Profile: 418 books

For as long as people have been migrating to London, so has their music. An essential link to home, music also has the power to shape communities in surprising ways. Black music has been part of London's landscape since the First World War, when the Southern Syncopated Orchestra brought jazz...

In 1982, aged twenty-three, Simon Parkes paid £1 for a virtually derelict building in Brixton. Over the next fifteen years he turned it into Britain's most iconic music venue. And now he's telling his story: full of fond - and wild - reminiscences of the famous musicians who played at the venue,...

David Toop's extraordinary work of sonic history travels from the rainforests of Amazonas to the megalopolis of Tokyo via the work of artists as diverse as Brian Eno, Sun Ra, Erik Satie, Kate Bush, Kraftwerk and Brian Wilson. Beginning in 1889 at the Paris exposition when Debussy first heard...

Born in 1953 to Anglo-Jewish/Nigerian parents, Pauline Black was subsequently adopted by a white, working class family in Romford. Never quite at home there, she escaped her small town background and discovered a different way of life - making music. Lead singer for platinum-selling band The...

From its first publication in 1997, Altered State established itself as the definitive text on Ecstasy and dance culture. This new edition sees Matthew Collin cast a fresh eye on the heady events of the acid house 'Summer of Love' and the rave scene's euphoric escalation into commercial excess as...

It is 3 a.m. in The City, and in a dark corner of The Bar, two lovers collide in the beginnings of a passionate and violent affair. Boy: nineteen, beautiful, ready for anyone to take him home, and 'O': the Older Man, cynical, unpredictable, and at the mercy of his personal demons. Their romance...

Beginning with the Weathermen explosion in Greenwich Village and ending with punk, the seventies was the age of extremes; sex, drugs and, of course, rock 'n' roll. With an extraordinary cast of characters, and even more extraordinary anecdotes, In The Seventies tells, firsthand, the story -...

Goofy was a ragamuffin and an enchanting rogue: the unwanted dog on the Greek island of Paxos who simply adopted Belinda Harley and laid his heart at her feet. Before she knew it, she was moving heaven and earth to save him from his fate and was introducing him to high life in London. Against all odds, Goofy conquered his new world.Then, Belinda faced the toughest decision of all...

Today it is almost forgotten that the D-Day landings of 6 June 1944 did not bring a single, isolate victory. As this masterly book reminds us, that first foothold on enemy shores was won at enormous cost, and for two months afterwards a fierce battle raged for the control of Caen. Using the personal...

A secretive child by nature, Susanna makes a covert list of everything she knows about her absent father, determined that one day she will find him. Unable and unwilling to adapt to life in her mother's unsympathetic household, she distances herself as much as possible.When she finally discovers her...

At Marathon an army of Greek city states, including Sparta and Athens, met the Persian army of Darius. This was the key battle of Western civilisation for Athens were defending not only their independence but their radical new political form, democracy. Alan Lloyd details the course of Athenian democracy,...

Controversy still rages about the Allied decision to bomb the beautiful and historic city of Dresden on February 13th 1945. By then the war was virtually won and Dresden was peopled mainly by civilians and refugees, most of them women and children. The firestorm created by the bombing of the city...

A plain-clothes copper in Paris, Kleber is 40 years old, drinks hard and smokes fifty a day. He is devoted to his young wife, Elenya, a former prostitute whom he rescued from her pimp, but he is embittered by 22 years on the streets, and his sleep is haunted by dreams of death. Kleber has many enemies,...

Of all the airplanes that defended Britain during World War Two, none inspired as much affection as the Spitfire, the plane that became a symbol of courage and determination during the Battle of Britain. Today, over sixty years later, it is still one of the world's most loved planes. This splendidly...