"Diana is restless and can't sit still in class. She's having trouble with math, and her mother is worried. But when she takes Diana to see a doctor, they discover that there's nothing wrong with Diana--she just loves to dance."--

A bright young man with cerebral palsy has his destiny intertwined with Princess Diana’s. Visiting a school for disabled boys, the future Princess Diana singles out wheelchair-bound Alex to dance with—a five-minute encounter that colors the rest of his life, though quickly forgotten by her. Alex, a survivor of severe school bullying, thinks constantly of the tall girl with blue eyes—until one day he sees her on television, the new fiancée of Prince Charles. Alex’s story interweaves with Diana’s final day before her fatal accident in the late summer of 1997. In the unsatisfying company of her billionaire boyfriend she careens from one luxurious, alien Paris location to another, tormented by paparazzi. All day she tries to reach a friend in London, hoping to hear news that will bring a new direction to her life. “Dancing with Diana is a beautifully wrought story that takes us deep into two hard-to-imagine worlds. Alex, a bright young man with cerebral palsy, has his destiny intertwined, in double-helix fashion, with Princess Diana. The latter we meet in her last few hours, and Alex we accompany from childhood through manhood. His ungainly yet triumphant progress towards self-acceptance and independence has an extraordinary echo in Diana’s own brave, doomed search for an authentic life. This is a very fine book that side-steps clichés about celebrity to create a new awareness of Diana, and also gives us a startling sense of life lived strongly and meaningfully with cerebral palsy.” — Dan Yashinsky, author of Tales for An Unknown City and The Storyteller at Fault

Diana’s Fitness, Fashion & Beauty is one of 4 volumes in the Sports She Wrote series written by the first woman with her own weekly sports column in a major American newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, from 1898 to 1901. Her real name (which she never revealed in print) was Mary Lagen, a prolific writer and bicycling pioneer, who inaugurated her “Athletic Woman” column at the age of 46. Diana was a strong proponent of physical fitness and athletics for women. She advocated exercise and good health as foundational aspects of well-rounded womanhood and lifelong happiness, as well as fundamental aspects of female beauty. Her devotion to fashion, diet, beauty and health endured for years beyond her “Athletic Woman” column, as she later became one of the first women editors of the “Woman’s Page” in a major American newspaper. This volume features 213 articles (120,000 words) presented in the following categories: fitness & athletics (60), fencing (12), boxing (5), dance (5), fashion (91), and beauty (40). Diana is an engaging writer with a keen observational eye and clever wordplay. The other three volumes presenting Diana's column are Diana's Ball Sports, Diana's Outdoor Sports, and Diana's Anecdotes & Aphorisms. Additional articles on fitness, fashion and beauty are included in the following volumes of the Sports She Wrote series: Physical Fitness, Health, & Beauty; Physical Education & Culture; 7 Exercise Manuals; What to Wear; and Adelia Brainerd, The Outdoor Woman of Harper’s Bazar. Sports She Wrote is a 31-volume time-capsule of primary documents written by more than 500 women in the 19th century.

Supplemented by many never before published photographs, offers a personal look at the woman known for her humanitarian inspiration to the world.

Supplemented by photographs, offers a personal look at the woman known for her humanitarian inspiration to the world.

Glamorized, mythologized and demonized – the women of the 1920s prefigured the 1960s in their determination to reinvent the way they lived. Flappers is in part a biography of that restless generation: starting with its first fashionable acts of rebellion just before the Great War, and continuing through to the end of the decade when the Wall Street crash signalled another cataclysmic world change. Diana Cooper, Nancy Cunard, Tallulah Bankhead, Zelda Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker and Tamara de Lempicka were far from typical flappers. Although they danced the Charleston, wore fashionable clothes and partied with the rest of their peers, they made themselves prominent among the artists, icons, and heroines of their age. Talented, reckless and wilful, with personalities that transcended their class and background, they re-wrote their destinies in remarkable, entertaining and tragic ways. And between them they blazed the trail of the New Woman around the world. Diana’s Story is extracted from Judith Mackrell’s acclaimed biography, Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation.

In the first full-length study of the English dancer-actress Hester Santlow, Moira Goff focuses on her unusual career at Drury Lane between 1706 and 1733. Goff charts Santlow's repertoire and makes extensive use of archival resources to investigate both her dancing and acting skills. Santlow made a unique contribution to the development of dance on the London stage, through her dancing roles in dance dramas by John Weaver and pantomimes by John Thurmond and Roger, as well as the virtuoso dances created for her by Mr. Isaac and Anthony L'Abbé. Goff examines Santlow's fascinating personal life, including her relationships with the politician James Craggs the Younger and the Drury Lane actor-manager Barton Booth. Santlow was unusual in making the transition from successful dancer-actress to independent and respectable widow. Goff also traces her life after retirement as her daughter's family rose from the gentry towards the aristocracy. This book will be of interest to dance and theatre historians, to women's studies scholars, and to all who are engaged with ongoing debates on the lives and careers of women on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stage.

Drama of the English Republic is the first modern collection of plays and entertainments which were originally published and performed when England was nominally a republic or commonwealth. The five texts, three of which have been edited here for the first time, illustrate how the dramatists devised new aesthetics in response to the ideological concerns of the Republic.