' Until that moment, I hadn't realized how much I'd been needing to meet someone I might be able to say everything to.' They met at a party. It was hate at first sight. Ruth was far too beautiful, too flamboyant. Not at all Ann's kind of person. Until a chance encounter in the bathroom led to an alliance of souls. Soon they were sharing hankies during the late showing of Sophie's World, wolfing down sundaes sodden with whipped cream, telling truths of marriage, mortality & love, secure in a kind of intimacy no man could ever know. After years of shared secrets, guilty pleasures, family life & divorce, they face a crisis that redefines the meaning of friendship & unconditional love. This is the story of Ruth. Of Ann. & of all of us who wonder what we'd say if we knew we didn't have forever. ...

What happened to the great dictators of contemporary history, responsible for some of its most gruesome chapters? & do they still seem as terrifying as when they held power? An unrepentant Idi Amin lives in exile in Saudi Arabia & still meddles in African wars. Before dying, Bokassa proclaims himself the 13th apostle of the Roman Catholic Church & talks of his secret meetings with the Pope. Colonel Menghistu defends his Red Terror campaign. Mrs Hoxha, from her cell in Tirana, argues why the most isolated regime in the world was right to adopt a brutal Stalinist ideology. Paris-based Baby Doc Duvalier speaks about voodoo, solar panels, his women & his lost money. Mrs Milosevic defends the wars in the former Yugoslavia & declares her love for her husb&. Jaruzelski reveals his personal transition from son of an aristocratic family, to autocrat army general in sunglasses. Riccardo Orizio has tracked down these fallen tyrants & thrown a new light on people whose names have become synonymous with misery, death & terror for entire nations. ...

What happened to the great dictators of contemporary history, responsible for some of its most gruesome chapters? &, now that they are disgraced, or in prison, or exiled, or simply forgotten, do they still seem as terrifying as when they held power? Thanks to his conversion to Islam, the unrepentant Idi Amin lives in exile in Saudi Arabia & is still meddling in African wars. Before dying at his dilapidated mansion in Bangui, Bokassa proclaims himself the 13th apostle of the Roman Catholic Church & talks of his secret meetings with the Pope. Colonel Menghistu, still a guest of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, defends his Red Terror campaign. Mrs Hoxha, from her bare prison cell in Tirana, argues why the most isolated regime in the world was right to adopt a brutal Stalinist ideology & explains how it worked. Paris-based Baby Doc Duvalier, in his first interview after fleeing Haiti in 1986, speaks about voodoo, solar panels, the women of his life & how he lost all his money. Mrs Milosevic, clutching her Fendi handbag, defends the wars in the former Yugoslavia & declares her love for her husb&, Slobodan. Jaruzelski, entrenched in a furious legal battle in a Warsaw court, reveals his personal transition from son of an aristocratic family exiled to Siberia by the Soviets, to autocrat army general in sunglasses who defended Moscow's supremacy in eastern Europe. In Talk of the Devil Riccardo Orizio has tracked down these fallen tyrants & thrown a new light on people whose names have become synonymous with misery, death & terror for entire nations. ...

In his new bachelor flat, too close to comfort to his former family home, Mike Newall, Oxford don & Wittgenstein scholar seeks to rebuild his life, but feels increasingly weighed down by the past.

When Donovan O' Dwyer, his colleague & fellow expatriate New Zealander dies, Newall attends the funeral. Afterwards, Newall reveals to his old friend Bertie Winterstoke the secret that O' Dwyer carried with him to his grave. During the battle for Crete in the Second World War, a soldier in New Zealand's Maori battalion died in harrowing circumstances. Believing his commanding officer, O' Dwyer, was responsible for the death, the soldier's family placed a makutu, a Maori curse, on him.

Winterstoke demands to be told all, & in the days that follow Newall obliges. But Newall's life & O' Dwyer's are curiously interconnected & Newall finds that he must interweave O' Dwyer's tale with his own
- his childhood in New Zeal&, his self imposed exile in Oxford, his marriage & divorce, the pilgrimage recently made to Croatia & the promise of a new beginning that this may hold. Gradually, through a series of entwined stories, beautifully told, reflecting on decades of war & of peace, on memory & its failures, & on language & its limitations, Mike Newall comes to see a way of laying the ghosts of O' Dwyer's
- & his own
- past to rest.






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Alan Bennett sealed his reputation as the master of observation with this series of 12 groundbreaking monologues, originally filmed for BBC Television.

At once darkly comic, tragically poignant & wonderfully uplifting, Talking Heads is widely regarded as a modern classic.

This new edition, which contains the complete collection of Talking Heads, as well as his earlier monologue, A Woman of No Importance, is a celebration of Alan Bennett



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