Osobnosti, memoáry, biografie

The legendary musician who defined rock in the 1960s and continues to astonish and delight a wide spectrum of music lovers tells, for the first time, the story of his personal and professional journeys in this pungent, witty, and painfully honest autobiography.

Eric Clapton is far more than a rock star. Like Dylan and McCartney he is an icon and a living legend. He has sold tens of millions of records, played sell-out concerts all over the world and been central to the significant musical developments of his era. His guitar playing has seen him hailed as 'God'. Tracks such as Layla, Sunshine Of Your Love, Wonderful Tonight and Tears In Heaven have become anthems for generations of music fans. Now for the first time, Eric tells the story of his personal and professional jou

When the journalist Lynn Barber was 16, she was picked up at a bus-stop by an attractive older man who drew up in his sports car - and her life was almost wrecked. A bright confident girl, on course to go to Oxford, she began a relationship which, incredibly, was encouraged by her conventional, suburban parents and which took her into the louche, semi-criminal world of west London just as the 1960s began. Ruin beckoned, until one day she made an important discovery. 'An Education', the opening piece of this fascinating memoir, was highly praised when first published in Granta magazine, and is currently being filmed by the BBC with a Nick Hornby script. Here's a sneak preview of the brilliant film An Education, releasing at the end of October, based on Lynn Barber's memoir and with a sc

The first volume in a series of memoirs by one of the most important and influential musicians and songwriters of our time. Bob Dylan takes us back to the early 1960s when he arrived in New York to launch his phenomenal career, he also talks us through his motivations, frustrations and remarkable creativity.

Lance Armstrong won the 1999 Tour de France in spectacular style, taking four stages and both a mountain and a time trial. His story is even more remarkable because he was diagnosed with stage 4 testicular cancer in October 1996.

World-famous writer Bill Bryson brings us this brilliantly readable biography of our greatest dramatist and poet, William Shakespeare. Examining centuries of myths, half-truths and downright lies, Bill Bryson tries to make sense of the man behind the masterpieces. In a journey through the streets of Shakespeare's time, he brings to life the hubbub of Elizabethan England and a host of characters along the way. Bryson celebrates the glory of Shakespeare's language - his ceaselss inventiveness gave us hundreds of now indispensable phrases, images and words - and delights in details of his fall-outs and folios, poetry and plays. Stitching together information from a vast array of sources, he has created a unique celebration of one of the most significant, and least understood, figures in h

'Here we drink three cups of tea to do business; the first you are a stranger, the second you become a friend, and the third, you join our family, and for our family we are prepared to do anything – even die.' Haji Ali, Korphe Village Chief, Karakoram mountains, Pakistan In 1993, after a terrifying and disastrous attempt to climb K2, a mountaineer called Greg Mortenson drifted, cold and dehydrated, into an impoverished Pakistan village in the Karakoram Mountains. Moved by the inhabitants’ kindness, he promised to return and build a school. Three Cups of Tea is the story of that promise and its extraordinary outcome. Over the next decade Mortenson built not just one but fifty-five schools – especially for girls – in remote villages across the forbidding and breathtaking landscap

An intimate history of Czechoslovakia under communism; a meditation on the social and political role of art, and a triumphant statement of the values underlying all the recent revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe.

In a book written while he was president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel combines the same powerful eloquence, moral passion, and abiding wisdom that informed his writing as a dissident and playwright, with a candor unprecedented from one with the broad perspective and infinite responsibility of governing a country.

Havel, now president of the Czech Republic, addresses the legacy of Communism as the euphoria of the Velvet Revolution gives way to a more problematic reality. Yet even as he grapples with the challenges of political change, he affirms his belief in a politics motivated by moral responsibility; in an economy tempered by compassion; and in the central roles of art and culture in the transformation of society. Summer Meditations is not only a timely and necessary

"My life is a series of embarrassing incidents strung together by telling people about those embarrassing incidents."

Russell Brand grew up in Essex . His father left when he was three months old, he was bulimic at 12 and left school at 16 to study at the Italia Conti stage school. There, he began drinking heavily and taking drugs. He regularly visited prostitutes in Soho, began cutting himself, took drugs on stage during his stand-up shows, and even set himself on fire while on crack cocaine. He has been arrested 11 times and fired from 3 different jobs - including from XFM and MTV - and he claims to have slept with over 2,000 women. In 2003 Russell was told that he would be in prison, in a metal hospital or dead within six months unless he went in to rehab. He has

In SCAR TISSUE Anthony Kiedis, charismatic and highly articulate frontman of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, recounts his remarkable life story, and the history of the band itself. Raised in the Midwest, he moved to LA aged eleven to live with his father Blackie, purveyor of pills, pot, and cocaine to the Hollywood elite. After a brief child-acting career, Kiedis dropped out of U.C.L.A. and plunged headfirst into the demimonde of the L.A. underground music scene. He formed the band with three schoolfriends - and found his life's purpose. Crisscrossing the country, the Chili Peppers were musical innovators and influenced a whole generation of musicians. But there's a price to pay for both success and excess and in SCAR TISSUE, Kiedis writes candidly of the overdose death of his soul mate and

Bill Bryson’s first travel book opened with the immortal line, ‘I come from Des Moines.Somebody had to.’ In this deeply funny new book, he travels back in time to explore the ordinary kid he once was, in the curious world of 1950s America.It was a happy time, when almost everything was good for you, including DDT, cigarettes and nuclear fallout.This is a book about one boy’s growing up.But in Bryson’s hands, it becomes everyone’s story, one that will speak volumes – especially to anyone who has ever been young.

Diego Armando Maradona needs little introduction - a poor boy from a Buenos Aires shanty-town, his genius with a ball took him to the heights of European and World football, and his struggle with the pressures of life inside and outside the game pulled him right back down again. Never before has Maradona given us his extraordinary story in his own words, until now.