Laurence Olivier is a complex and unexpected portrait of a man tormented by his own ruthless genius and everlasting guilt. It is the story of a High Church clergyman's son who became a West End matinee idol, and only at the age of twenty-eight determined to make himself a great Shakespearean actor, which he did in one season at the Old Vic. The next year he made himself a Hollywood star in "Wuthering Heights" and Rebecca, then produced, directed and acted in his own Shakespeare movies. Work and sex were for him inseparable: acting, he once said, was like coming for a living. Having abandoned his first wife, he entered a turbulent marriage with the manic-depressive Vivien Leigh. She dominated his life for twenty years and they became the royal family of the British stage. Then, to save himself and his work, he 'dropped the legend' and wrenched himself away from her, and was ever afterwards tormented by a sense of sin which only heroic and incessant work could expiate. He married Joan Plowright, a generation younger than himself, had a new young family, and became founding director of the National Theatre. But even the National, in his view, ended in betrayal and tragedy. For twenty years he was stricken by one illness after another. When he could no longer stand on a stage he acted sitting down. In his last years he played so many famous death scenes that when he died at the age of eighty-two, his son half expected him to emerge from the house to be congratulated on yet another. St Paul's and Westminster Abbey, the two principal theatres of the Church of England, outbid each other to stage the positively final appearance of the man universally seen as the most magical actor of his day.

ISBN: 0 7475 7798 6

Admiral Horatio Nelson captures our imaginations like few other military figures. A mixture of tactical originality, raw courage, cruelty, and romantic passion, Nelson in action was daring and direct, a paramount naval genius and a natural-born predator. Now, in Nelson: The Man and the Legend, novelist Terry Coleman provides a superb portrait of Britain's most revered naval figure.
Here is a vivid account of Nelson's life, from his childhood and early career at sea - where a high-placed uncle helped speed his advancement to post captain - to gripping accounts of his greatest sea battles. Readers will witness the Battle of the Nile, where Nelson crushed a French squadron of thirteen ships of the line, and the Battle of Trafalgar, where he died at the moment of his greatest triumph. What emerges is a man of strength of mind amounting to genius, frequently generous, always fascinated with women, often uneasy with his superior officers, and absolutely fearless. Coleman also lays bare Nelson's faults: he was a ruthless commander, whose instinct was not just to defeat the enemy but to annihilate him. Indeed, some of Nelson's more controversial actions might be viewed as war crimes today. And he was a skillful self-promoter, who did all he could to advance his own fame. But in the end, that fame was well earned and he was deservedly idolized by the British people.

ISBN: 0 7475 5685 7

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In the middle years of the last century more than two million men, women and children abandoned the British Isles. The Irish were "shovelled out" by absentee landlords and famine. The English went west to escape poverty and slums. Sea-sick, homesick, herded like cattle, dying like flies, they poured across the Atlantic from Liverpool to New York. They were swindled, robbed, insulted and terrorized at every stage. Making use of original diaries and letters and contemporary newspapers and prints, the author gives an account of this heroic and historic exodus.

ISBN: 0 7126 6707 5