Books

George RR Martin is perpetually busy. The 76-year-old has been working on his penultimate A Song of Ice and Fire novel since 2011, as fans continue to wait for updates on The Winds of Winter.The author infamously doesn’t write when travelling. Instead he exclusively works on his DOS computer with a 1987 WordStar 4.0 word processor, which lives at home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.This summer, he took a month off for a trip to Europe, which included visiting the Belfast set of the upcoming Game of Thrones spin-off show, The Hedge Knight.The miniseries is based on the first of his Dunk and Egg short stories, set 90 years before the events of A Song of Ice and Fire.Now in his latest blog post, Martin has addressed his writing schedule, including the long-delayed Winds of Winter.Martin wrote: “I...

Before her untimely death at just 54 in Janaury last year, Elvis Presley’s daughter Lisa Marie Presley was writing a memoir with her eldest daughter Riley Keough.Published today, From Here to the Great Unknown features heart wrenching confessions of her father’s final years, before his sudden death at just 42 in 1977.Lisa Marie, who was nine-years-old when The King died, writes how he was “a God to me. You could always sense my dad’s intensity. If it was a good intensity, it was incredible. If it was bad, watch the f*** out.“Whatever it was going to be, it was going to be a thousand per cent. When he got angry, everybody would run, duck and take cover.”She remembered his throwing objects off the balcony of a penthouse suite in Tahoe “really angry, cursing and screaming” as he was unable...

John Christie is led into West London Magistrates Court to face a charge of murdering his wife Ethel (Image: Popperfoto via Getty Images/Getty Images)Known simply as the 10 Rillington Place murders, they sent shockwaves through post-war Britain. Smartly dressed and bespectacled John Christie appeared an unlikely monster yet he killed at least eight people in the 1940s and 1950s, strangling them inside his West London flat then disposing of the bodies in the walls and under the floorboards.The killings are still fascinating today for those with an interest in historical true crime.But novelist Kate Summerscale, whose gripping new book The Peepshow examines the murders, reveals it was actually the tragic 2021 killing of Sarah Everard that prompted her to visit such a horrifying case from ...

He is the only player to have been knighted while still playing football. And Britain’s first global football superstar, Sir Stanley Matthews, is now being remembered by his daughter, who is writing a book about her famous dad as a political pioneer.Jean Gough Matthews, now 85, wants to highlight her father’s achievements off the pitch as a social campaigner, using the sport he loved to bring people together.Regarded as one of the greatest players of the English game, he was the first winner of both the European Footballer of the Year and the Football Writers’ Association Footballer of the Year awards.He was capped 54 times for his country and, at 42, was the oldest person to play for England. Incredibly, he was still playing top-league football at the age of 50.But the England, Stoke C...

Rick Astley opens up on his traumatic childhood in his new memoir (Image: Andy Prevezer)It's a desperately poignant way to sum up one’s childhood. “I remember being frightened all the time as a kid,” recalls Rick. He traces the trauma to a grave tragedy in the family before he was even born.It was four years earlier when his parents lost their five-year-old son David to meningitis and Rick believes his parents never recovered.“I think losing him was probably just way too traumatic to get over for either of them. I think you just learn to live with that loss. Certainly for my mum, that was a very, very hard thing to do.“My childhood was a bit odd. My dad was extreme at times and my mum was very much not there emotionally for us. I just don’t think she had anything left.”He was aged just ...

I remember bidding in a Midlands auction house for a set of old fishing flies. The price rocketed and they were eventually sold to a friend. Their value was that they had once belonged to Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister of the brolly and the ill-fated Munich Agreement.Premiership comes with many trappings, but huge stress. Few give the impression of enjoying their time at the top, or have much time to wind down, but Chamberlain apparently relaxed by fishing for trout. A true countryman, he could also identify every bird, flower and tree he saw on country walks.Writing a biography of Sir Winston Churchill in this, the 150th year of his birth, I wondered what other hobbies Britain's premiers had, although I greeted with incredulity Boris Johnson's revelation that he relaxed by mak...

A woman was shocked when she visited her local bookstore to find a popular fantasy series, only to unexpectedly meet the author browsing the shelves.Megan Moeai, an artist known for her gothic style and online presence under 'moeai.art', was left gobsmacked during a visit to her local Barnes and Noble in Salt Lake City, Utah. She was on the hunt for 'Mistborn', the first instalment of Brandon Sanderson's seven-part fantasy series, but found the shelf bare.Her irritation turned to astonishment when she realised the man beside the empty space was none other than Sanderson himself. In a viral video with more than 924,000 likes, their delightful exchange unfolded as she exclaimed: "I'm not even kidding. I was literally here looking for your books and I couldn't find them."Sanderson explaine...

Tate is one of the world’s most controversial figures (Image: Taken from Instagram)His abhorrent sexist ideology advocates male supremacy and celebrates violence against females – yet it has generated millions of pounds. Tate, 37, has argued women should take some responsibility for their sexual assaults, and once claimed the world would be a better place if women had their number of sexual partners tattooed on their heads.Fuelled by the power of social media algorithms, Tate’s views have been amplified to legions of vulnerable males who have paid thousands to be taught his methods of attracting, and controlling, women.But filmmakers Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin have uncovered allegations of rape, sexual violence, grooming and links to organised crime that now threaten to bring down this ...

Craig Brown sheds fresh light on the late Monarch in his brilliant new book. (Image: Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty Images)So you think you know everything about Queen Elizabeth II – the most written-about sovereign in the history of Britain, if not the world? If so, you’re in for a surprise.There are still apparently a million untold stories surrounding her 70-year reign – and the best of them appear in a fabulous new ­biography by humorist Craig Brown, a royal nut and obsessive collector of lesser-known gems about the woman who still casts a long shadow over our nation, two years afterher death.Brown paints Elizabeth’s astonishing life in a very different way to conventional writers – and we get much closer to learning what she was REALLY like.And what he especially loves is the way people lo...

Richard Osman has no intention of resting on his laurels. (Image: David Levenson/Getty Images)Richard Osman is in the middle of a mammoth round of press interviews when we talk. He’s just got off the phone to Australia – the Aussies, needless to say, wanted to chat about the obsessive Fulham fan’s love of sport – and someone’s been making him cups of tea between calls to keep him going.If it all sounds a bit overwhelming, it’s hardly a surprise. Since the 2020 publication of his debut novel The Thursday Murder Club, featuring a quartet of retired cold-case enthusiasts, the former host of hit BBC quiz show Pointless has become one of the world’s biggest authors – selling a staggering ten million copies of the four-part series. Today he looms large – quite literally, at 6ft 5in tall – ove...