Jean Stein's absorbing oral history of Hollywood from expert witnesses. Her book, West of Eden, features the direct, ungilded words from Arthur Miller, Lauren Bacall, Jane Fonda Stephen Sondheim and Warren Beatty among other household names, but also of gardeners, manservants, lawyers, even a bishop and, of course, of the bedroom hypnotist Jackie Park, who she interviewed over the years. Stein teases great candour from her subjects and the book offer unprecedented insight into life in Tinsel Town.
NEW FICTION
- MUST READS Water has swirled through storytelling since The Odyssey.
- CHICK LIT Handsome David was studious Ally's first love.
- CLASSIC CRIME Annie Haynes devoted her mental energies to a series of mysteries.
- QUICK READS The Quick Reads series, sponsored by Galaxy.
- LITERARY FICTION This hotly tipped U.S. debut is tremendously good.
- YOUNG ADULT I approached this follow-up with nervously high expectations. I need not have worried.
- LITERARY FICTION Yann Martel's new book consists of three linked stories. The first is set in 1904.
THIS WEEK'S PAPERBACKS
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Torture, castration, rampant sex, murders galore and dwarf tossing. Were Russia's Tsars the nastiest royals in history?
As we know from the stupendous BBC adaptation of Tolstoy's epic novel, War And Peace, the Russians are very good at war, not so pie-hot when it comes to peace. Military parades, manoeuvres and a good scrap are what they like best - and as Simon Sebag Montefiore says in The Romanovs: 1613-1918y, to Tsar Nicholas II, even World War I, in which Russia fielded more than 1.2 million men, was nothing more than 'a bracing national rite'. Pictured, Tsar Alexei (main), Peter the Great (top left), Alexander II (top right), Nicholas I (bottom left) and Catherine the Great (bottom right).
LITERARY NEWS
- Adrian Mole author Sue Townsend, 68, dies at her home in Leicester after a stroke
- New chapter in the history of the Bronte birthplace as new owners turn it into a cafe honouring the family's literary heritage
- Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, hospitalised with lung and urinary tract infections
- You don't need sex to sell! Dan Brown's Inferno tops Amazon best-seller list for 2013 as readers look for different thrills after Fifty Shades trilogy
Shameless shopaholics: The lust for clothes was once seen as sinful. But today British wardrobes are stuffed with six billion garments. So just how did this happen?
We live in a world of things. The average German owns 10,000 of them, while in 2013, the UK was home to six billion items of clothing. That's roughly 100 per adult, a quarter of which never leave the wardrobe. Only this week, the boss of IKEA said that we may well have hit saturation point or 'peak stuff' - a state of affairs that could be called 'peak curtains'. But where did this craze for things come from? How has it changed the world? And, perhaps most important of all, what does it say about us?