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Being a singleton of thirty-something may have its problems. Being one as you approach fifty, and have a teenage daughter to boot, would provide a challenge even to Jane Austen. Enter Jude Brautigan, divorcee, bookshop owner, daughter, mother, friend and fierce letter writer. Kicking fifty, Jude finds herself sandwiched between a demented mum and a rarely sensible daughter - whose hormones rage in a direction opposite to her own, though not always with dissimilar consequences.Jude doesn't like to confess it, even to her old (and thus inevitably, feminist) self, but she still harbours perverse urges: she wouldn't mind a lover; she wouldn't even mind something a little more sentimentally permanent, though to speak of permanence at her waning age feels a little like tempting fate. Which is precisely what takes over in this warm and witty novel. After all, a sense of humour may be the only sense we're finally left with.

The author presents a comprehensive cultural history of cabaret, where the most radical of artists, poets, writers, musicians and theatre directors have gathered since 1881. This edition is enriched with materials that have become more accessible in the post-Soviet era.

Unruly, unpredictable, love is a maddening deity. In this insightful and eloquent meditation on that many-splendored thing, Lisa Appignanesi draws on history, philosophy, psychology, literature, popular culture, and her own experience in order to tangle with love's paradoxes through the span of our lives. Beginning with the rose-tinted raptures of first love, she proceeds to love in marriage, the passions of triangulated love, jealousy and adultery, love in the family, and friendship, illuminating the expectations, the joys and difficulties that accompany each stage.

As her mother slipped into the darkness of old age, Lisa Appignanesi began to realise how little she knew of the reality behind the tales she had heard since childhood. She had shunned her parents' stories of war-time Poland, but now she set out to find the truth. In her quest she flew to Warsaw - imagining and revisiting a past she never knew. This is the moving story of the Jews who survived outside the camps, but it is also the author's own voyage of self-discovery - a family memoir of the rites of passage of emigration, childhood, and growing up an outsider in a closed community

A journey into the heart of dark passions and the crimes they impel. When passion is in the picture, what is criminal, what is sane, what is mad or simply bad? Through court and asylum records, letters and newspaper accounts, this book brings to life some sensational trials between 1870 and 1914, a period when the psychiatric professions were consolidating their hold on our understanding of what is human. Outside fiction, individual emotions and the inner life had rarely been publicly discussed: now, in an increasingly popular press and its courtroom reports, people avidly consumed accounts of transgressive sexuality, savage jealousy and forbidden desires. These stood revealed as aspects not only of those labelled mad, but potentially, of everyone. With great story-telling flair and a wealth of historical detail, Lisa Appignanesi teases out the vagaries of passion and the clashes between the law and the clinic as they stumble towards a (sometimes reviled) collaboration. Sexual etiquette and class roles, attitudes to love, madness and gender, notions of respectability and honor, insanity and lunacy, all are at play in that vital forum in which public opinion is shaped—the theater of the courtroom.

A deranged assassin has gunned down fourteen women students in Montreal. Celebrated Actress, Madeleine Blais, is haunted by a sense that somewhere out there, where her filmed image roams so freely, someone is determined to kill her too. Her old friend and lawyer, Pierre Rousseau can do nothing to shift her growing despair. So when on Christmas morning she is found hanging in a barn close to her grandmother's cottage in the small Laurentian town of Ste-Anne, the obvious verdict is that Madeleine's depression has driven her to suicide. Only her grandmother's unshakeable belief in Madeleine's love of life induces the police to launch a murder investigation, in which Pierre, with secrets of his own to hide, takes a leading role.

Unruly, unpredictable, love is a maddening deity. He has us singing in the rain or tearing our hair out. Or dueling with his shadows, hate, jealousy and loss. This book, from the award-winning author of MAD, BAD AND SAD: WOMEN AND THE MIND DOCTORS, tangles with the paradoxes of love through the span of our lives--from rapturous love to love in 'marriage', in the family and in friendship. It investigates love's shifts and continuities from the Greeks to the present and examines our present hypersexualized predicaments.

Sad, mad and bad. From the depression suffered by Virginia Woolf and Slyvia Plath to the mental anguish and addictions of iconic beauties Zelda Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe. From Théroigne de Méricourt, the Fury of the Gironde, who descended from the bloody triumphs of the French Revolution to untameable insanity in La Salpetrière asylum, to Mary Lamb, sister of Charles, who in the throes of a nervous breakdown turned on her mother with a kitchen knife. From Freud and Jung and the radical breakthroughs of psychoanalysis to Lacan’s construction of a modern movement and the new women-centred therapies. This is the story of how we have understood extreme states of mind over the last two hundred years and how we conceive of them today, when more and more of our inner life and emotions have become a matter of medics and therapists. Here too is the story of the professions that have grown up to offer treatment, and of how over the years symptoms and diagnoses have developed together to create fashions in illness.Many mental disorders – hysteria, anorexia, multiple personality, even depression – are diagnosed more frequently among women than among men. In asking why, Lisa Appignanesi brings vividly to life a series of exceptional, era-defining women and their mind doctors, and explores how women sometimes benefited from treatment, but sometimes did not, even when those giving the therapy were women too. In SAD, MAD AND BAD, Lisa Appignanesi takes us on a fascinating journey through the fragile, extraordinary human mind.

"Paris, 1990" on back cover should read: Paris, 1900.