“Once Upon a Time in the West was the movie that made me consider filmmaking.” Quentin Tarantino

Sergio Leone’s film Once Upon a Time in the West set out to be the ultimate Western – a celebration of the power of classic Hollywood cinema, a meditation on the making of America and a lament for the decline of one of the most cherished film genres in the form of a “dance of death.” With this film, Leone said a fond farewell to the noisy and flamboyant world of the Italian Western, which he had created with A Fistful of Dollars and sequels, and aimed for something much more ambitious – an exploration of the relationship between myth (“Once Upon a Time…”), history (“…in the West”) and his own autobiography as an avid film-goer. This would be a horse opera in which the arias aren’t sung, they are stared. Once Upon a Time has since inspired several generations of filmmakers worldwide. Its combination of “film about film” with an angry historical epic, told with great style, has resonated for half a century, and its reputation has steadily grown.

This book, by the world-renowned authority on Sergio Leone, Christopher Frayling, includes revealing personal interviews with all the key players involved in the movie (in front of the camera and behind it) a wealth of never-before-published documents, designs and photographs, and the latest research into the making of a masterpiece, shot by shot.

It is introduced with a foreword by Quentin Tarantino.

This year is the 50th anniversary of Once Upon a Time in the West and this richly illustrated book is a suitably spectacular birthday tribute.

From Paris to Prague, from the past to the present, authors and artists explore what Europe means to them – and us – in this unique collection.

In these pages you’ll find personal letters, reminiscences, poetry, art and brand new fiction from some of the most talented and important voices at work today, including Jessie Burton, Alain de Botton, Matt Haig, Richard Herring, Owen Jones, Mark Kermode, Robert Macfarlane, Kate Mosse, Chris Riddell, Lionel Shriver and many more. A fascinating, funny and moving must-read collection.

Get sucked into the world of box-sets, binge-watching and addictive insider anecdotes with this comprehensive guide to the small screen, brought to you by the people behind the Den of Geek website.

TV GEEK recounts the fascinating stories of cult-classic series, reveals the nerdy Easter eggs hidden in TV show sets, and demonstrates the awe-inspiring power of fandom, which has even been known to raise TV series from the dead.

Includes:
– How the live-action Star Wars TV show fell apart
– The logistics and history of the crossover episode
– The underrated geeky TV shows of the 1980s
– The hidden details of Game of Thrones
– Five Scandinavian crime thrillers that became binge hits
– The Walking Dead, and the power of fandom

TV series are now as big as Hollywood movies with their big budgets, massive stars, and ever-growing audience figures! TV GEEK provides an insightful look at the fascinating history, facts and anecdotes behind the greatest (and not-so-great) shows.

Following a formative encounter with the British pop movie Slade in Flame in 1975, Mark Kermode decided that musical superstardom was totally attainable. And so, armed with a homemade electric guitar and very little talent, he embarked on an alternative career – a chaotic journey which would take him from the halls and youth clubs of North London to the stages of Glastonbury, the London Palladium and The Royal Albert Hall.

HOW DOES IT FEEL?: A Life of Musical Misadventures follows a lifetime of musical misadventures which have seen Mark striking rockstar poses in the Sixth Form Common Room, striding around a string of TV shows dressed from head to foot in black leather, getting heckled off stage by a bunch of angry septuagenarians on a boat on the Mersey, showing Timmy Mallet how to build a tea-chest bass – and winning the International Street Entertainers of the Year award as part of a new wave of skiffle. Really.

Hilarious, self-deprecating and blissfully nostalgic, this is a riotous account of a bedroom dreamer’s attempts to conquer the world armed with nothing more than a chancer’s enthusiasm and a simple philosophy: how hard can it be?

Just after midnight on 26 May 1817, Mary Ashford left a party in a village near Birmingham in the company of Abraham Thornton, a local bricklayer with a bad reputation. A few hours later she was found drowned in a stagnant pond. She had been raped.

Thornton was soon on trial for murder but, to the widespread consternation of almost everyone from the local gentry to the humblest labourer, he was acquitted.

Then, in a last-ditch effort to find justice, the victim’s brother was persuaded to use an archaic process to prosecute Thornton again, only to find himself confronted with an extraordinary challenge harking back to medieval times. In court, the accused threw down a gauntlet and demanded his right to trial by combat. As that legal process played out, new and disturbing theories emerged to explain why Mary died.

In a fresh and many-layered exploration of this notorious case, Naomi Clifford sheds new light on the events leading up to Mary’s death, the motivations of the killer, and why, for two centuries, the truth of what happened remained hidden in plain sight…

In the last four decades of the Georgian era, 131 women in England and Wales went to the gallows. What were their crimes? And why, unlike most convicted felons, were they not reprieved? ‘Unfortunate Wretches’ brings new insights into their lives and the events that led to their deaths, and includes chapters on baby murders among domestic servants, counterfeiting, husband poisoning, as well as the infamous Eliza Fenning case.

Mary Morgan – a teenager hanged as an example to others

Mary Bateman – a ‘witch’ who duped her neighbours out of their savings

Harriet Skelton – hanged for passing counterfeit pound notes, in spite of efforts by Elizabeth Fry and the Duke of Gloucester to save her

Eliza Ross – the so-called ‘female burker’, hanged for murdering an old woman and selling her body to anatomists

Plus, for the first time, all the stories of the women have been compiled in a unique directory.

Reputations – and fortunes – are at stake in this tale of elopement and abduction unearthed from the archives.

Taunton, 1817. Barrister George Lowman Tuckett wakes to discover that his 16-year-old niece Maria Glenn, reputedly the heiress to West Indian sugar plantations, is missing. He discovers that she has been abducted by the Bowditches, a local farming family, who intend to force her to marry one of the sons.

Maria is rescued and Tuckett starts investigating, revealing a complex and disturbing web of lies and impersonation. At a drama-filled trial, four defendants are sent to prison, yet within days the people Taunton begin to turn on Maria – and soon she and her uncle are facing a campaign of vicious vilification.

Maria Glenn’s family said she was “One of the best of girls, of the most docile, modest and artless nature” who was “incapable of falsehood”. Her enemies called her “base, foul, fiend-like” and claimed she told “lie upon lie, oath upon oath, perjury heaped on perjury.”

The story of the sudden disappearance of Maria Glenn once had the nation gripped – and bewildered. Both sides gave such utterly different versions of what happened that night it was clear that one of them had to be lying.

What many assumed at first to be simply an “elopement gone wrong” turns out to be a rollercoaster story of crime, coercion and illusory triumph.

On New Year’s Day 1818, Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein was first published in an anonymous three-volume edition of 500 copies. Some thought the book was too radical in implication. A few found the central theme intriguing… no-one predicted its success.

Since then, there have been many, many adaptations – 120 films alone, at the last count – on screen, stage, in novels, comics and graphic novels, in advertisements and even on cereal packets. From a Regency nightmare, Frankenstein became a cuddly childhood companion – thoroughly munstered, so to speak. The story has been interpreted as a feminist allegory of birthing, an ecological reading of mother earth, an attack on masculinist science, the origin of science fiction, an example of ‘female gothic’, a reaction to the rise of the industrial proletariat… and much else besides.

Frankenstein lives! The ‘F’ word has been applied, since the 1950s, to test-tube babies, heart transplants, prosthetics, robotics, cosmetic surgery, genetic engineering, genetically-modified crops, and numerous other public anxieties arising from scientific research. Today, Frankenstein has taken over from Adam and Eve as the creation myth for the age of genetic engineering…

This book, celebrating the two hundredth birthday of Frankenstein, will trace, in colourful and engaging ways, the journey of Shelley’s Frankenstein from limited edition literature – to the bloodstream of contemporary culture. It includes new research on the novel’s origins, and a facsimile reprint of the earliest-known manuscript version of the creation scene; visual material on adaptations for the stage, in magazines, on playbills, in prints and in book publications of the nineteenth century; series of visual essays on many of the film versions – and their inspirations in the history of art; and Frankenstein in popular culture – on posters, advertisements, packaging, in comics and graphic novels.

Christopher Frayling has spent 45 years exploring the history of one of the most enduring figures in the history of mass culture – the vampire. Vampyres is a comprehensive and generously illustrated history and anthology of vampires in literature, from the folklore of Eastern Europe to the Romantics and beyond. Frayling recounts the most significant moments in gothic history, while extracts from a huge range of sources – including Bram Stoker’s detailed research notes for Dracula, penny dreadfuls and Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, new to this edition – are contextualized and analysed.

This revised and expanded edition brings Vampyres up to date with 21st-century vampire literature, including new text extracts, commentary and a revised introduction. For the first time, Christopher Frayling also explores the development of the vampire in the visual arts in four colour-plate sections, with illustrations ranging from 18th-century prints to 21st-century film stills, demonstrating the enduring appeal of the vampire from popular press to fine art and, finally, to film.

This stunning tome is a previously unseen look behind-the-scenes at the making of this most legendary of science fiction classics. It is an in-depth examination of the complete, largely unpublished archive of art director Harry Lange’s designs, concepts, roughs and photographs.

Lange’s strikingly realistic designs created an extraordinary vision of the future. By releasing this unpublished archive and explaining its significance, the book takes the reader/viewer on a journey deep into the visual thinking behind 2001, for the first time ever – visual thought that might actually work.

The book is about the process, as well as the finished product. It examines how Harry Lange’s experience with NASA fed into the innovations of the film.

It includes rejected designs, concepts and roughs, as well as the finished works. It reveals how the design team was obsessed with things that actually might work. The book illustrates several innovations that were science fiction in the 1960s but have since become science fact, including a ‘newspad‘ designed by IBM, which bears an uncanny resemblance to today’s iPad. The remarkable designs for 2001 created a credible vision of the future.