West End Girls
West End Girls

Author: Barbara Tate

Publisher: Seven Dials

Published: 2010-07-22

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1409116077

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A vivid and compelling memoir recounting the real lives, loves and friendship of 1940s Soho and its working girls. Barbara Tate was 17 when she heard the whispered word that would change her life: Soho. It would take four years for Barbara to escape her loveless home but when she finally made it to the forbidden streets of Soho - just as London was recovering from the trauma of the second world war - things would never be the same again. There the naive Barbara meets the beautiful and capricious Mae. When she takes a job as Mae's maid, Barbara imagines she'll be housekeeping. But down a shabby backstreet, Barbara discovers the secret lives of Soho's working girls. An astonishing world full of fierce friendships and bitter rivalries, dangerous men and desperate measures, Barbara soon learns that taking the money from a staggering supply of punters and making copious amounts of tea are only the bare essentials. She will need to be nursemaid, protector and confidante to impossible, adorable, self-destructive Mae.

Soho at Work
Soho at Work

Author: Melissa Tyler

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1107182735

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An ethnographic study of working in sex shops in London's distinctive Soho area, demonstrating the importance of place in shaping the identities and experiences of workers and customers.

The Bishop's Wife
The Bishop's Wife

Author: Mette Ivie Harrison

Publisher: Soho Press

Published: 2014-12-30

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 1616954787

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In the predominantly mormon city of Draper, Utah, some seemingly perfect families have deadly secrets. Linda Wallheim is a devout Mormon, mother of five boys and wife of a bishop. But Linda’s daily routine of church-going, Relief Society meetings, and visiting church ward members is turned upside down as a disturbing situation takes shape in her seemingly idyllic neighborhood. Young wife and mother Carrie Helm has disappeared. Carrie’s husband, Jared, claims that she has abandoned the family, but Linda doesn’t trust him. As she snoops, trying to learn more about the Helms’ circumstances, Linda becomes convinced Jared murdered his wife and painted himself as a wronged husband. Inspired by a chilling true crime and written by a practicing Mormon, The Bishop’s Wife is both a fascinating peek into the lives of modern Mormons and a grim and cunningly twisted mystery.

Soho
Soho

Author: Richard Scott

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Published: 2018-04-03

Total Pages: 91

ISBN-13: 0571338925

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'But tonight I am super-charged, alive, looking into the eyes of / men . . .' In this intimate and vital debut, Richard Scott looks into the places not everyone sees or chooses to see. Against the backdrop of London's Soho, he creates an uncompromising portrait of love and shame, questioning our sense of the permissible and the perverse. Scott takes us back to our roots: childhood incidents, the violence our scars betray, forgotten forebears and histories. The hungers of sexual encounters are underscored by the risks that threaten when we give ourselves to or accept another. But the poems celebrate joy and tenderness, too, as in a sequence re-imagining the love poetry of Verlaine. The collection crescendos to the title-poem, 'Soho!', where a night stroll under the street lamps becomes a search for 'true lineage', a reclamation of stolen ancestors, hope for healing, and, above all, the finding of our truest selves.

Tales from the Colony Room
Tales from the Colony Room

Author: Darren Coffield

Publisher: Unbound Publishing

Published: 2020-04-16

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 1783528176

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'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 to frequent the Club. With a glass in hand you’ll move through the decades listening to personal reminiscences, opinions and vitriol, from the authentic voices of those who were actually there. On your voyage through Soho’s lost bohemia, you’ll be served a drink by James Bond, sip champagne with Francis Bacon, queue for the loo with Christine Keeler, go racing with Jeffrey Bernard, get laid with Lucian Freud, kill time with Doctor Who, pick a fight with Frank Norman and pass out with Peter Langan. All with a stellar supporting cast including Peter O’Toole, George Melly, Suggs, Lisa Stansfield, Dylan Thomas, Jay Landesman, Sarah Lucas, Damien Hirst and many, many more.

North Face of Soho
North Face of Soho

Author: Clive James

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Published: 2009-09-30

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 0330474375

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From Fleet Street to the television, North Face of Soho is the fascinating and hilarious fourth volume of memoir from much-loved author, poet and broadcaster Clive James. '[James] delivers his gags with honed elegance' – Sunday Times It is 1968. Newly married, dressed in the style of the times ('a frenzy of bad judgement'), Clive James is leaving the cloistered world of Cambridge academia and setting his sights once again on the lights of literary London. Luckily for him and us, this crack at the big city would go rather better than last time. Still writing songs, directing sketch shows and trying to break into the movie business, with very mixed success, Clive eventually lands a weekly TV column at the Observer, finds his metier and rapidly becomes a household name. Credited with inventing a genre, Clive turns his attention to the previously critically disregarded medium of television to comment on the entire culture. Through the Seventies and early Eighties, from Fleet Street to Hollywood, from Russian department stores to Paris fashion shows, this is the hilarious, entertaining and honest story of a life lived to the full. North Face of Soho is the fourth book of memoir from Clive James. Continue his story with The Blaze of Obscurity.

The forgotten French
The forgotten French

Author: Nicholas Atkin

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2013-07-19

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 1847795668

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This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. It is widely assumed that the French in the British Isles during the Second World War were fully fledged supporters of General de Gaulle, and that, across the channel at least, the French were a ‘nation of resisters’. This study reveals that most exiles were on British soil by chance rather than by design, and that many were not sure whether to stay. Overlooked by historians, who have concentrated on the ‘Free French’ of de Gaulle, these were the ‘Forgotten French’: refugees swept off the beaches of Dunkirk; servicemen held in camps after the Franco-German armistice; Vichy consular officials left to cater for their compatriots; and a sizeable colonist community based mainly in London. Drawing on little-known archival sources, this study examines the hopes and fears of those communities who were bitterly divided among themselves, some being attracted to Pétain as much as to de Gaulle.

House of Psychotic Women
House of Psychotic Women

Author: Kier-La Janisse

Publisher: SCB Distributors

Published: 2015-01-09

Total Pages: 1357

ISBN-13: 1903254825

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Cinema is full of neurotic personalities, but few things are more transfixing than a woman losing her mind onscreen. Horror as a genre provides the most welcoming platform for these histrionics: crippling paranoia, desperate loneliness, masochistic death-wishes, dangerous obsessiveness, apocalyptic hysteria. Unlike her male counterpart - ‘the eccentric’ - the female neurotic lives a shamed existence, making these films those rare places where her destructive emotions get to play. HOUSE OF PSYCHOTIC WOMEN is an examination of these characters through a daringly personal autobiographical lens. Anecdotes and memories interweave with film history, criticism, trivia and confrontational imagery to create a reflective personal history and a celebration of female madness, both onscreen and off. This critically-acclaimed publication is packed with rare images that combine with family photos and artifacts to form a titillating sensory overload, with a filmography that traverses the acclaimed and the obscure in equal measure. Films covered include The Entity, Paranormal Activity, Singapore Sling, 3 Women, Toys Are Not for Children, Repulsion, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, The Haunting of Julia, Secret Ceremony, Cutting Moments, Out of the Blue, Mademoiselle, The Piano Teacher, Possession, Antichrist and hundreds more. Prior to this ebook edition, Kier-La's highly acclaimed book has already been issued twice in hardcover and twice in paperback, garnering extensive press coverage. Endorsement including the following: “God, this woman can write, with a voice and intellect that’s so new. The truth in the most deadly unique way I’ve ever read.” – Ralph Bakshi, director of ‘Fritz the Cat’, ‘Heavy Traffic’, ‘Lord of the Rings’, etc. “Fascinating, engaging and lucidly written: an extraordinary blend of deeply researched academic analysis and revealing memoir.” – Iain Banks, author of ‘The Wasp Factory’

You Just Don't Understand
You Just Don't Understand

Author: Deborah Tannen

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2013-04-23

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0062210092

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From the author of New York Times bestseller You're Wearing That? this bestselling classic work draws upon groundbreaking research by an acclaimed sociolinguist to show that women and men live in different worlds, made of different words. Women and men live in different worlds...made of different words. Spending nearly four years on the New York Times bestseller list, including eight months at number one, You Just Don't Understand is a true cultural and intellectual phenomenon. This is the book that brought gender differences in ways of speaking to the forefront of public awareness. With a rare combination of scientific insight and delightful, humorous writing, Tannen shows why women and men can walk away from the same conversation with completely different impressions of what was said. Studded with lively and entertaining examples of real conversations, this book gives you the tools to understand what went wrong -- and to find a common language in which to strengthen relationships at work and at home. A classic in the field of interpersonal relations, this book will change forever the way you approach conversations.