Charlotte Bingham

'Wickedly funny' Country Life'Hilarious and candid' Observer_____________________________London in the 1950s. Lottie is a reluctant typist at MI5 and the even more reluctant daughter of the organisation's most illustrious spy. Now she has had the bad luck to fall in love with Harry, a handsome if frustrated young actor, who has also been press-ganged into the family business, acting as one of her father's undercover agents in the Communist hotbed of British theatre. Together the two young lovers embark on a star-studded adventure through the glittering world of theatre - but, between missing files, disapproving parents, and their own burgeoning creative endeavours, life is about to become very complicated indeed...

The deliciously funny confessions of a debutante which became an international bestsellerIt is the early 1960s, and eighteen-year-old Charlotte Bingham, fresh from convent school, has been catapulted into the horrors of The Season. Though desperately on the hunt for a Superman to call her own, the country house ball circuit seems to yield nothing but an inexhaustible crop of charmless, chinless Weeds. But Charlotte’s adventures are more than sufficiently diverting: whether she’s bouffing up her hair to try and pass herself off as a beatnik, hurtling down the Champs Elysées on the back of a Vespa, or accidentally sticking her eyelids together with eyelash glue while at modelling school, her experiments in coming-of-age are never short of intrigue – and disaster. Published in 1963 when she was just nineteen, Bingham’s sparkling memoir of her trials and travails became an international bestseller. From its pages emerges a deeply lovable and relentlessly optimistic young woman – for all that her shorthand isn’t what it might be – looking for love in all the wrong places.

A Jilly Cooper heroine in a John le Carre world' (Libby Purves, TLS); a beguiling comic memoir about a young woman who discovers her father is a spy (and was the model for John le Carre's George Smiley) and goes to work as a secretary in 1950s MI5 Much to her surprise, eighteen-year-old Lottie has just found out that her aloof, rather unexciting father is a spy. And now he's decreed that she must make herself useful and get a Proper Job - so she's packed off to MI5 herself, trussed up in a dreary suit. Luckily her delightful colleague Arabella is on hand to enliven the torments of typing and decode the enigmas of office life. But as Lottie's home fills with actors doubling as spies, and Arabella's mother is besieged with mysterious telephone calls, the girls start to feel well and truly spooked... A hilarious true story, and a unique window into 1950s Britain - where Russian agents infiltrate the highest echelons, where debutantes are typists and where Englishness is both a nationality and a code of behaviour - MI5 and Me is a sparkling comic memoir.

When Kathleen finds a mare in foal, despite the fact that she and her father can barely afford to feed her, they take her in. But as Kathleen has always feared The Enchanted must be sold. Rory James and his father take a chance on the little horse in the hope of improving the fortune of their run-down racing yard.

It is 1941, and England is at its lowest ebb, under-nourished, under-informed and terrified of imminent invasion. Even at Eden Park, the beautiful country estate where Poppy, Lily, Kate, Marjorie and her adopted brother Billy are working in espionage, confidence is at an all-time low.