The Way We Wore is a passionate and personal account of the dazzling array of street styles and trouser tribes Britain produced from the 1950s to 1990s. Robert Elms' memoir takes us from Teddy Boys to Acid house, from Notting Hill to Soho. A love letter to London Town and the overdressed, undervalued youth who made this city such a hotbed of cool. This is the story of a life's obsession. From Ben Sherman shirts to boxtop loafers, from bondage trousers to Comme de Garcons, Elms has been there, seen it, and worn it out. It's about why you'd rather not go out at all than go out in the wrong sort of brogues, and why you just had to have a Budgie Jacket to cut it in the playground in 1970. It is ultimately a hilarious, passionate social history of London street fashion from the Teddy Boys and rude boys battling it out in his homeland of Notting Hill in the 50's to its end in Acid House in the 90's. A fond memoir of working class lads in tumultuous times and lary schmutter. One day in 1965 the five-year-old Robert Elms fell in love with clothes. His brother had just returned to the family's Burnt Oak council house in a new suit he'd picked up from a tailor in Kilburn. Otis Redding was playing in the front room. This, as his mum would say, was "all the go" - whatever that meant. This, Elms realised, was what you grew up for.

'London is a giant kaleidoscope, which is forever turning. Take your eye off it for more than a moment and you're lost.' Robert Elms has seen his beloved city change beyond all imagining. London in his lifetime has morphed from a piratical, bomb-scarred playground, to a swish cosmopolitan metropolis. Motorways driven through lost communities, accents changing, skyscrapers appearing. Yet still it remains to him the greatest place on earth. Elms takes us back through time and place to myriad Londons. He is our guide through a place that has seen scientific experiments conducted in subterranean lairs and a small community declare itself an independent nation; a place his great-great-grandfather made the Elms' home over a century ago and a city that has borne witness to world-changing events.

'ABC', as perfect as anything I've ever witnessed up until that point in my tiny little life. Three minutes of divine delirium. In 1972, when Robert Elms was thirteen years old, he saw the Jackson 5 play live at the Empire Pool. At some point during the performance, he found himself in a state of otherworldly perfect synchronicity with everything happening around him. This single event would set him off on an endless pursuit for that same height of pleasure. Since then, Robert has lived his life through live music, from pub rock to jazz funk, punk to country, and everything in between. Each gig is memorable in its own way, and his snapshots of musicians past and present are both evocative and startlingly concise: Tom Waits showboating with an umbrella, Grace Jones vogueing with a mannequin, Amy shimmying shamelessly like a little girl at a wedding, Gil Scott-Heron rapping with a conga drum. While in our changed times, Robert notes that we have found new ways of listening – of being part of something special by uniting fans with their favourite performers online – there is not, nor can there ever be, anything quite like the live experience. Live!: Why We Go Out is a memoir and a musing on why experiencing live music really matters.

Using an innovative auto-ethnographic approach to investigate the otherness of the places that make up the childhood home and its neighbourhood in relation to memory-derived and memory-imbued cultural geographies, Remembering the Cultural Geographies of a Childhood Home is concerned with childhood spaces and children's perspectives of those spaces and, consequentially, with the personalised locations that make up the childhood family home and its immediate surroundings (such as the garden, the street, etc.). Whilst this book is primarily structured by the author's memories of living in his own Welsh childhood home during the 1970s - that is, the auto-ethnographic framework - it is as much about living anywhere amid the remembered cultural remnants of the past as it is immersing oneself in cultural geographies of the here-and-now. As a result, Remembering the Cultural Geographies of a Childhood Home is part of the ongoing pursuit by cultural geographers to provide a personal exploration of the pluralities of shared landscapes, whereby such an engagement with space and place aid our construction of cognitive maps of meaning that, in turn, manifest themselves as both individual and collective cultural experiences. Furthermore, touching upon our co-habiting of ghost topologies, Remembering the Cultural Geographies of a Childhood Home also encourages a critical exploration of children’s spirituality amid the haunted cultural and geographical spaces and places of a house and its neighbourhood: the cellar, hallway, parlour, stairs, bedroom, attic, shops, cemeteries, and so on.

The 1980s was the revolutionary decade of the twentieth century. To look back in 1990 at the Britain of ten years earlier was to look into another country. The changes were not superficial, like the revolution in fashion and music that enlivened the 1960s; nor were they quite as unsettling and joyless as the troubles of the 1970s. And yet they were irreversible. By the end of the decade, society as a whole was wealthier, money was easier to borrow, there was less social upheaval, less uncertainty about the future. Perhaps the greatest transformation of the decade was that by 1990, the British lived in a new ideological universe where the defining conflict of the twentieth century, between capitalism and socialism, was over. Thatcherism took the politics out of politics and created vast differences between rich and poor, but no expectation that the existence of such gross inequalities was a problem that society or government could solve - because as Mrs Thatcher said, 'There is no such thing as society ... people must look to themselves first.' From the Falklands war and the miners' strike to Bobby Sands and the Guildford Four, from Diana and the New Romantics to Live Aid and the 'big bang', from the Rubik's cube to the ZX Spectrum, McSmith's brilliant narrative account uncovers the truth behind the decade that changed Britain forever.

From choosing the right pair of eyeglasses to properly coordinating a shirt, tie, and pocket square, getting dressed is an art to be mastered. Yet, how many of us just throw on, well, whatever each morning? How many understand the subtleties of selecting the right pair of socks or the most compatible patterns of our various garments-much less the history, imperatives, and importance of our choices? In True Style, acclaimed fashion expert G. Bruce Boyer provides a crisp, indispensable primer for this daily ritual, cataloguing the essential elements of the male wardrobe and showing how best to employ them. In witty, stylish prose, Boyer breezes through classic items and traditions in menswear, detailing the evolution and best uses of fabrics like denim and linen, accoutrements like neckties and eyeglasses, and principles for combining patterns, colors, and textures. He enlightens readers about acceptable circumstances for donning a turtleneck, declaims the evils of wearing dress shoes without socks, and trumpets the virtues of sprezzatura, the artistry of concealing effort beneath a cloak of nonchalance. With a gentle yet firm approach to the rules of dressing and an incredible working knowledge of the different items, styles, and principles of menswear, Boyer provides essential wardrobe guidance for the discriminating gentleman, explaining what true style looks like-and why.