This delightful collection of easy-to-make puppets will be a boon to all parents, teachers and entertainers of children. The puppets are based on an ordinary household-size matchbox which enables them to have opening mouths. The pages are designed to photocopy on to A4 card, cut out and colour as fancy takes. With a choice of some sixty different characters there is something for all ages and abilities in these simple but clever constructions. The collection varies widely from a simple flower to the Minotaur, a whale to Henry VIII, octopus to Roman emperor, and a selection of characters which...

The lives of eminent London actors of the Regency period - Kean, Mrs Siddons, Kemble, Cooke, Macready, Grimaldi et al are more than amply recorded. This book ploughs a more unusual, rarer, furrow. It reveals the theatrical lives of a family of provincial players who tramped the highways and byways bringing the latest London hits and classic plays to unsophisticated audiences in tiny country theatres and large manufacturing towns. The author offers not a specialist tome for theatre historians - although they will find previously unknown material and new revelations here - but a beguiling story...