Weird, spooky, gruesome, humorous, and strange but true stories come alive in The A-Z of Curious Nottinghamshire. ‘Curious’ is perhaps not the first word you would use to label Nottinghamshire. But ‘curiouser and curiouser’ itbecomes when you dig below the surface. Here the reader will meet highwaymen and hangmen, saints and martyrs, flying cars and bedsteads. To sum up, eccentrics, legends, folklore, murders, scandals, ghosts, incredible characters and oodles of wow factor, all may be found within the pages of this book.

Explore Nottingham's secret history through a fascinating selection of stories, facts and photographs.

Winner: Himalayan Club Kekoo Naoroji Award for Mountain Literature 'A full and fascinating portrait of one of the great figures of mountaineering.' – Michael Palin 'As well as relaying the literal ups and downs of the biggest walls and highest mountains in the world, Scott writes with honesty about the emotional and personal peaks and troughs of a life where family relationships are put under strain and life itself is so often at risk.' – The Westmorland Gazette At dusk on 24 September 1975, Doug Scott and Dougal Haston became the first Britons to reach the summit of Everest as lead climbers on Chris Bonington's epic expedition to the mountain's immense south-west face. As darkness fell, Scott and Haston scraped a small cave in the snow 100 metres below the summit and survived the highest bivouac ever – without bottled oxygen, sleeping bags and, as it turned out, frostbite. For Doug Scott, it was the fulfilment of a fortune-teller's prophecy given to his mother: that her eldest son would be in danger in a high place with the whole world watching. Scott and Haston returned home national heroes with their image splashed across the front pages. Scott went on to become one of Britain's greatest ever mountaineers, pioneering new climbs in the remotest corners of the globe. His career spans the golden age of British climbing from the 1960s boom in outdoor adventure to the new wave of lightweight alpinism throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In Up and About, the first volume of his autobiography, Scott tells his story from his birth in Nottingham during the darkest days of war to the summit of the world. Surviving the unplanned bivouac without oxygen near the summit of Everest widened the range of what and how he would climb in the future. In fact, Scott established more climbs on the high mountains of the world after his ascent of Everest than before. Those climbs will be covered in the second volume of his life and times.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. By what miracle can an assortment of seemingly unrelated particles come together and correctly assemble to form a human being? Amazingly, once aggregated, these atoms, molecules, and compounds manage to interact reasonably coherently during our lives but seek to return to their dusty state when death occurs. Of the billions of our species who have existed on earth over the millennia, most have quietly and inexorably returned to ashes and dust when their term of life expired. This book tracks some of the misadventures of selected corpses, including burials that went awry to body snatching, exhumations, human-relic collection, and assorted desecrations. Over the years, it seems that a remarkable number of bodies have failed to enjoy the admonition to “Rest in Peace.” Whether these aberrations in the burial process have disturbed the afterlife of the departed, everyone is dying to discover the answer.

Explore the city of Nottingham in this fully illustrated A-Z guide to its history, people and places.

List of members in each volume.