Bananas Can't Fly: The Autobiography Of Des O'Connor (Headline, £18.99)

IT'S hard to dislike old Des. The butt of a thousand jokes about his singing capabilities, he's taken it all on the chin like the old trouper he is.

Des O'Connor has now starred in his own prime-time show longer than anyone else in the world. In his own words, he relives his amazing life from his early childhood struggle against ill health in London's impoverished East End to his current position as showbiz icon and international star.

Here is a man who has met anybody who is anybody contained within these pages is a virtual roll call for the men and women who have trodden the boards and found fame over the last half-century.

From national serviceman to national treasure, this is his story. Read it and discover the face that lurks behind the clown's mask.

John Phillpott.

Belly Dancing: The Art Of Becoming A Woman by Rosina-Fawzia Al-Rawi (Robinson, £7.99)

INTEREST in the diversity of world artistic endeavour is steadily increasing and Belly Dancing is yet more confirmation that this shrinking planet is becoming one large global, cultural village.

This book gives a unique insight into the life of Arab women as Al-Rawi tells the fascinating story of her childhood in Baghdad.

She describes her grandmother's first lesson about the ancient craft and how she is initiated into womanhood.

Far from the slightly risque image belly dancing has been given in the west, to Arab women, the dance hold a significance that underlies their well-being and the sense of being a woman.

Drawing deeply on her experience of the dance, Al-Rawi studies it and gives a comprehensive and authoritative history of women's dancing.

Dance is traced from the earliest times through the days of the Pharoahs and the Roman Empire, to the Arab world of the last three centuries and Europe and America in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Without doubt, Al-Rawi gives a refreshing new slant on one of the world's oldest art forms.

Patience Mansell-Read.

Child Of The North: Memories Of A Northern Childhood by Josephine Cox (Midas, £18.99)

ONE of 10 children sleeping up to six in a bed, the author knew poverty and the charity of the Ragged School.

Between births, her mother worked in the cotton mills of Blackburn while her father swept the streets. Life was hard, but laughter and humour were never far away.

With additional research in Blackburn's archives, conversations with local people, extracts from Josephine's other novels and revealing photographs, Child Of The North unveils the world of a skilled writer as she observes the lives of people who were truly the salt of the earth. This is her amazing story, told for the first time.

John Phillpott.