Paul Ferris Bücher

A follow-up memoir to Paul Ferris' critically acclaimed The Boy on the Shed for which he won virtually every major sports writing award. This is not a football book or even a sports book. It is a memoir about his survival from the most acute health problems though, by a true sportsman in every sense of the word.

This is the real inside story of notorious villains, by one of their own. Murder, gunrunning, drug trafficking, kneecappings - Paul Ferris has been accused of many things in his life, some true, some not. What's not in dispute is that he spent twenty-five years as one of Britain's most feared gangsters. Out of prison and straight for five years, Paul still hasn't forgotten the common thugs and big-time players that surrounded him or the world of violence, fear and uneasy alliances that he inhabited with them. Now Paul Ferris recounts the stories of a tough existence that nobody knows better. The brutality you'd expect, the strangeness you might not. There's the man wanted by everyone from the Old Bailey to Glasgow High Court but who might just be a figment of the cops' imagination; the rise of women in the underworld, with unheard-of power and loaded pistols in thigh holsters; or the betrayed Manchester face who visited a gang's club and sprayed it with bullets, only to become the gang's hero overnight. The stories cover the underbellies of London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Manchester and beyond, but the material couldn't be closer to home - from the job Paul's father, Willie Ferris, pulled with a school bus full of kids as the getaway vehicle, to the war Paul got caught up in between two of London's biggest teams. And, as you'll discover, when it comes to villains, it takes one to know one.

The armed guards and Alsatians stayed put as the prison gates slammed shut. 'I'm going straight,' Paul Ferris announced to the press, then sped off in a waiting car. Before he'd reached the first corner, the journalists were after him. And they weren't the only ones . . . Paul Ferris ruled crime in Scotland. He had links to London firms, Manchester gangs and Liverpool faces. He'd been accused of murdering The Godfather's son, Fatboy, and found not guilty. Some cops talked of killing him. Now he was telling the world that he was walking away from his life of crime. But would they let him? Vendetta tells the astonishing inside story of what happened next to Paul Ferris. And it's a story of international gangsters, hit contracts, murders, bank scams, Essex-boy torturers, corrupt politics, crackhead hitmen, knife duels, terrorists and more. In Vendetta, Paul Ferris slashes open the underbelly of Britain's streets and exposes the dark forces that police them as well as revealing the truth about what really happened to him and about the conspiracies and corruption that won't leave him alone. For years, new enemies and old foes have tried to silence Paul Ferris. But it's Ferris who's here to tell the tale while many of them are not. And some tale it is.

This wide-ranging narrative of the British way of sex since 1900 presents a gallery of figures, including prostitutes, sexual visionaries, pornographers, fetishists, fallen women, fallen clergymen, Home Secretaries, lawyers, detectives, writers, nudists, adulterers and abortionists. From the white-slave traffic and powerful puritans of Edwardian Britain to the new morality of the second half of the century, with a reappraisal of marriage, the prevalence of the condom, sex shops, videos, and fantasists who do things with custard, this is an account of British sexual culture of the 20th century.

Dylan Thomas's letters bring the fascinating and tempestuous poet and his times to life in a way that no biography can.The letters begin in the poet's schooldays and end just before his death in New York at the age of 39. In between, he loved, wrote, drank, begged and borrowed his way through a flamboyant life. He was an enthusiastic critic of other writers' work and the letters are full of his thoughts on the work of his contemporaries, from T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden to Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis.More than one hundred new letters have been added since Paul Ferris edited the first edition of the COLLECTED LETTERS in 1985. They cast Thomas's adolescence in Swansea and his love affair with Caitlin into sharper focus. A lifetime of letters tell a remarkable story, each taking the reader a little further along the path of the poet's self-destruction, but written with such verve and lyricism that somehow the reader's sympathies never quite abandon him. The definitive collection of Dylan Thomas's letters reprinted to celebrate the centenary of his birth and featuring a bold new livery.

1st NEL edition 1984 paperback vg+ book In stock shipped from our UK warehouse