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Making Us Crazy is a powerful and challenging book which forces us to question the labels which are now commonly imposed on us by the American bible of mental syndromes.

Tana Dineen has been described as a “dissident psychologist” by the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, a “renegade psychologist” by the National Post and the San Diego Union Tribune, and a “heretic” by the LA Daily Journal (the largest newspaper for lawyers in US).

Her provocative book, Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry is Doing to People, offers a critical look at psychology, psychotherapy and the “Psychology Industry.

Robert Southey was an English poet and contemporary of Nelson. It was his ambition to write a clear and concise life of Nelson which could be easily absorbed by any young sailor.’

This text takes up the story of Prince Rupert from 1647, when his army career came to an end, and examines his work as an admiral, then sometimes known as a general-at-sea.

The quintessential patriot king and national hero, Robert the Bruce brought independence to Scotland. Caroline Bingham”s biography unites the historic figure of popular mythology with the genuine man.’

Carl Rogers was the psychiatrist who pioneered the practice of client-centred therapy, revolutionising the practice of psychotherapy, yet his own life was far from ideal. This biography explores his life – including his tortured marriage, his use of confidential information about his children’s lives and his drinking – against the background of his work. The author draws heavily on the papers left by Rogers to the Library of Congress.

A hugely entertaining contemporaneous account of the Napoleonic Wars by a young officer who was eventually promoted to General on the eve of Waterloo. Abridged from the two-volume original of The Adventures of Baron de Marbot, the Exploits are edited to provide expert comment and essential background. The episodes are picaresque, anecdotal, packed with bravado, duels, deceptions, narrow escapes and derring-do.

This extraordinary book reveals the engineering know-how of the ancient Greeks and Romans, explores in fascinating detail how they developed and constructed their machines, and considers how the same principles are used in modern-day engineering.
The achievements of the Greeks and Romans in art, culture, philosophy and war are well known, but their prowess as engineers has been less well studied. They made many remarkable machines, which were not bettered until the Industrial Revolution. Using wind, water, animal and man power, they made crossbows and catapults for war; built water-mills and pumps, including fire-engines; designed cranes and hoists for building; built and sailed ships both for commerce and war; and constructed aqueducts to carry water for miles to feed their complex municipal plumbing systems.
In this new, revised edition, Dr Landels has added a chapter on how – to his astonishment and delight – it has proved possible to reconstruct and sail an exact replica of an Ancient Greek trireme.

This novel was written in a rush of emotion; it’s really my love-letter to Dutch painting and that lost world of serene and dreamy domestic interiors. I hadn’t written a historical novel before, and found the whole process extraordinary. It happened like this: I had bought, at auction, a painting by a minor Dutch artist. Dated 1660, it depicted a young woman getting ready to go out. She gazes at us with an enigmatic expression, and, as I gazed back I wondered: where is she going? Should she be going there? She hung in my living room, silent with her secrets.

 

 

Here she is.

 

Some months later, in 1998, I was asked to give a talk about adapting books into films. The venue was the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square. This was where I had been sitting next to my partner, the cartoonist Mel Calman, when he died of a heart attack some years earlier. So giving a talk there was rather traumatic. When I was asked what film I would really like to make I replied, without hesitation: “I’d walk into a Vermeer painting.” So the idea was born, in that dark cinema with its terrible memories.

 

I went away and swam in the ponds on Hampstead Heath, which helps me think of ideas, and worked out a plot based on a love affair between a painter and his sitter. In researching it, I discovered the tulip mania that had gripped the Dutch during the 1630s and thought this a wonderful symbol of human greed and passion. So the story was born. I sat down, surrounded myself with books of paintings and wrote it in a rush. It was a very thrilling time. I was living with a young Hungarian painter during that period and he built a three-dimensional Dutch interior around me – fireplaces, panelling – as I lay on the floor writing (he was doing up my house), and lit the rooms with candles.

 

This is a passage from the book that describes what I love about Dutch paintings of the 17th century.

“And hanging in a thousand homes, paintings mirror back the lives that are lived there. A woman plays the virginal; she catches the eye of the man beside her. A handsome young soldier lifts a glass to his lips; his reflection shines in the silver-topped decanter. A maid gives her mistress a letter…the mirrored moments are stilled, suspended in aspic. For centuries to come people will gaze at these paintings and wonder what is about to happen. That letter, what does it say to the woman who stands at the window, the sunlight streaming onto her face. Is she in love? Will she throw away the letter or will she obey it, waiting until the house is empty and stealing out through the rooms that recede, bathed in shafts of sunshine, at the back of the painting?

 

“Who can tell? For her face is serene, her secrets locked into her heart. She stands there, trapped in her frame, poised at a moment of truth. She has yet to make her decision.”

 

Before the book was even published Steven Spielberg phoned from his car, in LA, saying he wanted to film it. Many plot twists followed this, as they do with such things, but finally – sixteen years later – it’s changed executives from Spielberg to Harvey Weinstein and has been filmed! It stars Alicia Vikander, Dane deHaan, Judi Dench, Jack O’Connell, Holliday Grainger, Christoph Waltz and Tom Hollander and is directed by Justin Chadwick. Release date is autumn 2015 but see my News section for the latest info.

 

Book Description

 

Seventeenth-century Amsterdam is a city in the grip of tulip mania, basking in the wealth it has generated. Sophia’s husband Cornelis, an ageing merchant, is among those grown rich from this exotic new flower. To celebrate, he commissions a talented young artist to paint him with his young bride. But as the portrait grows, so does the passion between Sophia and the painter; and as ambitions, desires and dreams breed an intricate deception, their reckless gamble propels their lives towards a thrilling and tragic conclusion.

This novel was prompted by a newspaper story I read, about a young woman who was charged with fraud. She worked at the British Telecom payments processing centre at Durham, and when cheques arrived written to “BT” (rather than the full name) she changed them to “B.Taylor” and her friend Barry and herself paid them into their own account. This struck me as a simple little scam, and rather brilliant.And there was something about it that stuck in my mind. I kept asking myself the novelist’s question “What if?” What if a payment doesn’t get processed? The customer gets a final demand and in the end their phone is cut off. And if a phone gets cut off, what then? All sorts of life-changing things can happen. So I developed this into a story that starts out as a simple little fraud and that suddenly gets darker when, as a result of a phone line being disconnected, a terrible tragedy happens. This novel is really about guilt and responsibility, how there is no such thing as a victimless crime. I also scripted it as a drama for the BBC, starring Tamsin Outhwaite. She brought a terrific minx-like ammorality to the part of Natalie, our anti-heroine; but she also brought a humanity to her, so we were on her side. For Natalie truly believed she was doing nothing wrong, until she was faced with the devastating result of her greed.

 

Book Description

 

Natalie is a girl who should be going somewhere. Beautiful, bright and ambitious, she’s stuck in a dead-end job in the accounts department of Nu-Line Telecommunications, living her life through wild weekends and yearning for something more.

 

When she sees a chance to change her life, she takes it.After all, it’s only a minor crime.Nobody’s going to get hurt. But other people do get hurt, because Natalie’s actions do have consequences – tragic consequences. Poignant and beautifully written, Final Demand is a cautionary tale about the battle between greed and love, about human hopes and our own frailty in the face of temptation.

This novel was also scripted, by me, as a TV drama. In fact I can’t remember which came first, TV or book. Like “To Have and To Hold” it tackles another hard-hitting, controversial subject –in this case, child abduction. This topic hit the news, around this time, and in fact the TV drama did a lot to bring these casess to public notice, with questions asked in Parliament and an eventual change in the law. I wanted to write about a father stealing his children and taking them back to his country (in this case Pakistan, as I could write about the place), but I didn’t want to paint him as a villian. This would seem racist and unfair. I also believe that if a novel makes us dismiss somebody as evil, without us understanding them, then it’s not done its job of enlarging our understanding (with “Porky” this was difficult, but I tried). So I gave Salim a very good reason for taking his children home to his own country – his wife was feckless and faithless, England is increasingly brutish and so on. It helped, with the TV drama, that Salim was played by the wonderful Art Malik.

 

Book Description

 

Always a rebel, Marianne was the first girl in her class to bleach her hair and learn how to smoke. A few boyfriends and one abortion later she falls in love with Salim, the proud and elegant Pakistani with eyes like treacle. East meets West in a passionate mixed marriage. However, Marianne knows little of the Islamic view of motherhood. When his wife proves unfaithful, Salim reasons that she is morally incapable of bring up her children and kidnaps them while she is at work…

I like setting up a seemingly happy family and then planting a stick of dynamite in the corner of the room. Light the touch paper and watch what happens. In this, my eleventh novel, I set up a family blessed by good fortune. And then see what happens when their daughter is kidnapped and they have to ruin themselves financially to get her back. It’s when she comes home that the story really starts; this is the story we never hear, in real-life cases. I wanted to explore guilt, and complex, profound family feelings which are tested to breaking-point. And, like so many of my books, I wanted to tell the story of the loss of a child – in this case, a stroppy adolescent. I’ve often drawn material from my own children, and – funnily enough – the ages of the children in my novels riss as my own son and daughter, their shadowy counterparts, grow older. I scripted this novel as a TV drama with David Suchet and Geraldine James. Its ending was changed, for various reasons; I think the book works better. I like to have a walk-on part in my productions and in this one I beat all my records by appearing about six times – as Woman Getting Into Mercedes, Woman driving expresso in Camden Lock, Woman Worshipper at Pentecostal Church in Harlesden and so on.

 

Book Description:

 

Take an ordinary, well-off family like the Prices. Watch what happens when one Sunday seventeen-year-old Hannah disappears without a trace. See how the family rallies when a ransom note demands half a million pounds for Hannah’s safe return.

 

But it’s when Hannah comes home that the story really begins.

 

Now observe what happens to a family when they lose their house, their status, all their wealth. Note how they disintegrate under the pressures of guilt and poverty and are forced to confront their true selves. And, finally, wait to hear about Hannah, who has the most shocking surprise in store of all.

I loved writing this novel. I stole some of its jokes from my partner at the time, the cartoonist Mel Calman, himself the veteran of several marriages. Its main character, Russell Buffery, isn’t based on Mel but has some of his problems, including a bad back, assorted step-children and a tendency to find himself in vaguely humiliating situations. I became very fond of him, and even fond of his various ex-wives, despite this bad behaviour and his shameless adultery.

 

Book Description

 

Meet Buffy.

 

With three ex-wives, a failing career and only his dog George for company, Buffy’s bachelorhood is looking worryingly confirmed.

 

Until he meets Celeste.

 

Dazzled by love, Buffy has no idea that Celeste is systematically researching his ex-wives, children and step-children, and unearthing secrets that will change all their lives…

This is my first novel. I started writing it when I was living in Karachi, in my mid-twenties. Its story is drawn a great deal from my own early experiences, which were easier to shape, to make sense of, when I was living so far away. Halfway through the novel I returned to England, had a baby and and finished it in very different circumstances. The strange thing is, that by writing about my past – the book is very autobiographical – I also lost it. To be more exact, the novel lay like a hologram over my memories, both obscuring them and giving them another, alternative life

 

Book Description

 

Claire – a model daughter, an imaginative teacher, as clear and legible as her handwriting. Laura – a student, as vital and rebellious as her parents would ever have feared for. As children they had shared everything – so much so that later, neither sister could quite remember to which one of them some long-distant adventure had happened. Far from the leafy respectablity of Harrow where they grew up, each are now going their distinctly separate ways in this warm, funny and poignant novel of coming of age.

Five years after I returned home from Karachi I wrote a novel that was set there. Maybe it takes that long for experiences to be absorbed and reassembled into fiction. I loosely based one of the characters on myself, an English woman who rebels against the ex-pat community in Pakistan and lands in trouble. This novel, however, has a large ensemble cast consisting of Pakistanis, Brits, Americans. And a holy man. I wanted to explore the culture clash between Islam and the West, run with it and have some fun with it, and drew on my memories of living there.

 

Book Description

 

East is East and West is West…

 

Fresh from London, Christine and Donald Manley have come to the alien swelter of Karachi: Christine to conceive a child, Donald to sell the Pill for a pharmaceutical company. Among the ex-pats already there is straight-talking Duke Hanson, whose all-American values cannot prevent him falling, then sinking, helplessly in love with a sophisticated Pakistani girl. In the ensuing tangle of Anglo-American-Oriental relations, the strangest things for those who have come out East are revealed in the very people with whom they arrived…

This is the novel that, as I said, grew out of a short story. In fact, even more deliciously, I later extracted a character from it (Shirley) and gave her a story of her own (it appears in a later collection, “Changing Babies”).. The storl is narrated by a man, a coach driver called Desmond. It really describes a long nervous breakdown as he drives through Britain, searching for a son he’s never seen, the result of a liaison long ago. I write a great deal about lost children – lost through divorce, kidnapping, abduction, incest. It’s also a voyage through various hinterlands of modern life – a caravan park in Spalding, a house, condemned for demolition, in a backstreet of Reading. I like people who are washed up, who live on the edge. Like Heather in “Porky”, this man seems to be carrying on life without me; I’ve thought about him a great deal in the intervening years (this novel was written in 1988). I’m very fond of poor bewildered Desmond, who is trying to understand women. I suppose it’s a sort of road movie, a dark night of the soul. And it speaks up for the eighties’ forgotten gender: men.

 

Book Description

 

Desmond never did have much luck with women – except in getting them through their driving tests. Now a coach driver, he is at the most crucial crossroads of his life. His wife has thrown him out. The crisis serves only to deepen his despair over another failed liaison – until he elects to steer his coach on a spectacularly reckless quest for the son he has never seen.

This is my fifth novel. It came to me quite suddenly, when I was driving towards London and passed a smallholding – a bungalow surrounded by muddy fields, the sort that have old buses and lorry containers in them.. Maybe there were pigs too, I can’t remember. But it was near Heathrow Airport and I saw, very clearly, a girl stepping out of the house. She was dressed as an air stewardess and I knew that her father had been having sex with her since she was 11 and the only way she could escape would be to fly away. She wasn’t there, of course – she was only in my head. But I had been thinking a great deal about incest – this was in 1981, when it was little spoken of – and suddenly the whole story told itself to me. The girl, Heather, told it to me. I just had to write it down, which I did, in a rush; it took about six months, flat out.. That hinterland around an airport, a place for transients, is a strong presence in the book too. I was, and remain, haunted by Heather and her story, and still wonder about her, all these years later. She would be a middle aged woman now.

 

Book Description

 

At school they called her Porky on account of the pigs her family kept outside their bungalow near Heathrow. But she felt no different – not until she realised she was losing her innocence in a way that none of her friends could possibly imagine. Only a child robbed of her childhood can know too late what it means to be loved too little and loved too much…

This is a thriller. I’d never written one before – introduce a gun and everything moves into different territory. The idea came to me when a film actress friend of mine told me about her stand-in, how the woman knew just when she wanted a Polo mint, how it was kind of eerie how this woman sort of looked like her and had to shadow her life.. It set me thinking about life’s inequalities, how a stand-in is a person’s doppelganger, their ghostly less-successful self. They are simply there to set up a shot, yet they too might have yearnings to be a great actress., to be centre stage rather than invisible . And how, if driven to extremes, the resentment might drive someone to murder. It’s narrated by an unreliable narrator, our heroine Jules, who we slowly realize is quite unhinged. But after what she’s been through, we can understand why.

 

I had a fascinating time researching the book. It took several years. I immersed myself in the film business. I went to Hollywood and talked to stand-ins, the invisible people. I visited a women’s prison in upstate New York. I sat in cafes on Sunset Boulevard and tape recorded the chatter at other tables. I walked and walked around Los Angeles and Manhattan, seeing them through the eyes of a seething and intelligent woman, my anti-heroine Jules. It was as much an acting exercise as a writing one. The novel was optioned as a movie for Angelica Huston, way back in the early nineties, and I went to Hollywood to write the script. That never happened so I’m now writing it again, for another studio. It’s not just people who can transform themselves, and appear in another incarnation.

 

Book Description

 

Jules is an unknown English actress with a precarious career and a wayward but irresistible boyfriend, Trevor. But then she gets the break of a lifetime – a part as stand-in for Lila Dune, American film star and sex-symbol – and her world is transformed.

As I write this, the First World War is slipping out of memory and into history. Only five British servicemen are still with us – all aged over 106 – and soon these last witnesses will be gone. All that remains will be silence, and books, and our imaginations.

 

No other war has affected us so profoundly. It changed history, of course, and set in train the often catastrophic events of the twentieth century. But it’s the senseless slaughter of a generation of young men that haunts us. My grandmother, for instance, lost her only brother and eleven cousins. I often wonder what they would have done with their lives; how their grandchildren would be middle-aged by now; how the world would be a different place with those people in it.

 

In fact it’s my grandmother’s own story that inspired this novel. Her much-loved young husband Tommy was also killed in action in 1918, leaving her alone with a small son. She re-married a man her little boy hated, with disastrous results (her son, my half-uncle, ended up committing suicide). Nearly a century later and the effects are still being felt in my family – just one small example, amongst many, of the war’s fall-out. That sniper’s bullet changed everything.

 

I didn’t want to write about snipers, however. I wanted to write about the effect of the war on ordinary lives. This seems to be the missing piece of the jigsaw – we’re deluged with books about the trenches but we know little of what happened on the home front, where women struggled to survive without men, when they had to take over men’s work, when food was short, times were hard but also extraordinarily liberating. Rules were broken, the old world disintegrated and it would never be put back together again. The London of blackouts and bombing raids was a sexually-charged city where, as my butcher says, “women would drop their knickers for a pound of mince”. The dank, dark, gas-lit streets of Southwark, where my novel is set, seethed with secrets and deception. War creates victims but also profiteers, and my story concerns a young widow, who runs a shabby lodging-house, and a racketeering butcher who wooes her with meat. Her son’s hatred of this interloper leads to a chain of events with a dramatic and tragic climax.

 

Book Description

 

1916. Pretty Eithne Clay runs a ramshackle South London boarding house with the help of her teenage son, Ralph, and their maid, Winnie. Struggling to keep herself, her lodgers, and her son going as every day life vanishes in the face of war, Eithne’s world is transformed by the arrival of Mr Turk, the virile, carnal, carnivorous local butcher who falls passionately in love with her. As the house bursts to life with the electricity – metaphorical and real – he brings, dark secrets come to light…

POWER

Two clever, stylish and ambitious women are fighting for control of a multi-million cosmetics empire.

 

MYSTERY

What is the secret that lies behind its charming, ruthless creator, Julian Morell? And why, when he dies, does he leave half his forturne to a complete stranger?

 

GLAMOUR

Here are the designer interiors, the jewels, cars and to-die-for couture of the rich and the super-rich – the glittering, fabulous world Julian created for himself, and the women who loved him.

 

PASSION

And here is a love story – poignant, sexy, tempestuous – featuring a mother, a mistress, a wife and a daughter, all of whom are overshadowed by … old sins.

This book came about because I’d been thinking a lot about growing older, about what is going to happen to us all. The population is ageing – for the first time the over 50s outnumber the rest of us – and it’s getting older. Where are we all going to live? Care homes are closing, pensions are dwindling, and life expectancy is rising. Then I had a brainwave. We live in a global age – the internet, cheap travel, satellite TV…when it comes to goods and services it hardly matters where we live. “Geography is history.” Our healthcare is sourced from the developing countries; how about turning the tables and outsourcing the elderly? How about setting up retirement homes in developing countries where it’s sunny and labour is cheap? So I created an Indian whizz-kid called Sonny who sets up a retirement home in Bangalore and fills it with Brits.

 

I wanted to explore questions of race and mortality, but I also wanted it to be funny. I wanted to write a comedy of manners between east and west, and chose Bangalore because it’s both an old Raj cantonement town and Silicon City, home to gleaming skyscrapers and high-tech offices. .And call centres. In the novel Evelyn, one of my characters, wanders into a call centre because she thinks she can phone from there. And ends up befriending a young operative who has to pretend she comes from England. (“What’s Enfield like, aunty?”) Evelyn’s Enfield is a place of tea dances, a place that no longer exists – except in India. For in many ways India resembles the Britain of fifty years ago, the Britain of my characters’ youth, where children were polite and Morris Oxfords puttered along the streets. Or so it seems. But that, too, can be an illusion.

 

There are many characters in the book, each with a reason for going to India: escape, revenge, spiritual enlightenment, marriage to a rich maharaja. And India changes them profoundly, in ways they would never have expected.  Norman is a frightful old lech; Minoo and Mrs Cowasjee are the Parsi couple who run the hotel – a shabby, former guest house. Mrs Cowasjee is the resident nurse, though in truth she has only worked, a long time ago, as a chiropdist’s assistant. Evelyn is a gentle soul from Sussex. Muriel is a working class Londoner who has come out to India because she’s been mugged and robbed, back in Peckham.

 

Book Description

 

Enticed by advertisements for a newly restored palatial hotel and filled with visions of a life of leisure, good weather and mango juice in their gin, a group of very different people leave England to begin a new life in India. On arrival they are dismayed to find the palace is a shell of its former self, the staff more than a little eccentric, and the days of the Raj long gone. But, as they soon discover, life and love can begin again, even in the most unexpected circumstances.

Sometimes a character in an earlier book simply refuses to go away, hanging around long after the party’s over. Buffy, the boozy old actor in “The Ex-Wives”, was one of these. So I wrote him another story, this time set in Wales. I’d fallen in love with a man who lived in the Welsh borders and wanted to write about his town. I’d also had the idea for a money-making scheme which Buffy, being a wily old fox, dreams up. Like “The Best Exotic Marigold”, this novel is set in a hotel – but wetter and even more ramshackle than the one in India. I had fantastic fun writing it; by this time I knew Buffy so well that he practically wrote it himself. Here’s the plot:

 

When retired actor Buffy decides to up sticks from London and move to rural Wales, he has no idea what he’s letting himself in for. In possession of a run-down b&b that leans more towards the shabby than the chic and is miles from anywhere, he realizes he needs to fill the beds – and fast.

 

Enter his master plan of ‘Courses for Divorces’ and a motley collection of guests: Harold, whose wife has run off with a younger woman; Amy, who’s been dumped by her weedy boyfriend and Andy, the hypochondriac postman whose girlfriend has become too much for him to handle.

Jean Liedloff, an American writer, spent two and a half years in the South American jungle living with Stone Age Indians. The experience demolished her Western preconceptions of how we should live and led her to a radically different view of what human nature really is. She offers a new understanding of how we have lost much of our natural well-being and shows us practical ways to regain it for our children and for ourselves.