Jim Cregan is an English rock guitarist, songwriter and producer, who in a career spanning fifty years has recorded numerous albums with stars such as Cat Stevens, Family, Willie Nelson, Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel, Joe Cocker, The Gypsy Kings and Katie Melua among many others. However, he is perhaps best known for his 40-year association with Rod Stewart, as both his guitarist and co-writer/producer. In And on Guitar..., Cregan lifts the lid on an extraordinary career in which he toured for 13 weeks with Elton John as part of Family, recorded two albums with seminal psychedelic group Blossom Toes, and was recruited by Steve Harley to form the new Cockney Rebel (his sublime solo on their hit single ‘Come Up and See (Make Me Smile)’ is considered to be one of the best). And on Guitar... recounts Cregan’s early life, his burgeoning music career, extraordinary tales of hedonism, and features a Who’s Who of music’s biggest stars.

And on Guitar...: The Autobiography of Jim Cregan

Biographies & Memoirs

Merriman, Andy.

Cregan, Jim

Arts & Literature

The History Press

Greasepaint And Cordite: How ENSA Entertained The Troops During World War II

History

Military

ReadHowYouWant

Once the Second World War had broken out, it soon became clear that morale would be crucial in the military effectiveness of our armed forces. And so was born the Entertainment National Services Association, or ENSA â?? to send the nationâ??s best singers, dancers, musicians and comedians, from NoÃ«l Coward to Gracie Fields, to entertain the troops, however far away they might be.
Over the course of the war ENSA gave their first break to such postwar stars as Tommy Cooper and Frankie Howerd, as well as enshrining the young Vera Lynn forever as the forcesâ?? sweetheart. When Allied troops landed in Normandy in 1944, George Formby followed close behind, while a distinguished troupe under Laurence Olivier was performing Shakespeare to British soldiers in Hamburg within weeks of the German surrender.
Now, Andrew Merriman has talked to surviving ENSA veterans from Vera Lynn to Dame Beryl Grey, to piece together the extraordinary adventures of the ordinary men and women sent out across the world â?? even to inhospitable, dangerous Burma â?? whose contribution to the war effort was song, dance and laughter.

Greasepaint and Cordite: How ENSA Entertained the Troops During World War II

Humor & Entertainment

Aurum Press

For over thirty years Hattie Jacques was a familiar presence on radio, television and ?lm. But her stage persona of a buxom, masterful female dragon (the formidable matron of Carry On Nurse was a typical role) could hardly have been more at odds with her off-stage personality. Warm, impetuous and generous to a fault, she was almost pathetically grateful for any show of affection.In 1947 she married the actor John Le Mesurier, who divorced her in 1965. It was, however, typical of her that she actively encouraged Le Mesurier to remarry and the two remained ?rm friends until her death. Hattie involved herself deeply in charity work and became a con?dante to many of the young actors and actresses with whom she worked.This biography has been written with the help and encouragement of Hattie's surviving son and her many friends, including Barbara Windsor, Clive Dunn, Bill Pertwee and Joan Le Mesurier.

Hattie Jacques

The hardback of this first and authorised biography received very good reviews and immediately reprinted. It tells the story of one of the heroines of post-war British comedy, on radio, film and TV. Hattie Jacques is known as the billowing, imposing Matron in the Carry On films, as the star of such BBC radio classics as ITMA, Educating Archie and Hancock's Half Hour, and as the fictional sister of Eric Sykes in his long-running TV sitcom. But the formidable, frumpy galleon-in-full-sail screen persona could not have been more at odds with the real-life woman, as this biography reveals for the first time. She had a tempestuous wartime affair with an American officer, and then a strange marriage to the actor John le Mesurier (Corporal Wilson in Dad's Army) whose dissatisfactions she circumnavigated by moving her lover, a flashy Cockney car dealer, into the matrimonial home. But as well as being warm and sexy and generous she was also, owing to her lifelong struggle with her weight, needy and melancholic, and rueful that her size persistently typecast her and excluded her from many roles. This biography has been written with full co-operation from Hattie's son, and show business friends like Barbara Windsor, Clive Dunn, Galton and Simpson and Ian Carmichael.

Hattie

Aurum Press Ltd

She was one of our most individual actresses, appearing in such thoroughly English classics as Blithe Spirit, The importance of Being Earnest, Passport to Pimlico and I'm All Right, Jack! But above all she was Miss Marple, in four films and entirely created for the screen the role of Agatha Christie's elderly and fearless private detective that subsequent actresses like Joan Hickson and Geraldine McEwan have continued. She first played Miss Marple at the age of 70, and insisted on wearing her own clothes to feel right in the part. But it was as a comic actress that she enjoyed her finest hours she admitted, however, that she didn't set out to be funny: her appearance, with its air of doleful, distracted confusion, meant people inevitably saw her so. Andy Merriman's biography is the first for over 20 years, and by the author of a very well-received authorised biography of Hattie Jacques Aurum published three years ago What an altogether good book this is excellently researched and infused with a love of its subject , said the Daily Telegraph. Andy Merriman is also the author of Hattie (978 1 84513 362 7) and A Minor Adjustment, a book about his daughter who has Down's syndrome. He lives in London

Margaret Rutherford: Dreadnought with Good Manners

Literature & Fiction

Humor & Satire

Aurum

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