Ophelia Reid is an incomparable beauty with an incorrigible nature. Having purposefully wrecked her carefully arranged marriage to an utterly suitable marquis, she flees to London, determined to choose her own wealthy husb&. On the journey there, she meets Raphael Locke, the most desired young lord in Engl&.

Raphael is determined to prove to his friends that Ophelia is more than just a vacuous beauty & whisks her off to his country estate. But as the days pass, & Ophelia

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'I was nearly twenty before I understood that there was a name for what sometimes happened to me. Later, I learned that it has gone by many names
- the black dog, the bell jar, the noonday demon, darkness visible, malignant sadness
- but in my teens I'd just assumed that my fierce highs & days of disproportionate, isolating despair were part of every teenager's repertoire
- how else would Morrissey have sold so many records? These pitches in mood were something I didn't speak about to anyone, because I was afraid of two things
- either that it was nothing serious, & I would be told to pull myself together, or that it was serious, & I would be told that, yes, I was a mental case.'

Stephanie Merritt has a career as a novelist & journalist, a beautiful son & a supportive family. Why then did she want to kill herself at the age of 29? Why could no one, neither the system of GPs & health professionals, nor her closest family & friends help her?

Reading like a hybrid of Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation and Rachel Cusk's more sober A Life's Work, Stephanie's unflinchingly honest memoir explores areas of experience commonly associated with depression such as love, solitude & self-medication through the prism of her own experience.

Beautifully written & intensely honest this is an extraordinarily moving, life-affirming book about a debilitating illness that affects one in six people in the UK alone.









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' Whichever option I choose, men are going to die.'

This is the Devil's Alternative, the appalling choice facing

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' Whichever option I choose, men are going to die.'

When the entire Soviet Union wheat crop is destroyed by

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The Nazi regime was essentially a religious cult, relying on the hypnotic personality of one man, Adolf Hitler, & it was fated to die with him. But while it lasted, his closest lieutenants competed ferociously for power & position as his chosen successor. This deadly contest accounted for many of the regime's worst excesses, in which millions of people died, & which brought Western civilization to its knees. The Devil's Disciples is the first major book for a general readership to examine those lieutenants, not only as individuals but also as a group. It focuses on the three Nazi paladins closest to Hitler
- Goring, Goebbels & Himmler
- with their nearest rivals
- Bormann, Speer & Ribbentrop in close attendance. Others who were removed in various ways
- like Gregor Strasser, Ernst R-hm, Heydrich & Hess
- play supporting roles. Perceptive & illuminating, The Devil's Disciples is above all a powerful chronological narrative, showing how the personalities of Hitler's inner circle developed & how their jealousies & constant intrigues affected the regime, the war, & Hitler himself.




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In 1987, Latif Yahia was taken to Saddam's headquarters to meet Uday, Saddam's eldest son, & told that a great honour had been bestowed upon him: that because of the great likeness between them, he had been chosen to be Uday's double. For many Iraqis it would have been the highlight of their lives, but for Latif, a peace-loving man who did not agree with Saddam's brutal regime, it was not. He refused. Following a week of torture, & realising he would be killed if he continued to refuse, Latif was forced to accept the role. After a gruesome training programme during which he was made to watch over thirty films of torture, hours of tapes of Uday, & undertake a final remodelling of his appearance, Latif was deemed ready. But it was only after the final test, a meeting with Saddam himself, that Latif made his first public appearance. & so began his life as Uday's double
- a life on the perimeter of the inner circle of Saddam's eldest son, a witness to the horror of his insane life of debauchery, excess & brutality, & an experience for which he almost paid with his life on more than one occasion.
...