Television past, as LP Hartley might have once said, is another country. And, in the early 1980s it certainly was a different beast. There were still only three channels to watch; the evening's programmes finished with the playing of the national anthem; and the biggest prize on TV was not Chris Tarrant's million pounds but a speedboat on Bullseye . . . But as Tom Bromley suggests in this funny and warming memoir, all that was about to change: The 1980s saw the end of the original golden era of television, and the beginnings of TV as we know it today. In 1982, Channel 4 became the first new terrestrial channel for almost twenty years and by the end of the decade, Rupert Murdoch's Sky Television was vying to become Britain's first multi-channel provider. The result of all this was that slowly but surely, British viewers had more choice than ever before and the cost of this choice was the erosion of television as a shared national event. And no-one felt this change more deeply than Tom Bromley. Television played a large part in Tom's childhood. His first word was 'two', as in BBC Two, and his earliest childhood memory is seeing Johnny Ball at a church fete. With great humour and affection, Tom Bromley tells the story of a childhood spent with his three siblings and that other all-important family member; the television set.

A New York Times Editors' Choice pick Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Los Angeles Times, Vogue, Wall Street Journal, Food Network, KCRW, WBUR Here & Now, Emma Straub, and Globe and Mail One of the Millions's Most Anticipated Books of 2021 America’s modern culinary history told through the lives of seven pathbreaking chefs and food writers. Who’s really behind America’s appetite for foods from around the globe? This group biography from an electric new voice in food writing honors seven extraordinary women, all immigrants, who left an indelible mark on the way Americans eat today. Taste Makers stretches from World War II to the present, with absorbing and deeply researched portraits of figures including Mexican-born Elena Zelayeta, a blind chef; Marcella Hazan, the deity of Italian cuisine; and Norma Shirley, a champion of Jamaican dishes. In imaginative, lively prose, Mayukh Sen—a queer, brown child of immigrants—reconstructs the lives of these women in vivid and empathetic detail, daring to ask why some were famous in their own time, but not in ours, and why others shine brightly even today. Weaving together histories of food, immigration, and gender, Taste Makers will challenge the way readers look at what’s on their plate—and the women whose labor, overlooked for so long, makes those meals possible.

This is a biography of Kenny Everett, who died of AIDS in April 1995. As a broadcaster he changed the presentation of music radio forever with his zany, irreverent and anarchic humour. His career spanned and helped to shape the key moments in broadcasting history: pirate radio, the birth of Radio 1 and the start of commercial radio.

When you're a teenager in seventies Stoke living on Smash and Cup-a-Soup, there's only one thing you long to acquire: Taste. At least you do if you're Stephen Beckett, and you're convinced you were born into the wrong class. So when middle age nears and you're running your own trendy Brighton eatery, you're entitled to think you've made it. But you're about to find out just how expensive taste can be. It can cost you: Your wife and children Your friends and family Your sex drive, your business and probably your sanity Caught in the headlights of a terrifying new life and an unhealthy fixation with a lapdancer who hates him, Stephen must face the question: is class really about what's on your plate? And if not, what are its true ingredients? To discover where he belongs - and who with - Stephen Beckett is going to have to swallow a lot of things far less palatable than a plate of borsch. And that's just for starters . . . 'O'Reilly is a clever story teller who keeps you hooked right to the last line' Independent

Interest in and consumption of wine have grown exponentially in recent years and there has been a corresponding increase in consumers' knowledge of wine, which in turn has generated discussions about the meaning and value of wine in our lives and how renowned wine critics influence our subjective assessment of quality and shape public tastes. Wine first played a part in Western philosophy at the symposium of the early Greek philosophers where it enlivened and encouraged discussion. During the Enlightenment David Hume recommended drinking wine with friends as a cure for philosophical melancholy, while Immanuel Kant thought wine softened the harsher sides of men's characters and made their company more convivial. In Questions of Taste, the first book in any language on the subject, philosophers such as Roger Scruton and wine professionals like Andrew Jefford, author of the award-winning book The New France, turn their attention to wine as an object of perception, assessment and appreciation. They and their fellow contributors examine the relationship between a wine's qualities and our knowledge of them; the links between the scientifically describable properties of wine and the conscious experience of the wine taster; what we base our judgements of quality on and whether they are subjective or objective; the distinction between the cognitive and sensory aspects of taste; whether wine appreciation is an aesthetic experience; the role language plays in describing and evaluating wines; the significance of their intoxicating effect on us; the meaning and value of drinking wine with others; whether disagreement leads to relativism about judgements of taste; and whether we can really share the pleasures of drinking. Questions of Taste will be of interest to all those fascinated by the production and consumption of wine and how it affects our minds in ways we might not hitherto have suspected.