“Invest in a good bra. Spend money on underwear and if you've got a tummy, suck-in knickers. What you wear on the inside counts more than you think.” Susannah Constantine

“If you want to be stylish, it's about knowing what to avoid. If you know what to avoid then you will inevitably look stylish because you will wear things that people say 'God you look wonderful', they won't say, 'oh, that's a really odd pair of trousers.” Trinny Woodall

“Giving genuinely useful, no-nonsense advice, it's a brilliant starting point for anyone confused about how to best flatter their figure.” HEAT

“I was really enjoying this book, empathising with Chris’s plight as an aspiring wrestler, laughing out loud at many of the dead-on depictions of some of the more colourful characters in our business. Suddenly, all that enjoyment stopped as a wave of momentary panic crashed right into my literary ego. ‘Oh no,’ I thought. ‘What if this book is better than mine?’” Mick Foley, number one New York Times bestselling author and three-times world champion

“This book is a funny, fast-paced romp that is as honest as any book written by anybody else in the know.” Bret ‘Hitman’ Hart, five-times WWE Champion

“I went to law school in the U.S. in 1981 to work for prisoners on Death Row, because they seemed to be the most hated on earth, despised to the point that people wished them to die an often torturous death. I spent two decades helping to represent more than 300 prisoners in capital cases. The tragedy of September 11th then turned the focus on Muslims, and the Bush Administration’s first step in a war for democracy and the rule of law seemed hypocritical to the point of folly: to set up an island prison in Cuba, and refuse to allow the prisoners any rights.

I therefore immediately called around my friends in the death penalty community to sue to stop this ill-conceived policy. The team that began the litigation was a tiny group of volunteers. Because the U.S. military tried to keep the names of the prisoners’ secret, they first had to identify a plaintiff, and that was a British prisoner, Shafiq Rasul. Two years later, Shafiq would prevail in the Supreme Court in the case that first established the prisoners’ rights.

In the meantime, working with the charity I established in 1999, Reprieve, I have added the Guantanamo work to the many capital cases I still have on-going, visiting prisoners in Cuba more than 15 times. There are still as many as 14,000 ‘ghost’ prisoners held by the U.S. without rights around the world. Bad Men is their story, and a personal account of the dire consequences of President Bush’s secret prison programme.”

Clive Stafford Smith, September 2006

The mirror is a cruel mistress. Is it any wonder that most women start thinking about cosmetic surgery when they get depressed by what they see in the mirror? A terrible moment happens when all of a sudden you find yourself feverishly plucking out your first gray hair or having to drag up your eyelids to put on your mascara. It seems like everything started to sag practically overnight. Imagine a grape shriveling up and becoming a raisin. It starts off juicy, round, and smooth, and gradually becomes dull, rough and wrinkly. That’s essentially the grim reality of what happens as you age. One day you look in the mirror and think to yourself, “How did that happen?”

World renowned beauty guru and cosmetic surgery expert, Wendy Lewis, answers everything readers need to know about cosmetic enhancements. Plastic Makes Perfect is Lewis’ tenth beauty scripture. In it, she has intertwined surgical procedures with what she calls “cosmetic surgery lite” – the most popular less invasive alternatives, and gives readers the lowdown on everything on offer today. Plastic Makes Perfect is the “must have” beauty bible every woman needs to get it right.

“Together with my team of colleagues and assistants, I have spent the last fourteen years following the lives of meerkats in a remote part of the southern Kalahari. Having studied colobus monkeys and red dear I was ready for a change and beginning to think about what I would do next. I decided that my next study would be of a co-operative mammal and the co-operative mongooses, specifically Kalahari meerkats seems the best bet.

Meerkat Manor is the story of a meerkat. More specifically, it is the story of Flower, the dominant female of a group we call Whiskers. It is a true story in the sense that Flower isn’t a fictitious character drawn from all the other female meerkats we have known over the years. It’s the real story of a real animal. She was born on 15 March 2000, the smallest of a litter of four pups, and is now nearly seven years old. She has reared twelve litters of pups since she was born and has at least twenty surviving offspring. She goes foraging each day, looks after her pups and defends her position against her older daughters and her range against her neighbours.

It is the story of Flower’s birth to Holly, the dominant female of Whiskers group. And of Holly’s role in the group until her death, when she was replaced in turn by her two nieces, who fought each other for over a year and were unable to breed successfully, so Whiskers was at risk of being driven from its range by powerful neighbours. Of how Flower was banished from the group by one of them and was only saved from near-certain death by her cousin’s sudden end. Finally, it is the story of how Flower returned and acquired the dominant position, tried to breed and failed, until, in the nick of time, she suppressed her competitors and reared three successive litters of pups, saving herself and her group from losing their range to rivals, so that Whiskers were able to take over their range, making Flower queen of her group – and of all she surveys.

It is also the story of how we have come to understand the complex society of meerkats and the evolution of their unusual level of co-operation.”
Tim Clutton-Brock

“Is it still possible to make a great British journey? Well, I certainly feel as if I have just completed one. In the course of following eight extraordinary travellers across the length and breadth of Britain, this island has become a much bigger, more exciting place. Repeatedly, I’ve been led beyond the edges of my own mental map. My octuplet of explorers have led me into unfamiliar territory, and taken me back to parts of the country that I mistakenly thought I knew.”
Nicholas Crane, London, July, 2007

“A seed was planted in my mind a very long time ago when told by an employer, ‘Jo you have so much insight you could write your own book.’

That idea became a vision: that I would be able to empower parents to become confident with their babies from the get-go. After 17 years of nannying, a hit TV show Supernanny, two New York times bestseller books on childcare and countless miles traveling around the world helping families, I knew it was time for me to bring my baby book vision into your homes. This book is very special to me as it has allowed me to bring home to you my instincts, intuition, and knowledge.

Easing countless parents into the joy of nurturing their babies, this book will be a staple in your infant’s formative first year. Trusted by millions of families world wide, I now entrust this baby book to you!”

“Prince Rupert of the Rhine: it’s a reputation as much as a name. For most, he is a figure from the English Civil War, who comes with a simple tag: that of dashing cavalier, whose men were brave but wild, winning parts of battles before allowing their indiscipline to lose the day.

“There’s truth to this pocket portrait: at the first and last of the great engagements of the Civil War – Edgehill and Naseby - Prince Rupert’s bold horsemen splintered their Parliamentary opponents’ ranks, before spinning from the battlefield in a whirlwind of adrenaline. They left their colleagues as easy prey for the enemy.

“If this were all that there were to the Prince, I would not have written about him. There are many hundreds of historians who could write with more expertise about the Civil War – its causes, its course, its consequences. My interest in the turbulence of the seventeenth century lies in the way that Prince Rupert was buffeted by it: not just by the harsh 1640s, but throughout a life that began in 1619 and ended in 1682, and seems to have caught every passing gale of the intervening years.”
Charles Spencer

“Piecing together Sarah’s story was a real challenge, not only because it spanned an entire decade, but also because it involved getting inside the mind of an arch manipulator – Robert Freegard. Freegard’s crime of fraud and deception is one of the most complex in British legal history. It involved numerous victims, and an entire web of deceit, and to unravel it meant analysing the psychological methods he used and the effect these had on his victims. To capture a first person story, but also an accurate portrayal of the crime I had to write in three dimensions – the story as Sarah knew it from her perspective, and the counter story of what her parents believed was happening; events that were taking place that Sarah knew nothing about as Freegard expanded and interwove his victims’ lives into a complex web of lies; and an analysis of what Freegard was up to, his motivation, and how he used mind games to prey on his victims’ fears to amass himself a small fortune. I can only compare this process to trying to solve a Rubik’s cube. In order to comprehend the big picture of Freegard’s crime I needed a timeline. This involved not only talking to victims and their families, the police, and the Crown Prosecution Service, but also ploughing through thousands of pages of evidence pertaining to the case.

“What emerged out of this period of intense research was truly staggering. I had not appreciated the sheer audacity, scale and labyrinthine ways in which Freegard operated, and understanding this it is easy to see why his victims believed what he said, and how Freegard remained undetected for so long. Contextualised within this bigger picture, Sarah’s story runs as a spine throughout the book. Through her eyes we see events as she genuinely believed them, the doubts and uncertainties she felt, and the way in which Freegard always successfully squashed them by plausible argument or holding another threat over her. The end result is a story that reads like a thriller. It is sobering indeed to think all the events are true.

“It was always important to me as an investigative filmmaker and author to show how such a devastating crime can happen so easily and to anyone. In April this year, the court of Appeal quashed Freegard’s convictions for kidnapping by fraud, and the life sentences were swept aside. As a result he is set to be freed in a few months’ time. In my view current English law fails adequately to recognise these complex psychological crimes. I hope the book can open debate on this subject, and eventually lead to a recognition for the need to pass new laws.”

Kate Snell May 2007

Glenn Harrold (MBSCH Dip C.H) is a very experienced clinical hypnotherapist, who has helped thousands of clients with a wide range of stress-related problems. He has combined his hypnotherapy skills with an extensive recording knowledge to produce an effective series of high-quality hypnosis recordings.

Glenn’s unique hypnosis recordings deliver multiple hypnotic suggestions simultaneously to the unconscious mind and combine inventive therapeutic production techniques to facilitate positive changes quickly and easily.

His CDs have sold over 500,000 via Diviniti publishing and BBC audiobooks, and are officially the UK's best selling self-help CDs.

In 2002, Sue Palmer became convinced that social and cultural changes underpinned by technological progess were affecting many children's potential to learn, especially to learn the skills of literacy. This led, in 2003, to a collaboration with early years specialist Ros Bayley.

Her research then expanded to cover other aspects of child development, culminating in 2006 in the publication of Toxic Childhood: How The Modern World Is Damaging Our Children And What We Can Do About It . She has presented her findings at several major events in the UK and around the world. Her essential message is that, while the tumultuous changes of the last half-century have been great for adults (born in the late 40s, Sue counts herself one of a blessed generation), their side effects have become progressively damaging for children. It's now a matter of urgency that we recognise these side effects and take action to 'detoxify childhood'.

From: www.suepalmer.co.uk where you can also read the letter on these issues published in the Daily Telegraph and written by Sue Palmer and child mental health specialist Richard House, and also signed by more than a hundred influential academics, writers and others.

“My philosophy of life is do something different or atrophy.”
Professor Ben (C) Fletcher

“Treble twenty is, I feel, the right age for an account of one’s life to be written. My life has been split – 30 years as Robert George and 30 years as Bobby George. Now that my story is down on paper, in black and white, it is history and there forever.”

Peter Sallis at the premiere of Wallace and Gromit’s The Wrong Trousers:

“I was chatting away before the curtain went up, when a guy turned round and looked at me and said, ‘Peter Sallis?’
‘Yes, hello, hello.’
He said, ‘If I hear that voice of yours once more, I’ll break your bloody neck!’

It turned out to be one of the animators; in fact, he was the principal animator for Wallace. What had happened was that this man had spent hours, for days on end, in a studio putting me through my motions as they followed me with a camera. They had taken goodness knows how many shots just to cover twenty seconds of film, and I think we have all got the message now, even me, that this was where the real work was, in doing the actual animation. So for this chap to hear me saying ‘What, no cheese, Gromit?’ or whatever it might be, over and over again, while he adjusted my face and arms and legs, well, I could see his point. Fortunately for me he didn’t break my blood neck and I suppose, to some extent, fortunately for him.”

From: Fading into the Limelight, Peter Sallis’ autobiography

“Michael Palin is not just one of Britain’s foremost comedy character actors, he also talks a lot. Yap, yap, yap he goes, all day long and through the night … then, some nights, when everyone else has gone to bed, he goes home and writes up a diary.”    John Cleese

“At the age of six, I told my teacher I wanted to be Lord High Protector of England, an ambition I haven't entirely lost.”