Harriet Jacobs's slave narrative is remarkable for its candid exposure of the sexual abuse suffered by slaves at the hands of their owners. Her sufferings, and eventual escape to the North, are described in vivid detail. This edition also includes her brother's short memoir, 'A True Tale of Slavery'.

They called for a break, and Gambon magicked up a cigarette from out of his beard. He and I were often to be found outside the stage that housed the Astronomy Tower, having 'a breath of fresh air' as we referred to it. There would be painters and plasterers and chippies and sparks, and among them all would be me and Dumbledore having a crafty cigarette.

From Borrower to wizard, Tom Felton's childhood was anything but ordinary. His early rise to fame saw him catapulted into the limelight aged ...

"I loved writing, I loved chronicling life and every moment I was cogent, sober, or blitzed, I was forever feeding off my surroundings, making copious notes as ammunition for future compositions. . . . The thing is good, bad or indifferent I never stopped writing, it was as addictive as any drug."

This is the memoir music fans have been waiting for. Half of one of the greatest creative partnerships in popular music, Bernie Taupin is the man who wrote the lyrics for Elton John, who co...

The extraordinary life of the global figure in modern environmentalism and co-creator of Gaia Theory, as confided to award-winning journalist Jonathan Watts

We look at our lives and wonder: Wasn't it all supposed to be more beautiful than this? We quickly silence that question, telling ourselves to be grateful, hiding our discontent - even from ourselves.For many years, Glennon Doyle denied her own discontent.

Wonder Boy is a riveting investigation into the turbulent life of Zappos visionary Tony Hsieh, whose radical business strategies revolutionized both the tech world and corporate culture, based on rigorous research and reporting by two seasoned journalists.

Tony Hsieh's first successful venture was in middle school, selling personalized buttons. At Harvard, he made a profit compiling and selling study guides. In 1998, Hsieh sold his first company to Microsoft for $265 million. About a decade l...

An extraordinarily brave and moving memoir from one of the world's most famous whistle-blowers, activists and trans women.

In 2010, Chelsea Manning, working as an intelligence analyst in the United States Army in Iraq, disclosed classified military documents that she had smuggled out via the memory card of her digital camera. The army sentenced Manning to thirty-five years in military prison, charging her with twenty-two counts relating to the unauthorized possession and distribution of class...

The Book-Makers is a celebration of 550 years of the printed book, told through the lives of eighteen extraordinary men and women who took the book in radical new directions: printers and binders, publishers and artists, paper-makers and library founders. This is a story of skill, craft, mess, cunning, triumph, improvisation, and error.

Some of these names we know. We meet jobbing printer (and United States Founding Father) Benjamin Franklin. We watch Thomas Cobden-Sanderson conjure books tha...

A Shropshire village is Ann Handley’s home in 1851. Her father has destined her to be a farmer’s wife, and says she doesn’t need to read and write.

Feeling constrained at home, she longs to escape. But just as Ann begins to make her way out into the world, a shocking encounter brings misfortune and conflict to her door. She’s forced to leave the village and find work elsewhere; a pattern which future generations will follow. 

Letters from the Past is the story of four generations...

1 July 1523, Hendrik Vos and Johan van den Esschen died by burning at the stake on the Grand-Place in Brussels. They were the first martyrs of the Reformation.

Following this event, the Faculty of Protestant Theology and Religious Studies (FPTR) in Brussels organized a colloquium to discuss what has changed in the 500 years since the first martyrs of the Reformation. After an historical introduction to set the scene regarding 1 July 1523, this colloquium dealt with the consequences of the Ref...