by Brenda Ashford (2014)
Brenda Ashford is the quintessential British nanny. Prim and proper, gentle and kind, she seems to have stepped straight out of Mary Poppins. For more than six decades, Nanny Brenda swaddled, diapered, dressed, played with, sang to, cooked for, and looked after more than one hundred children. From the pampered sons and daughters of lords ensconced in their grand estates, to tough East End evacuees during the war, Brenda taught countless little ones to be happy, healthy, and thoroughly well-bred. Knowing a career caring for children was her only calling in life, Brenda attended London's prestigious Norland Institute, famous for producing top-class nannies. It was a sign of privilege and taste for the children of the well-to-do to be seen being pushed in their Silver Cross prams by a Norland nanny -- recognizable by their crisp, starched black uniforms with white bib collars, and their flowing black capes lined with red silk. Sprinkled throughout with pearls of wisdom (children can never have too much love, and learn how to sew a button, for goodness' sake) this delightful memoir from Britain's oldest living nanny is practically perfect in every way.
Richard Buckle
In 1954, Buckle planned the famous Diaghilev Exhibition in Edinburgh and London. He describes here his search for material and his building-up of a show that was to give a new meaning to the words "exhibition design."
Shirley Williams
Shirley Williams was born to politics. As well as being influenced by her mother, Vera Brittain, her father George Caitlin, a leading political scientist, encouraged his daughter to have high ambitions for herself - including daring to climb the bookshelves in his library. Elected as MP for Hitchin in 1964, she was a member of the Wilson and Callaghan governments and was also the Secretary of State for Education. As one of the 'Gang of Four' Shirley Williams famously broke away from the Labour Party to found the SDP in 1981 and later supported its merger with the Liberal Party to form the Liberal Democrats -- globalbooksinprint.com.
Robert Sackville-West
A fascinating memoir of an extraordinary family told through the vast, four-hundred-year-old house, Knole. Since its purchase in 1604 by Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset, the house at Knole, Kent, has been inhabited by thirten generations of a single aristocratic family, the Sackvilles.
Jane Shilling
'I looked in the mirror one morning, and saw the face of a stranger. Who was she, this haggard, bun-faced woman with the softening jawline, the downturned mouth, the world-weary air of a woman who hasn't had what she wanted from life, and knows she isn't going to get it now? Why, it was no one else but me, myself and I'. Middle age took Jane Shilling by surprise. She hadn't seen it coming, and she certainly wasn't ready for it. Living a flawed, bittersweet version of the idyll she dreamed of in her twenties, in a tumbledown urban cottage by the Thames, with a son, a cat and a horse in a livery fifty miles away, she wondered whether middle age was the beginning of the end. Or was there one last great adventure to be had? "The Stranger in the Mirror" is one woman's attempt to understand what middle age means for her and whether, as a new generation of women turns fifty, a revolution is under way. It definitely won't reverse the signs of ageing - but it will make you laugh, it will make you think and it could just make you look in the mirror in a slightly different way...