Fabulous Fanny Cradock

While Fanny Cradock cut a controversial figure – berating Margaret Thatcher for wearing 'cheap shoes and clothes', writing off Eamonn Andrews as a 'blundering amateur' and famously being forced to apologise for insulting a housewife cook on The Big Time – her cookery programmes were enormously popular. Dressed in evening gown, drop earrings and pearls, donning thick make-up, she boomed orders to her partner Johnnie, a gentle, monocled stooge who was portrayed as an amiable drunk. The programmes were watched by millions and were hugely influential: the Queen Mother told Fanny that she and Johnnie were 'mainly responsible' for the improvement in catering standards since the war; Keith Floyd declared that 'she changed the whole nation's cooking attitudes'; for Esther Rantzen 'she created the cult of the TV chef'. Lavishly illustrated and illuminated by amusing facts and anecdotes, Fabulous Fanny Cradock paints a fun, entertaining portrait of this extraordinary woman.

Spaghetti in aspic, anyone? Revel in astonishing dishes from yesteryear: Stuffed Cocktail Grapes, Savoury Sausage Salad, a spunky Shrimp-Salmon Mould and so much more. Anna Pallai was brought up on 1970s stalwarts of stuffed peppers, meatloaf and platters of slightly greying hardboiled eggs. When she rediscovered her mother's grease-stained 70s cookbooks, she knew she needed to share them with the world, and so the hit Twitter account @70s_Party was born. Harking back to a simpler pre-Instagram, pre-clean-eating era, when the only concern for your dinner party was whether your aspic would set in time, this is a joyful celebration of food that can give you gout just by looking at it. Covering all the essentials, from starters through to desserts, dinner party etiquette (just how does one start to eat a swan fashioned from a hardboiled egg?) and the dreaded 'foreign' food, there's no potato-fashioned-as-a-stone left unturned.

When the Television Food Network launched in 1993, its programming was conceived as educational: it would teach people how to cook well, with side trips into the economics of food and healthy living. Today, however, the network is primarily known for splashy celebrity chefs and spirited competition shows. These new essays explore how the Food Network came to be known for consistently providing comforting programming that offers an escape from reality, where the storyline is just as important as the food that is being created. It dissects some of the biggest personalities that emerged from the Food Network itself, such as Guy Fieri, and offers a critical examination of a variety of chefs' feminisms and the complicated nature of success. Some writers posit that the Food Network is creating an engaging, important dialogue about modes of instruction and education, and others analyze how the Food Network presents locality and place through the sharing of food culture with the viewing public. This book will bring together these threads as it explores the rise, development, and unique adaptability of the Food Network.

'An evocative, endearing, entertaining and thoroughly delicious character portrait and a terrific first novel' - Donal MacIntyre, TV presenter 'A tender, thought-provoking and totally gripping novel from a wonderful storyteller...deserves to be a huge hit!' - Matt Cain, author of The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle Meet Margaret Small: 75, plain spoken, Whitstable native and a Cilla Black super fan. Shortly after the death of her idol, Margaret begins receiving sums of money in the post, signed simply 'C'. She is convinced it must be Cilla, but how can it be? To solve the mystery of her benefactor Margaret must go back in her memories almost 70 years, to the time when she was 'vanished' to a long-stay institution for children with learning disabilities. An absorbing and page-turning mystery with a dual timeline, The Vanishing of Margaret Small takes readers into a fascinating past, and introduces an unforgettable literary heroine. Perfect for fans of Libby Page and Gail Honeyman. Praise for The Vanishing of Margaret Small: 'A captivating and charming story' - Imogen Clark 'Funny, sad and uplifting all at once' - Frances Quinn 'A beautiful story of human spirit and its power to thrive against the odds' - Anstey Harris 'A fantastic, feel-good story . . . rich in nostalgia and a joy to read' - Matson Taylor 'Beautifully observed and poignant. An outstanding debut.' Alex Brown 'Compelling and authentic . . . Margaret's story is quiet but her voice is mighty' - Julietta Henderson

Explore the East Sussex seaside town of Bexhill-on-Sea in this fully illustrated A-Z guide to its history, people and places.

As in his highly acclaimed Austerity Britain, David Kynaston invokes an astonishing array of vivid, intimate and unselfconscious voices to drive his narrative of 1950s Britain. The keen-eyed Nella Last shops assiduously at Barrow Market as austerity and rationing gradually give way to relative abundance; housewife Judy Haines, relishing the detail of suburban life, brings up her children in Chingford; the self-absorbed civil servant Henry St John perfects the art of grumbling. These and many other voices give a rich, unsentimental picture of everyday life in the 1950s. Well-known figures are encountered on the way, such as Doris Lessing (joining and later leaving the Communist Party), John Arlott (sticking up on Any Questions? for the rights of homosexuals) and Tiger's Roy of the Rovers (making his goal-scoring debut for Melchester). All this is part of a colourful, unfolding tapestry, in which the great national events - the Tories returning to power, the death of George VI, the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth, the Suez Crisis - jostle alongside everything that gave Britain in the 1950s its distinctive flavour: Butlin's holiday camps, Kenwood food mixers, Hancock's Half-Hour, Ekco television sets, Davy Crockett, skiffle and teddy boys. Deeply researched, David Kynaston's Family Britain offers an unrivalled take on a largely cohesive, ordered, still very hierarchical society gratefully starting to move away from the painful hardships of the 1940s towards domestic ease and affluence.

Contemporary Publishing and the Culture of Books is a comprehensive resource that builds bridges between the traditional focus and methodologies of literary studies and the actualities of modern and contemporary literature, including the realities of professional writing, the conventions and practicalities of the publishing world, and its connections between literary publishing and other media. Focusing on the relationship between modern literature and the publishing industry, the volume enables students and academics to extend the text-based framework of modules on contemporary writing into detailed expositions of the culture and industry which bring these texts into existence; it brings economic considerations into line alongside creative issues, and examines how employing marketing strategies are utilized to promote and sell books. Sections cover: The standard university-course specifications of contemporary writing, offering an extensive picture of the social, economic, and cultural contexts of these literary genres The impact and status of non-literary writing, and how this compares with certain literary genres as an index to contemporary culture and a reflection of the state of the publishing industry The practicalities and conventions of the publishing industry Contextual aspects of literary culture and the book industry, visiting the broader spheres of publishing, promotion, bookselling, and literary culture Carefully linked chapters allow readers to tie key elements of the publishing industry to the particular demands and features of contemporary literary genres and writing, offering a detailed guide to the ways in which the three core areas of culture, economics, and pragmatics intersect in the world of publishing. Further to being a valuable resource for those studying English or Creative Writing, the volume is a key text for degrees in which Publishing is a component, and is relevant to those aspects of Media Studies that look at interactions between the media and literature/publishing.