Robinson

This book is for those who want to follow a sugar free lifestyle for health or weight reasons, as well as families wishing to reduce sugar, in order, ultimately to live a sugar free lifestyle – but without missing out on family favourites. With advice, tips and mouthwatering recipes for all the family, sugar-free has never been so easy. Sarah offers practical advice and recipes to overcome everyday hurdles – from starting out right through to what to prepare at Christmas, birthday parties or for packed lunches. With chapters such as The Tuck Shop, The Pantry and The Bakery, this book is all you need for your sugar-free journey

In November 1974, British cabinet minister, John Stonehouse, walked into the sea off a beach in Miami and disappeared, seemingly drowned.  Then he was found – on the other side of the world, in Australia – and his extraordinary story began to come to light: a Labour cabinet minister and a devoted family man; also in a long-term affair with his secretary, and a spy for the Czech State Security agency, who had committed fraud and attempted to fake his own death to escape catastrophic business failures.

This is the definitive biography of Stonehouse, written by Julian Hayes, who, as the son of Stonehouse’s nephew and lawyer, Michael Hayes, is uniquely placed to tell the story of this charismatic but deeply flawed politician. As a criminal lawyer in London, Hayes has used his in-depth knowledge and experience of the criminal courts, not least the Old Bailey, where the Stonehouse trial took place, to forensically examine Stonehouse’s story, including Czech defector Josef Frolík’s claim that he was a spy.

Hayes has unearthed secret reports in the archives in Prague written by Stonehouse’s former spymasters.  He has gleaned much from family members, also lawyers involved in the trial, and from the trial documents and government papers held in archives in the UK and Australia.

For three days Billy Hughes played psychological games with Gill Moran and her family, while secretly murdering them one by one. Blizzards hampered the police manhunt, but they learned where the dangerous criminal was hiding and closed in on the cottage. A desperate car chase ensued, ending with a shoot-out and the killer’s death. There was just one survivor.

The plot for a great crime novel? No, it all actually happened in January 1977.

The Pottery Cottage Murders is a gripping, fast-paced account of a criminal case that reads like fiction but is terrifyingly true. What took place at a family home on the Derbyshire moors in 1977 made the name Pottery Cottage synonymous with horror: an address briefly as infamous as 112 Ocean Avenue in the US town of Amityville, where a young man had murdered his entire family three years earlier, and the home of married killers Fred and Rosemary West on Cromwell Street in Gloucester.

Afterwards, the determination of sole survivor Gill Moran to prevent any written or dramatic accounts of the case saw ‘Pottery Cottage’ largely vanish from public consciousness, yet those events were important milestones in the history of British crime.  At last, the real story has been told by Carol Ann Lee and her co-author, Peter Howse, the former Chief Inspector, who bravely saved Gill’s life over forty years earlier, as Hughes held her hostage in the final shoot-out on the moors.

A grisly book dedicated to the crimes, perversions and outrages of Victorian England, covering high-profile offences – such as the murder of actor William Terriss, whose stabbing at the stage door of the Adelphi Theatre in 1897 filled the front pages for many weeks – as well as lesser-known transgressions that scandalised the Victorian era.

The tales include murders and violent crimes, but also feature scandals that merely amused the Victorians. These include the story of a teenage man who married an actress, only to be shipped off to Australia by his disgusted parents; and the Italian ice-cream man who only meant to buy his sweetheart a hat but ended up proposing marriage instead. When he broke it off, his fiancée’s father sued him and the story was dubbed the ‘Amusing Aberdeen Breach of Promise Case’. Also present is the gruesome story of the murder of Patrick O Connor who was shot in the head and buried under the kitchen flagstones by his lover Maria Manning and her husband, Frederick. The couple’s subsequent trial caused a sensation and even author Charles Dickens attended the grisly public hanging.

Drawing on a range of sources from university records and Old Bailey transcripts to national and regional newspaper archives, Michelle Morgan’s research sheds new light on well-known stories as well as unearthing previously unknown incidents.

Madonna: singer, songwriter, actress, businesswoman, not to mention one of the most renowned cultural icons of the last three decades. Since her first, eponymous album, over thirty years ago Madonna has sold a remarkable 300 million records worldwide, making her the top-selling female recording artist of all time. Madonna is famous for continuously reinventing both her music and her image. By pushing the boundaries of mainstream popular music with both her lyrical content and the imagery in her music videos she achieved extraordinary popularity. Morgan offers a richly illustrated, comprehensive account of the artist’s phenomenally successful career. Reviews, interviews, commentary, and Madonna’s own words shed new light on her videos, books, tours, fashion, charity work and every other aspect of her life.