Compassion, nurturing and pain are at the heart of everyone's story of mothers and motherhood. In this book, Matt Hopwood presents a selection of deep, powerful stories of and by mothers which were told openly and bravely to him. Women, men, children, teenagers and centenarians tell their experiences of childhood, motherhood, birth, loss, yearning, fear, contentment, love and divinity. They tell of connection with Mother and the Mother instincts that reside in every human being. Together, these stories, from as far afield as the USA, Russia, Taiwan, and Europe as well as the UK, are a gift that help bring us to a deeper understanding of our humanity and the role of the intuitive feminine Mother that is so needed by every one of us.

From the hugely respected journalist Miranda Sawyer, a very modern look at the midlife crisis - delving into the truth, and lies, of the experience and how to survive it, with thoughtfulness, insight and humour. 'You wake one day and everything is wrong. It's as though you went out one warm evening - an evening fizzing with delicious potential, so ripe and sticky-sweet you can taste it on the air - for just one drink ... and woke up two days later in a skip. Except you're not in a skip, you're in an estate car, on the way to an out-of-town shopping mall to buy a balance bike, a roof rack and some stackable storage boxes.' Miranda Sawyer's midlife crisis began when she was 44. It wasn't a traditional one. She didn't run off with a Pilates teacher, or blow thousands on a trip to find herself. From the outside, all remained the same. Work, kids, marriage, mortgage, blah. Days, weeks and months whizzed past as she struggled with feeling - knowing - that she was over halfway through her life. It seemed only yesterday that she was 29, out and about. Out of Time is not a self-help book. It's an exploration of this sudden crisis, this jolt. It looks at how our tastes, and our bodies, change as we get older. It considers the unexpected new pleasures that the second half of life can offer, from learning to code to taking up running (slowly). Speaking to musicians and artists, friends and colleagues, Miranda asks how they too have confronted midlife, and the lessons, if any, that they've learned along the way.

Originating from the Latin for deity or goddess, our concept of what a 'diva' might be - or should be - has evolved in richness and complexity. Delving into the personas of performers from Sarah Bernhardt to Rihanna, this book looks at what it has meant to be a diva, and what unites and defines these unique artists. Opening with 19th-century opera stars and 20th-century silent-screen sirens, it then focuses on different aspects of divadom: from Hollywood icons such as Elizabeth Taylor and Bette Davis cultivating their image to the activism of artists such as Billie Holiday and Miriam Makeba; from the acumen shown by Dolly Parton and Beyonce to the development of radical new musical identities by Madonna, Missy Elliot and Lady Gaga; from new ways of performing gender and sexuality by Tina Turner, Freddie Mercury and Grace Jones to the tensions between public and private experience by the likes of Amy Winehouse and Liza Minnelli.