Decades Never Start On Time

The Wrong Knickers - A Decade of Chaos

Bryony Gordon survived her adolescence by dreaming about the life she'd have in her twenties: the perfect job; the lovely flat; the amazing boyfriend. The reality was something of a shock. Her Telegraph column was a diary of her daily screw-ups; she lived in a series of squalid shoe boxes; and her most meaningful relationship of the entire decade was with a Marlboro Light. Here in the Sunday Times bestselling THE WRONG KNICKERS Bryony busts open the glamorized myth of what it means to be a young (perpetually) single girl about London town, and shares the horrible and hilarious truth. The truth about picking up a colleague at the STI clinic; sinking into debt to fund a varied diet of wine, crisps and vodka; and how it feels when your dream man turns out to be a one night stand who hands you someone else's knickers in the morning. Bryony's wonderfully ridiculous and ultimately redemptive story is essential reading for everyone whose 'best years' weren't quite what they were expecting...

The Purple Decades

The essential collection of Tom Wolfe’s writing on a turning-point era in modern American culture. The Purple Decades brings together the author's selections from his list of critically acclaimed publications, including the complete text of Mau-Mauing and the Flak Catchers, his account of the wild games the poverty program encouraged minority groups to play. It was in the 1960s and 1970s—those “purple decades”—that Tom Wolfe rose to fame as one of the late-twentieth-century pioneers of American literature. He became the foremost chronicler of the gaudiest period in American history, much of which is spread out before us in these selections from nine of his books. Wolfe’s innovations in style, his feats as a reporter, and his insights into modern American life dominated a period of widespread experimentation in the writing of nonfiction. Wolfe’s contributions to the language of the purple decades range from the phrases “the right stuff” to “radical chic,” the latter of which he coined in 1970, when Leonard Bernstein gave a party for the Black Panthers in his apartment on Park Avenue; and on to “the Me Decade,” as the 1970s were dubbed as soon as Wolfe’s essay “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening” appeared in 1976. The complete texts of “The Last American Hero” and “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” and long sections of “Radical Chic” and The Right Stuff, are included here in The Purple Decades. Generous selections from both From Bauhaus to Our House and The Painted Word also appear here, as well as many stories from The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, The Pump House Gang, and Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine. When Tom Wolfe’s first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, was published in 1965, Newsweek predicted: “This will be a sharp pleasure to reread years from now, when it will bring back, like a falcon in the sky of memory, a whole world that is currently jetting and jazzing its way somewhere or other.” In these pages the falcon flies with big talons, and an even bigger grin, across the first two decades of Tom Wolfe’s literary career.

Hearings