Melrose Books imprint: 69 books

Before Spin is the eye-opening autobiography by Keith McDowall. It reveals an exciting wartime childhood, how the author became a local reporter chasing the news in South London to eventually working in Fleet Street where he covered industry, trade unions and Cabinet level politics. At the height...

Memorable Moments of a Met Copper – 1967–1997 is the fascinating and absorbing memoir of a Met Copper spanning a thirty year period. Presented as a series of stark, harrowing and often disturbed short anecdotes and stories, the author shares some of the horror, fear, humour and sadness that he...

This is the story of an ordinary young man, unworldly, untried and patriotic, who enlisted at 18 in 1942 and became an infantryman specialising as a machine gunner with the Middlesex Regiment and later with the Cheshire Regiment. His early years were spent in Lambeth and Mitcham, Surrey. As a 17 year...

The redoubtable Peggy Haswell was a young pioneer, flying to The Gambia just after World War Two. She was an agronomist who was sent to the remote parts of Africa to study how the villagers lived. Facing crocodiles, snakes and scorpions, not to mention the local magician practising his ‘medicine’,...

The Incontinent Continent tries to show how the EU has allowed politicians to create a separate world where instead of serving their constituents, they serve each other. With their prime allegiance to Brussels, they are both unwilling and unable to speak up for those whom they are supposed to represent...

When the author started working in recruitment over thirty years ago, things were very different. The key measures were the number of interviews arranged with clients and the number of temporary workers placed. That was the only information a manager was interested in. Technology makes life easier...

Long-term unemployed alcoholic Fred Mode makes hapless attempts to improve his life, all of which are doomed to inevitable failure. But change he must and he does give up the drink, only to find that the more stubborn aspects of addiction remain. With his attempts to reform he finds he has to make...

The troop of meerkats in the zoo live a happy life until one day the eagle owl next door tells them the van has come to take some away. Who is going to go and where? Would they be split up? There was only one thing to do – make a break for freedom and see what happens. Which is exactly what Molly’s...

Michael was a happy little mouse living with his parents and his sister, Molly, in the peace of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Then they heard that they weren’t wanted in the Cathedral anymore and had to leave – quickly! Maximus, the wise mouse moved them all to join the little mouse community...

In this book by John Hendry the author explains in a straightforward way how reason works together with our other faculties. He explores what it can do for us in different fields of enquiry, how and where it runs out on us, what the practical and political implications are, and how we might reasonably respond.

Possessed by Music is the fascinating story of the Russian composer Alexander Konstantinovich Glazunov (1865-1936). He was born into a wealthy publishing family, with very musical parents: his mother was a fine pianist and his father played the violin. The young Glazunov demonstrated a number of talents,...

Bloody Berwick is well named as the history of Berwick-upon-Tweed is bloody indeed. Covering the period from the untimely death of Alexander III of Scotland in 1286 up to the symbolic construction of The Old Bridge over the Tweed in 1624 following the Union of the Crowns, Keith Ryan takes the reader...

Surgeon: ‘You’ve got cancer, but we can keep you going for a few months, or maybe a few years.’ Me: ‘Okay, which is it: months or years?’ Surgeon: Silence. Me: ‘Will it kill me?’ Surgeon: ‘Yes, it probably will.’ That was when my head went into overdrive and I lost the plot. Hearing...

John Hunt was born in 1948 into a family of teachers. In one incarnation or another his life has been spent in and around schools. Schooled for Life is a personal history of education in England from 1945 to the present. It grew from a long-standing interest in the ways in which political, social...