Events

Rick Stein has spent his life travelling the world in search of cooking perfection – from France and Italy to Australia and the Far East – and inspiring millions of food lovers with the results. In his new book, Rick Stein At Home, he takes stock of his remarkable life and takes us into the rhythms and rituals of his home cooking. For Rick cooking at home is not all about dinner parties, it’s about nights in with your family,…

THIS EVENT IS NOW SOLD OUT We're delighted to welcome back bestselling author Jacqueline Wilson to Chorleywood this autumn. Jacqueline will be talking about her brand new novel The Primrose Railway Children, a heartwarming story of family and adventure, inspired by E. Nesbit's timeless classic. Sit back and enjoy the journey! Phoebe Robinson loves making up stories - just like her wonderful, imaginative Dad. When he mysteriously disappears, Phoebe, Perry, Becks and their mum must leave everything behind and move…

James O’Brien has made his name interrogating the opinions of his callers live on air, to well over a million listeners. From Brexit to Boris, people are used to being asked ‘what’ their views are, but when James asks ‘why’ they think what they do, he is often met with surprising and profound results. In How Not To Be Wrong, James puts himself under the microscope, laying open his personal beliefs and opinions on everything from racial prejudice to showing…

We're delighted to be welcoming back veteran foreign correspondent John Simpson, who'll be talking about his new novel Our Friends in Beijing. OLD FRIENDS, NEW ENEMIES Jon Swift is in trouble again. His journalism career is in freefall. He is too old to be part of the new world order and he has never learned to suck up to those in charge. But experience has taught him to trust his instincts. When, for the first time in years, Jon runs…

We're thrilled to welcome back acclaimed historian Alison Weir to Chorleywood, where she'll be talking about her short story collection In the Shadow of Queens. Behind every great king stands a queen. And behind every queen, the whole court watches on… Over the years of his reign, six different women took their place beside King Henry VIII of England as his wife and queen. But the real stories of the six Tudor queens belong to those who lived among them.…

This second volume of the bestselling diaries of Henry 'Chips' Channon takes us from the heady aftermath of the Munich agreement, when the Prime Minister Chips so admired was credited with having averted a general European conflagration, through the rapid unravelling of appeasement, and on to the tribulations of the early years of the Second World War. It closes with a moment of hope, as Channon, in recording the fall of Mussolini in July 1943, reflects: 'The war must be…

Join the irrepressible Gyles Brandreth as he talks about his long-awaited autobiography Odd Boy Out. 'I am what my childhood made me.' But what is that exactly, Gyles? Who are you? And why? In Odd Boy Out Gyles Brandreth provides an extraordinarily revealing account of growing up and coming of age in an apparently well-to-do but always strapped-for-cash middle-class English family. It is a story about the ordinary things - family life, happiness, ambition, and love, but it is also…

Miss Dior is a story of freedom and fascism, beauty and betrayal, roses and repression, and how the polished surface of fashion conceals hidden depths. It paints a portrait of the enigmatic woman behind the designer Christian Dior: his beloved younger sister Catherine, who inspired his most famous perfume and shaped his vision of femininity. Justine Picardie's journey takes her to Occupied Paris, where Christian honed his couture skills while Catherine dedicated herself to the French Resistance, until she was…