Dr John Durkan (1914-2006), historian and schoolmaster and a co-founder of the Innes Review, left a published legacy of hundreds of articles on Scottish intellectual and religious life in the Middle Ages and Renaissance and helped change the face of Scottish historiography. He was latterly a Senior Honorary Research Fellow of his alma mater, Glasgow University.

'The incredible story of the man who went from trying to win the Grand National to playing a key role in co-ordinating the French Resistance.' Daily Express An English racehorse trainer and horse dealer's son, John Goldsmith was born and brought up in Paris and spoke fluent French. In 1942 he was recruited in to the legendary Special Operations Executive, or SOE, and dropped three times behind enemy lines. In 1943 he organised the escape of a French air force general across the Pyrenees but a few months later he was caught by the Gestapo in Paris only to engineer his own getaway from a locked third floor hotel room. By the end of the war he had been awarded the DSO, MC, Croix de Guerre and Legion d'Honneur. Resuming his peacetime occupation in 1946 Goldsmith was sent numerous French racehorses to train. He found uncanny similarities between the secret agent's milieu and the black market world of Britain's post war racetracks and, in partnership with a high stakes Mayfair bookie, he orchestrated some of the most audacious betting coups in racing history.

*William Hill Sports Book of the Year award winning author*

Monsieur X is a dazzling tale of glamour, riches, violence and ultimately tragedy.

Patrice des Moutis was a handsome, charming and well-educated Frenchman with an aristocratic family, a respectable insurance business, and a warm welcome in the smartest Parisian salons. He was also a compulsive gambler and illegal bookie.

Between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, Des Moutis made a daring attempt to beat the French state-run betting system. His success so alarmed the authorities that they repeatedly changed the rules of betting in an effort to stop him. And so a battle of wills began, all played out on the front pages of the daily newspapers as the general public willed Des Moutis on to ever greater triumphs. He remained one step ahead of the law until finally the government criminalised his activities, driving him into the arms of the underworld. Eventually the net began to close, high-profile characters found themselves the target of the state's investigation, and people began turning up dead.

Victor Chandler, the most recognisable face in bookmaking, tells his remarkable life story in 'Put Your Life On It: Staying At The Top in the Cut-throat World of Gambling.' In this new authorised biography written by Jamie Reid, Chandler will reveal how gambling was in his blood from birth. Discover how his grandfather dealt with Darby Sabini's Italian mob, Alfie Solomons and the real Peaky Blinders. How his father, Victor senior, built up the firm only for illness to force 'Young Victor' into the fray at the age of 23 - the start of a high life and fast times. To begin with, he found the going tough. He almost accepted an offer to sell up from Playboy Bookmakers. But fortunately he stuck with it just in time to enjoy his first profitable Royal Ascot and from then on there was no going back. In the face of the UK recession in the 1990s he went out to the Far East and began duelling audaciously with colossal Asian punters while dodging the attentions of the Triads in Hong Kong and Macau. Then at the end of the decade he sparked a revolution by moving his entire business offshore to Gibraltar; he is often credited with being the first to take gambling online. Victor shares his often hilarious memories of 40 years of a high-octane racing and bookmaking life, populated by a huge cast of colourful characters including the artist Lucian Freud, who painted 'VC' as well as betting with him.