Are you ready for a stroll down memory alley? Can you recall a time when cops arrested rioters who were setting fire to buildings and vandalizing historical monuments? Remember when shoplifters actually went to jail? Imagine an era when violent lunatics weren’t allowed to wander freely through neighborhoods and menace residents. Don’t you wish you lived in a time when the police were allowed to do their jobs? Retired Southern California homicide detective John J. Lamb remembers those days because he was there. Service With a Sneer is the first volume in his entertaining, sardonic, and unremorseful memoirs. The book takes the bold reader on a journey a half-century into the past. It’s an era before computers, automated license plate readers, and body cams. It’s a time when Tasers didn’t exist and the only “less lethal” options open to police officers were nightsticks and fists. Yet those old-time cops did a pretty fair job keeping the streets safe. The tale begins in the early 1960s. Lamb was a little boy with the deck stacked against him. He suffered from a crippling bone disease that forced him to wear a full metal leg brace, was so myopic he was legally blind, and was the victim of brutal and regular child abuse. Yet his improbable dream was to become a police officer. He made that goal a reality. First, in 1974 when he joined the USAF Security Police and five years later when he became a deputy sheriff with the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, working in the desert and tourist cities near Palm Springs. Lamb’s stories include: How his work with British police detectives on a major and successful drug trafficking investigation led to his being targeted as a troublemaker by his USAF commanding officer. How following shoe impressions in the desert sands led him to a pair of professional cat burglars who were pillaging homes in an exclusive community of millionaires. His surprising observation while working a traffic security detail for then President-elect Ronald Reagan’s motorcade. Some readers might remember Lamb as the author of a series of “cozy” mystery novels set in the warm world of collectible teddy bears. Don't look for anything cute and cuddly in his newest book. Instead, he freely mixes tragedy with absurdity as he shares tales about vicious fights, high-speed fatal traffic crashes, the terrorist attack that wasn’t, and how he convinced a woman that he had the know-how to evict Satan from her apartment. The stories are shocking, infuriating, ironic, heart-rending, and sometimes gruesomely funny. Best of all, they’re all true.

A retired and sardonic Southern California homicide detective shares his remarkable cop experiences from the 1970s and 1980s. The stories are exciting, heart-rending, disturbing, and at times grotesquely funny. Above all, they are true.

Born too gifted, losing his home life too young, the flavor gone from living. Gradually drowning in himself and his thoughts, a silent madness and deconstruction of life and the thoughts of his own mind inevitably continues, progressing to its natural conclusion. His only company one whose obsession with him threatens to devolve her life into the same train of thought nothingness. An existential love story drags painfully towards the inevitable as life and language break into increasingly meaningless nameless pieces.

Chris Patten was a cradle Catholic (hence First Confession), became on the most prominent Tory 'Wets' of the 1980s and 1990s, and went on to hold a series of prominent public offices - Chairman of the Conservative Party, the last Governor of Hong Kong, European Commissioner for External Affairs, Chancellor of Oxford University, Chairman of the BBC, advisor to the Pope - as he self-deprecatingly puts it 'a Grand Poo-bah, the Lord High Everything Else'. He writes with wry humour about his time in all these offices, taking us behind the scenes and showing us unexpected sides of many of the great figures of the day. No political writer is so purely enjoyable as Chris Patten.

A riveting, real-life equivalent of The Kite Runner—an astonishingly powerful and profoundly moving story of a young couple willing to risk everything for love that puts a human face on the ongoing debate about women’s rights in the Muslim world. Zakia and Ali were from different tribes, but they grew up on neighboring farms in the hinterlands of Afghanistan. By the time they were young teenagers, Zakia, strikingly beautiful and fiercely opinionated, and Ali, shy and tender, had fallen in love. Defying their families, sectarian differences, cultural conventions, and Afghan civil and Islamic law, they ran away together only to live under constant threat from Zakia’s large and vengeful family, who have vowed to kill her to restore the family’s honor. They are still in hiding. Despite a decade of American good intentions, women in Afghanistan are still subjected to some of the worst human rights violations in the world. Rod Nordland, then the Kabul bureau chief of the New York Times, had watched these abuses unfold for years when he came upon Zakia and Ali, and has not only chronicled their plight, but has also shepherded them from danger. The Lovers will do for women’s rights generally what Malala’s story did for women’s education. It is an astonishing story about self-determination and the meaning of love that illustrates, as no policy book could, the limits of Western influence on fundamentalist Islamic culture and, at the same time, the need for change.

'An excellent and intelligent investigation of the realities of urban living that respond to no design or directive... This is a book about the nature of London itself' Peter Ackroyd, The Times A powerful exploration of the seedy side of Victorian London by one of our most promising young historians. In 1887 government inspectors were sent to investigate the Old Nichol, a notorious slum on the boundary of Bethnal Green parish, where almost 6,000 inhabitants were crammed into thirty or so streets of rotting dwellings and where the mortality rate ran at nearly twice that of the rest of Bethnal Green. Among much else they discovered that the decaying 100-year-old houses were some of the most lucrative properties in the capital for their absent slumlords, who included peers of the realm, local politicians and churchmen. The Blackest Streets is set in a turbulent period of London's history when revolution was in the air. Award-winning historian Sarah Wise skilfully evokes the texture of life at that time, not just for the tenants but for those campaigning for change and others seeking to protect their financial interests. She recovers Old Nichol from the ruins of history and lays bare the social and political conditions that created and sustained this black hole which lay at the very heart of the Empire. A revelatory and prescient read about cities, class and inequality, the message at the heart of The Blackest Streets still resonates today.