Tales from the Colony Room

Tales from the Colony Room
Author: Darren Coffield
Publisher: Unbound Publishing
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2020-04-16
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1783528176

'Entertaining, shocking, uproarious, hilarious . . . like eavesdropping on a wake, as the mourners get gradually more drunk and tell ever more outrageous stories' Sunday Times This is the definitive history of London's most notorious drinking den, the Colony Room Club in Soho. It’s a hair-raising romp through the underbelly of the post-war scene: during its sixty-year history, more romances, more deaths, more horrors and more sex scandals took place in the Colony than anywhere else. Tales from the Colony Room is an oral biography, consisting of previously unpublished and long-lost interviews with the characters who were central to the scene, giving the reader a flavour of what it was like to frequent the Club. With a glass in hand you’ll move through the decades listening to personal reminiscences, opinions and vitriol, from the authentic voices of those who were actually there. On your voyage through Soho’s lost bohemia, you’ll be served a drink by James Bond, sip champagne with Francis Bacon, queue for the loo with Christine Keeler, go racing with Jeffrey Bernard, get laid with Lucian Freud, kill time with Doctor Who, pick a fight with Frank Norman and pass out with Peter Langan. All with a stellar supporting cast including Peter O’Toole, George Melly, Suggs, Lisa Stansfield, Dylan Thomas, Jay Landesman, Sarah Lucas, Damien Hirst and many, many more.

Tales from the Heart

Tales from the Heart
Author: Maryse Conde
Publisher: Soho Press
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2004-01-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1569473471

Winner of the 2018 New Academy Prize in Literature In this collection of autobiographical essays, Maryse Condé vividly evokes the relationships and events that gave her childhood meaning: discovering her parents’ feelings of alienation; her first crush; a falling out with her best friend; the death of her beloved grandmother; her first encounter with racism. These gemlike vignettes capture the spirit of Condé’s fiction: haunting, powerful, poignant, and leavened with a streak of humor.

West End Girls

West End Girls
Author: Barbara Tate
Publisher: Seven Dials
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2010-07-22
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1409116077

A vivid and compelling memoir recounting the real lives, loves and friendship of 1940s Soho and its working girls. Barbara Tate was 17 when she heard the whispered word that would change her life: Soho. It would take four years for Barbara to escape her loveless home but when she finally made it to the forbidden streets of Soho - just as London was recovering from the trauma of the second world war - things would never be the same again. There the naive Barbara meets the beautiful and capricious Mae. When she takes a job as Mae's maid, Barbara imagines she'll be housekeeping. But down a shabby backstreet, Barbara discovers the secret lives of Soho's working girls. An astonishing world full of fierce friendships and bitter rivalries, dangerous men and desperate measures, Barbara soon learns that taking the money from a staggering supply of punters and making copious amounts of tea are only the bare essentials. She will need to be nursemaid, protector and confidante to impossible, adorable, self-destructive Mae.

All the Greys on Greene Street

All the Greys on Greene Street
Author: Laura Tucker
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 98
Release: 2020-06-02
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0451479556

"A dazzling debut novel about resilience, courage, home and family."--Rebecca Stead, Newbery Award-winning author of When You Reach Me SoHo, 1981. Twelve-year-old Olympia is an artist--and in her neighborhood, that's normal. Her dad and his business partner Apollo bring antique paintings back to life, while her mother makes intricate sculptures in a corner of their loft, leaving Ollie to roam the streets of New York with her best friends Richard and Alex, drawing everything that catches her eye. Then everything falls apart. Ollie's dad disappears in the middle of the night, leaving her only a cryptic note and instructions to destroy it. Her mom has gone to bed, and she's not getting up. Apollo is hiding something, Alex is acting strange, and Richard has questions about the mysterious stranger he saw outside. And someone keeps calling, looking for a missing piece of art. . . Olympia knows her dad is the key--but first, she has to find him, and time is running out.

Soho Society

Soho Society
Author: Bernie Katz
Publisher: Quartet Books (UK)
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2008
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

Bernie Katz's collection of Soho stories is a remarkable celebration of a unique piece of London, where culture and sleaze merge happily together, often well into the night.

Dirty White Boy

Dirty White Boy
Author: Clayton Littlewood
Publisher: Cleis Press Start
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1573446009

What is the correct etiquette for visiting a brothel? How should one react when a transsexual wants to show off her latest surgery? Is it appropriate to speak to television personalities when they’re buying underwear? These are the questions that matter in London's Soho neighborhood, where Clayton Littlewood runs the cult clothing store Dirty White Boy. From his window on one of the busiest street corners in the world, Littlewood watches the daily parade of fashion queens, prostitutes, gangsters, and celebrities that make up the population of this strangest of villages. Dirty White Boy is a vivid mosaic of modern London, caught between the ghosts of the past and the uncertainties of the future. With an unforgettable cast of characters ranging from Chico the camp queen to Pam the Fag Lady (with guest spots by stars like Kathy Griffin and Graham Norton), these compulsively readable true tales offer a wry panorama of Soho's rich and often raucous subcultures.

Goodbye to Soho

Goodbye to Soho
Author: Clayton Littlewood
Publisher: Dwb Press Limited
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2012-05
Genre: Gay business enterprises
ISBN: 9780957029118

Business in London's Soho is not going well and the designer menswear shop that Clayton Littlewood runs with his partner, Jorge Betancourt, is under threat. Will they survive? Following on from his award-winning diary Dirty White Boy: Tales of Soho. Littlewood is back, watching the hookers, the gangsters, the rent boys and following the same strange characters who make up this strangest of villages. Will eccentric artist Raqib Shaw continue on his path to artistic immortality? Can Sue and Maggie, the Soho madams, keep the law at bay? What will become of Chico, the imprisoned ex-Diana Ross impersonator? And what of the Prince of Soho himself, Sebastian Horsley? Will America welcome him to its shores? Goodbye to Soho is a snapshot of modern London - a Samuel Pepys diary for the Soho subculture.

Illegal Living

Illegal Living
Author: Roslyn Bernstein
Publisher:
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2010
Genre: Artist colonies
ISBN: 9786099517209

Tells "the story of the building at 80 Wooster Street in New York and the people who lived and worked there. The first of 16 artists' coops started by George Maciunas, founder of the Fluxus art movement, Fluxhouse Coop II spurred the development of SoHo and the spread of worldwide loft conversions. ... The authors reveal the myriad ways that the legal formalities and unavoidable business decisions of a live-work cooperative were shaped on a daily basis." -- back cover.

Reader, I Buried Them & Other Stories

Reader, I Buried Them & Other Stories
Author: Peter Lovesey
Publisher: Soho Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2022-02-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1641293624

Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Peter Lovesey presents a collection of short fiction spanning fifty years, including the first story he ever published and three brand-new stories. More than fifty years ago, Peter Lovesey published a short story in an anthology. That short story caught the eye of the great Ruth Rendell, whose praise ignited Lovesey’s lifelong passion for short form crime fiction. On the occasion of his hundredth short story, Peter Lovesey has assembled this devilishly clever collection, eighteen yarns of mystery, melancholy, and mischief, inhabiting such deadly settings as a theater, a monastery, and the book publishing industry. The collection includes the career-launching story, as well as three never-before-published works. And surprising the author himself, the irascible Bath detective, Peter Diamond, "bulldozed his way" into this volume.

Soho in the Eighties

Soho in the Eighties
Author: Christopher Howse
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2018-09-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1472914821

A fascinating glimpse into 1980s Soho by leading journalist and writer Christopher Howse. In the 1980s Daniel Farson published Soho in the Fifties. This memoir is a sequel from the Eighties, a decade that saw the brilliant flowering of a daily tragi-comedy enacted in pubs like the Coach and Horses or the French and in drinking clubs like the Colony Room. These were places of constant conversation and regular rows fuelled by alcohol. The cast was more improbable than any soap opera. Some were widely known – Jeffrey Bernard, Francis Bacon, Tom Baker or John Hurt. Just as important were the character actors: the Village Postmistress, the Red Baron, Granny Smith. The bite came from the underlying tragedy: lost spouses, lost jobs, pennilessness, homelessness and death. Christopher Howse recaptures the lost Soho he once knew as home, its cellar cafés and butchers' shops, its villains and its generosity. While it lasted, time in those smoky rooms always seemed to be half past ten, not long to closing time. As the author relates, he never laughed so much as he did in Soho in the Eighties.