My mother Maureen Buckley Shaw was born in India during the hey-day of British colonialism. My no-nonsense, "where there's muck there's brass" grandfather obliged her to return to England to be educated: she swapped sunshine, warmth and a leisured home environment for the gloomy ginnels of Hollinwood in the shadows of the dark Satanic (cotton) mills of Oldham. War stopped her going to University. She was instead sent by the Chemical Inspectorate to check explosives and trigger mechanisms at Risley Royal Ordnance Factory....and to meet my father. The two things were not dissimilar. Her mother...

Unimpressed by the Architect's efforts, Dad decided to design and build his own house in 1963. Half wood and 'upside down' - but with a unique sense of design and a pzazz uncommon at that time in rural Essex. But he was an atomic physicist, not a builder Never mind, "Let's see what happens " So we did; the house emerged in its finery from the brambles and the old beer bottle tip. We left suburban Southend and moved to a little village without "proper" drainage. Grandma Lily was horrified This is the story of that house, the man who created it and the family who lived in it until, more than...

Clever Freddie Tanner and beautiful but apparently 'simple' Kathleen Soper are childhood sweethearts in the grimy, deprived streets of the East End, growing up in the shadows of fascism and under the relentless savagery of the Blitz. Kathy's mother dies in childbirth. Freddie's mother dies in a terrible accident in which her violent husband's involvement is unclear. It is an incident which Freddie can never forget, for he is tormented by his inability to say a proper farewell to her. Freddie has high hopes of a glittering, professional career but his, and Kathy's dreams are thwarted by the...

The Philippines, where we live, is an extraordinary, three-dimensional paradox. There are the most stunning landscapes and the most unbelievably squalid towns and settlements. There is shiny affluence of a Western kind, side-by-side with endemic poverty. We can just as easily find light and laughter as we can find abject despair and the absolute darkness of the human soul. One of us takes photographs to interpret what he sees; the other one does the same thing with word-pictures. We wondered whether we could produce a "montage" of our surroundings. Keith says: "Jim's photographs and my...

A group of boys thrown together in the 'A' form of a favoured grammar school in Southend-on-Sea in England in the late 1950's have remained a close-knit group for half a century. This book examines their history and gives accounts of their unusually subversive school behaviour and their more modern meetings or exchanges through social media. It is surprising how rude some of these boys can be.

Coming of Age in the uncertain 50's and the over-heated 60's in a seaside town, pinned under the thumb of a selective boys' grammar school, wherein academic success was guaranteed for those who abjured pop music, coffee bars, Vespa scooters and girls with a certain shape. A nostalgic tour-de-force for anyone who agonised over how to find a girlfriend and then what to do about it when you had. Hysterically funny, romantic, assertive, tormented, thoughtful and ultimately self-critical. Autobiographies often don't come this candid - or quite so unashamedly vulgar. Do not read this if the f-word...

Ellie is sixteen, beautiful, passionate and troubled. Mike is forty four and saddled (he'd say) with a dull marriage and a mortgage. They fall in hopeless, all-consuming love. An age-inappropriate relationship? Infatuation or manipulation? Love or lust? Ellie is still at school. She's clever and perceptive. Dr. Mike is her teacher, almost at the pinnacle of his career. An abuse of power? Technically, yes. But is it clear who is doing the grooming here, and why? Perhaps things are not always as they seem. In any event, after a court trial in which Ellie's sexuality is put under a microscope,...

Eating this phallic vegetable can have unfortunate consequences. Asparagus tastes good - if you like asparagus, of course - but a short while after you've eaten it, your urine stinks. Nevertheless, you come back for more next time. How perverse is that? People smoke cigarettes or drink too much alcohol even though Science has told us we are risking cancer or some other terminal ailment. Most things in life have consequences. They do not necessarily have to be unpleasant; after all, that would make all our lives a stream of unrelenting misery and discomfort. But in many cases, the consequences...