“In early ’77 I asked Grant if he’d form a band with me. ‘No,’ was his blunt reply.” Grant McLennan didn’t want to be in a band. He couldn’t play an instrument; Charlie Chaplin was his hero du jour. However, when Robert Forster began weaving shades Hemingway, Genet, Chandler and Joyce into his lyrics, Grant was swayed and the 80s indie sensation, The Go-Betweens, was born. These friends would collaborate for three decades, until Grant’s tragic, premature death in 2006. Beautifully written – like lyrics, like prose – Grant & I is a rock memoir akin to no other. Part ‘making of’, part music industry exposé, part buddy-book, this is a delicate and perceptive celebration of creative endeavour. With wit and candour Robert Forster pays tribute to a band who found huge success in the margins, who boldly pursued a creative vision, and whose beating heart was the band’s friendship.

When Robert Forster and Grant McLennan formed the Go-Betweens in Brisbane in 1977, they were determined to be different. They were angular, spare, and poetic when crashing direct­ness was the prevailing style. Their heroes were Dylan, Creedence, and Television, when it was more fashionable to cite the Stooges and the New York Dolls. Their attitude was as punk as any­­one’s, but their lyrical guitar pop stood in sharp contrast to the trends of the day. The Go-Betweens story is a fascinating one. With cornerstone drummer Lindy Morrison – and, later, additional members Robert Vickers and Amanda Brown – the band recorded six albums in the 1980s that are among the finest work of the decade, and earned them a reputation as “the ultimate cult band.” And as one reviewer of the original 1997 edition of this book noted, “Unlike most rock groups, the Go-Betweens had personalities as well as talent”—which makes for a compelling read, even if you’re not yet a fan. David Nichols relates the Go-Betweens story with wit and verve, and for this edition he completely updated the book, adding chapters on the members’ subsequent solo careers in the 1990s, the subsequent reuniting of Forster and McLennan under the Go-Betweens name, and the band’s flourishing second life in the new millennium, tragically cut short by the sudden death of Grant McLennan in 2005.

This is the untold story of how some of Germany's top aristocrats contributed to Hitler's secret diplomacy during the Third Reich, providing a direct line to their influential contacts and relations across Europe — especially in Britain, where their contacts included the press baron and Daily Mail owner Lord Rothermere and the future King Edward VIII. Using previously unexplored sources from Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and the USA, Karina Urbach unravels the story of top-level go-betweens such as the Duke of Coburg, grandson of Queen Victoria, and the seductive Stephanie von Hohenlohe, who rose from a life of poverty in Vienna to become a princess and an intimate of Adolf Hitler. As Urbach shows, Coburg and other senior aristocrats were tasked with some of Germany's most secret foreign policy missions from the First World War onwards, culminating in their role as Hitler's trusted go-betweens, as he readied Germany for conflict during the 1930s — and later, in the Second World War. Tracing what became of these high-level go-betweens in the years after the Nazi collapse in 1945 — from prominent media careers to sunny retirements in Marbella — the book concludes with an assessment of their overall significance in the foreign policy of the Third Reich.

'Entertaining, affectionate and righteous' Guardian 'Says so much about being a woman' Cosey Fanni Tutti In 1983, backstage at the Lyceum in London, Tracey Thorn and Lindy Morrison first met. Tracey’s music career was just beginning, while Lindy, drummer for The Go-Betweens, was ten years her senior. They became confidantes, comrades and best friends, a relationship cemented by gossip and feminism, books and gigs and rock ’n’ roll love affairs. Thorn takes stock of thirty-seven years of friendship, teasing out the details of connection and affection between two women who seem to be either complete opposites or mirror images of each other. She asks what people see, who does the looking, and ultimately who writes women out of – and back into – history.

From the author of lnsectopedia, a powerful exploration of loss, grief, endurance, and the absences that permeate the present. Unconformities are gaps in the geological record, physical evidence of breaks in time. For Hugh Raffles, these holes in history are also fissures in feeling, knowledge, memory, and understanding. In this endlessly inventive, riveting book, Raffles enters these gaps, drawing together threads of geology, history, literature, philosophy, and ethnography to trace the intimate connections between personal loss and world historical events, and to reveal the force of absence at the core of contemporary life. Through deeply researched explorations of Neolithic stone circles, Icelandic lava, mica from a Nazi concentration camp, petrified whale blubber in Svalbard, the marble prized by Manhattan's Lenape, and a huge Greenlandic meteorite that arrived in New York City along with six Inuit adventurers in 1897, Raffles shows how unconformities unceasingly incite human imagination and investigation yet refuse to conform, heal, or disappear. A journey across eons and continents, The Book of Unconformities is also a journey through stone: this most solid, ancient, and enigmatic of materials, it turns out, is as lively, capricious, willful, and indifferent as time itself.

Doña Marina (La Malinche) ...Pocahontas ...Sacagawea—their names live on in historical memory because these women bridged the indigenous American and European worlds, opening the way for the cultural encounters, collisions, and fusions that shaped the social and even physical landscape of the modern Americas. But these famous individuals were only a few of the many thousands of people who, intentionally or otherwise, served as "go-betweens" as Europeans explored and colonized the New World. In this innovative history, Alida Metcalf thoroughly investigates the many roles played by go-betweens in the colonization of sixteenth-century Brazil. She finds that many individuals created physical links among Europe, Africa, and Brazil—explorers, traders, settlers, and slaves circulated goods, plants, animals, and diseases. Intercultural liaisons produced mixed-race children. At the cultural level, Jesuit priests and African slaves infused native Brazilian traditions with their own religious practices, while translators became influential go-betweens, negotiating the terms of trade, interaction, and exchange. Most powerful of all, as Metcalf shows, were those go-betweens who interpreted or represented new lands and peoples through writings, maps, religion, and the oral tradition. Metcalf's convincing demonstration that colonization is always mediated by third parties has relevance far beyond the Brazilian case, even as it opens a revealing new window on the first century of Brazilian history.