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The Colony Room Club was home to Soho's eclectic art community for generations, famously including Francis Bacon. The Colony Room Club was known to the local's as 'Muriel's', after the proprietor Muriel Belcher, of whom Francis Bacon was a great admirer, the artist painted her portrait three times. Muriel would pay Francis ten pounds a week to 'bring in the people you like'. Before long the Colony Room was was welcoming the likes of Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice, Charles Laughton, E.M. Forster, Tallulah Bankhead, as well as artists Frank Auerbach Colquohoun and Macbryde, who, like Bacon are represented in the Leeds Art Gallery collection. Opinions of the famous artistic drinking den have rang...
'Entertaining, shocking, uproarious, hilarious . . . like eavesdropping on a wake, as the mourners get gradually more drunk and tell ever more outrageous stories' Sunday Times This is the definitive history of London's most notorious drinking den, the Colony Room Club in Soho. It’s a hair-raising romp through the underbelly of the post-war scene: during its sixty-year history, more romances, more deaths, more horrors and more sex scandals took place in the Colony than anywhere else. Tales from the Colony Room is an oral biography, consisting of previously unpublished and long-lost interviews with the characters who were central to the scene, giving the reader a flavour of what it was like ...
Food is meant to be enjoyed, and Sophie Dahl would have it no other way. Growing up in a family of true food lovers, she began cooking at a young age and never looked back. Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights presents nearly one hundred of her tried-and-true recipes, organized around the four seasons and using the freshest ingredients available. Accented with her stories about how she came to know these foods and why she loves them, Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights provides a complete picture of what a meal should provide. From lemon-scented summer stews, to crisply burnished pies, to salads and soups for breezy lunches, to decadent desserts, Sophie Dahl cooks food that is indulgent, delicious, and wholesome.
Benedict le Vay reveals London's most bizarre and macabre secrets with his novel approach, which doubles both as a thematic guide to the hidden attractions of the streets of London and a compelling insight into the citizens and culture of this historic city.
Irreverent and iconoclastic, Nigel Coates has been stirring up the architectural scene for over 40 years. In this warm and compelling autobiography, he explores the highs and lows of life at the cutting edge of architecture and design. Coates’ work often treads playfully at the intersection between bodies, sexuality and design. His portfolio includes interiors for Liberty, Jigsaw and Caffè Bongo in Tokyo, the Body Zone in the Millennium Dome, and built work such as Noah's Ark and the Wall (both in Tokyo) and the Geffrye Museum extension, London. He has also collaborated with high-end product and lighting manufacturers Fornasetti, Fratelli Boffi and Slamp. Formerly the Head of Architecture...
As heard on the New Yorker Radio Hour: The triumphant and "engaging history" (The New Yorker) of the young women who devised a winning strategy that defeated Nazi U-boats and delivered a decisive victory in the Battle of the Atlantic. By 1941, Winston Churchill had come to believe that the outcome of World War II rested on the battle for the Atlantic. A grand strategy game was devised by Captain Gilbert Roberts and a group of ten Wrens (members of the Women's Royal Naval Service) assigned to his team in an attempt to reveal the tactics behind the vicious success of the German U-boats. Played on a linoleum floor divided into painted squares, it required model ships to be moved across a make-b...
The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails presents an in-depth exploration of the world of spirits and cocktails in a ground-breaking synthesis. The Companion covers drinks, processes, and techniques around the world as well as those in the US and Europe. It provides clear explanations of the different ways that spirits are produced, including fermentation, distillation and ageing, alongside a wealth of new detail on the emergence of cocktails and cocktails bars, including entries on key cocktails and influential mixologists and cocktail bars.
...meet a man who listens to tube trains from the road above with a large hearing-trumpet, the inventor who made giant ships out of ice, a chap who rides down the river in an Edwardian bath chair, the guy with the world's biggest collection of pillar boxes...These are just a few of the colourful characters to be found in Eccentric London. This is an insider's guide to the city by someone who has lived, loved, eaten, drank and worked in London for five decades. He takes you to the best and most eccentric pubs and restaurants, specialist shops (26,000 stores selling £62billion worth of stuff a year), bizarre bookshops, weird museums, least-known secret neighbourhoods where you won't find tourists, but will find the utterly odd and amazing.Marvel at the petrified pile of century-old hot cross buns at the Widow's Son pub; discover what the 'Royal Ravenmaster' does for a living; and pay a visit to Pierre Vivant's curious tree, formed from 75 sets of blinking traffic lights. Ben le Vay's Eccentric London will help you dig beneath the capital's barmy surface to reveal the barmier world beneath.
Rose Rouse, a journalist, and Suzanne Noble, a serial entrepreneur– created Advantages of Age out of a conversation in a hot tub in 2016. ‘We didn’t like how we were being depicted in the media as we got older.’ Advantages of Age is a social enterprise designed to passionately challenge the prevailing negative stereotypes around ageing. No, we’re not all grandparents, some of us are over 50, single and childless. We don’t wish to be defined by the reductive headlines we see around us. We are writers, filmmakers, singers, press officers, death doulas, psychotherapists and so much more. We are not all retired. We surf, play tennis, lift weights. We have sex, we don’t have sex. We have partners, we don’t have partners. We’re an eclectic bunch. In this collection of essays gathered from seven years of commissioning, AoAers share their thoughts on life, love, sex, death, adventures on their terms, lockdown and everything in between. ‘We hope we’re doing our bit to re-define and re-frame what getting old means.’
Rock 'n' Roll fanatics, mods, beat group wannabes, underground hippies, glam rock icons: David Bowie and Marc Bolan spent the first part of their careers following remarkably similar paths. From the day they met in 1965 as Davie Jones and Mark Feld, rock 'n' roll wannabes painting their manager's office in London’s Denmark Street, they would remain friends and rivals, each watching closely and learning from the other. In the years before they launched an unbeatable run of era-defining glam rock masterpieces at the charts, they were both just another face on the scene, meeting for coffee in Soho, hanging out at happenings and jamming in parks. Here, they are our guides through the decade that changed everything, as the gloom of post-war London exploded into the technicolor dream of the swinging sixties, a revolution in music, fashion, art and sexuality. Part dual-biography, part social history, part musical celebration of an era, The London Boys follows the British youth culture explosion through eyes of two remarkable young men on the front lines of history.