Amanda Foreman

Amanda Gorman is the youngest presidential inaugural poet in US history. She is a committed advocate for the environment, racial equality, and gender justice. 
 
In 2017, Urban Word named her the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate. Gorman's performance of her poem "The Hill We Climb" at the 2021 Presidential Inauguration received critical acclaim and international attention. The special edition of her inaugural poem debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and was a Sunday Times Bestseller in the United Kingdom. She is also the author of the children's picture book Change Sings. 
 
After graduating cum laude from Harvard University, she now lives in her hometown of Los Angeles.

Amanda Gorman

Amanda Gummer is a child development expert and play and parenting psychologist who has been helping children and families for over 20 years. Widely considered as THE go to expert on play, toys and child development, Amanda combines her theoretical knowledge (developing the Parent-Centred Parenting model of family life and the Fundamental Model of Child development) with a refreshingly pragmatic approach to family life, that resonates both with parents and professionals. 
 
Amanda is regularly in the media, and continues to take an active role in research, presenting a paper at the International Toy Research Association’s World Congress in Portugal in July 2014. She is often involved in government policy around children’s issues, contributing to the Bailey Report and the Childhood Inquiry. Amanda ran the research consultancy FUNdamentals for 10 years before combining that with the Good Toy Guide, the online play advice website that she set up in 2012, and the Good 
App Guide to create Fundamentally Children.

Amanda Gummer

Amanda Hearty

Amanda Hodgkinson

Amanda Holden

Amanda Holton

Amanda Jenner, a mum of three, is the toilet training expert on ITV's This Morning, the owner of the award winning My Carry Potty (the world's only 100% leak-proof potty for training at home and on the go), and has decades of experience working with parents to overcome toilet training challenges through the Potty Training Academy: www.pottytrainingacademy.co.uk

Amanda Jenner

Amanda Leask is a first-time author. She rescued Miracle the dog from Thailand in 2014 who then repaid the favour by creating a special bond with her six year old son Kyle, who was born with cerebral palsy and autism. Winners of the prestigious Friends for Life Award at Crufts 2015, Amanda lives with her husband Tobias, son Kyle and a menagerie of rescue and sled dogs near Inverness, Scotland.

Amanda Leask

Amanda Li has worked as a children's book editor for many years before becoming a freelance editor and writer. Amanda live in south-west London with her partner and two small girls.

Amanda Li

Amanda Lindhout

Amanda Ljunggren is a Swedish crochet designer. Amanda released her first collection of crocheted clothes together with Vogue 2021. She has since worked with textiles crafts that cross the border between fashion and art. With an an international background in fashion and set design, Amanda is happy to be in front of the camera in expressive clothes from well-known fashion houses and behind the camera with the silver tape (the designer’s best) in full swing.

Amanda Ljunggren

Amanda Mitchison grew up in Scotland. She has travelled widely. Her first job as a journalist was on the Egyptian Gazette in Cairo and she later worked as a radio reporter for the Vatican in Rome. She now lives in Bristol with her husband and two sons.

Amanda Mitchison

Amanda Murphy

Amanda Owen is a shepherdess, mother of nine children, TV star and bestselling author. Born in Huddersfield, Amanda is a first-generation farmer, who escaped the city for the rugged landscapes of Ravenseat, a 2000-acre hill farm in North Yorkshire. The Owen family’s TV series, Our Yorkshire Farm, captivated over 3 million viewers in the UK and aired in over 20 countries around the world. In 2023, Amanda Owen's Farming Lives launched on More4 and in October 2024 Amanda’s latest TV adventure, Our Farm Next Door: Amanda, Clive and Kids became the channel’s highest-rating series of the year and was also repeated on Channel 4. As well as TV, Amanda is a bestselling author, penning five Sunday Times bestselling books and a hugely popular public speaker, with a new theatre show in the pipeline for winter 2025. With over 800,000 followers on social media, Amanda's genuine, down-to-earth approach to life in the countryside continues to inspire and connect with a global audience. Christmas Tales from the Farm is Amanda’s first book for children.

Amanda Owen

AMANDA PETERS is a writer of Mi’kmaq and settler ancestry. A graduate of the Master of Fine Arts Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she has a Certificate in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. She is the winner of the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award for Unpublished Prose and a participant in the 2021 Writers’ Trust Rising Stars program. She lives in the Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia. The Berry Pickers is her first novel.

Amanda Peters

Amanda Ripley

Amanda Vickery is the writer and presenter of BBC2's At Home with the Georgians based on her book Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (2009). Amanda is a Professor of Early Modern History at Queen Mary, University of London. Her first book The Gentleman's Daughter (1998) won the Wolfson, the Whitfield and the Longman-History today prizes. Amanda Vickery is also the editor of Women, Privilege and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present (2001) and Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700-1830 (2006). Among her radio credits are presenting the popular Radio 4 shows A History of Private Life and Voices from the Old Bailey.

Amanda Vickery

Amanda Wakeley OBE is a celebrated British fashion designer known for her 'Clean Glam' aesthetic. With over three decades of experience, she has dressed high-profile women including two Princesses of Wales, Diana and Catherine, as well as many other global icons including Beyoncé and Angelina Jolie. She is also the host of the acclaimed podcast series, StyleDNA, where she explores fashion stories with celebrity guests.

Amanda Wakeley

Amanda Ware

Amanda Whittington

Dr Amantha Imber is an organisational psychologist and the host of the popular business podcast How I Work. With over 3 million downloads, the show features some of the world's most successful people's habits, strategies and rituals. In 2021, she won the Thinkers50 Innovation Award (described by the Financial Times as the 'Oscars for Management Thinking'), which recognises the thinker who has contributed the most to the understanding of innovation globally over the last two years. She has been featured or published in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Entrepreneur and Fast Company.

Amantha Imber

Amartya Sen is Professor of Economics and Professor of Philosophy at Harvard. He was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1998 to 2004, and won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998. His many celebrated books including Development as Freedom (1999), The Argumentative Indian (2005), Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (2007), and The Idea of Justice (2010), have been translated into more than 40 languages. In 2012 he received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama and in 2020 he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade by President Steinmeier.

Amartya Sen

Following her CIA career in the field, AMARYLLIS FOX has covered current events and offered analysis for CNN, National Geographic, al Jazeera, BBC, and other global news outlets. She speaks at events and universities around the world on the topic of peacemaking. Amaryllis leads investigations into the international drug trade for new Netflix original documentary series, The Business of Drugs, and lives in Los Angeles, CA, with her husband and two daughters.

Amaryllis Fox

Ambelin Kwaymullina

Amber Chen is a Singaporean-Chinese author of SFF and contemporary fiction. She spends much of her free time living within Chinese fantasy novels and dramas, and also drinks one too many cups of bubble tea. One of her webnovels, The Cutting Edge, has been adapted for television. You can find her online at ambercwrites.com and on TikTok, Instagram, and X @AmberWrites88.

Amber Chen

Amber Davenport

Amber Griffin

Amber Hatch is recognised as the UK's leading expert on baby-led potty training. She has successfully used the approach with her own two children and runs a monthly support group in Oxford for other families. Her articles on baby-led potty training are regularly featured in the media, including in the Independent and The Times. www.nappyfreebaby.co.uk

Amber Hatch

Amber Husain is the author of Replace Me (2021) and Meat Love (2023). Her essays have been published in Granta, New Left Review, The White Review, The Believer, Bookforum LA Review of Books and New York Times Magazine. She has a PhD in art history from UCL and teaches critical and creative writing.

Amber Husain

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John Steinbeck

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-modern-classics/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_Modern_Classics_Series_26_06">Choose 3 timeless classics for only £21 over on the Penguin Shop</a>

In Monterey, on the California Coast, Sweet Thursday is what they call the day after Lousy Wednesday, which is one of those days that's just naturally bad. Returning to the scene of CANNERY ROW, the weedy lots, junk heaps and flop houses of Monterey, Steinbeck once again brings to life the denizens of a netherworld of laughter and tears. The book is in many ways a statement about Steinbeck's greatest theme: the common bonds of humanity and love which make goodness and happiness possible.

Sweet Thursday

This classic collection of short stories serves as the ideal introduction to Steinbeck's work. Set in the idyllic Salinas Valley in California, where simple people farm the land and struggle to find a place for themeselves in the world, these stories reflect many of the concerns key to Steinbeck as a writer; the tensions between town and city, labourers and owners, past and present. Included here are the celebrated tales, THE MURDERER and THE CHRYSANTHEMUMS.

The Long Valley

Originally published at the zenith of Nazi Germany's power, Steinbeck's fable THE MOON IS DOWN explores the effects of invasion on both the conquered and the conquerors. Occupied by enemy troops, a small, peaceable town comes face-to-face with evil imposed from the outside and betrayal from within the close-knit community. As he delves into the motivations and emotions of the enemy, Steinbeck uncovers profound and often unsettling truths both about war and human nature.

The Moon is Down

While fulfilling his dead father's dream of creating a prosperous farm in California, Joseph Wayne comes to believe that a magnificent tree on the farm embodies his father's spirit. His brothers and their families share in Joseph's prosperity andthe farm flourishes - until one brother, scared by Joseph's pagan belief, kills the tree and brings disease and famine on the farm. Set in familiar Steinbeck country, TO A GOD UNKOWN is a mystical tale, exploring one man's attempt to control theforces of nature and to understand the ways of God.

To a God Unknown

Geoffrey Willans

Ronald Searle

School is 'wet and weedy', according to Nigel Molesworth, the 'goriller of 3B', 'curse of St Custard's' and superb chronicler of fifties English life. Nothing escapes his disaffected eye and he has little time for such things as botany walks and cissy poetry with an assortment of swots, snekes and oiks. Instead he is very good at missing lessons, charming masters and putting down little brothers, in fact he is exceptional at most things except spelling. Wildly funny and full of sharp observations on life, the &lsquo;Molesworth tetralogy&rsquo; is magnificently complemented by the illustrations of Ronald Searle

Molesworth

Saki

Saki is perhaps the most graceful spokesman for England's 'Golden Afternoon' - the slow and peaceful years before the First World War.  Although, like so many of his generation, he died tragically young, in action on the Western Front, his reputation as a writer continued to grow long after his death.  The stories are humorous, satiric, supernatural, and macabre, highly individual, full of eccentric wit and unconventional situations.  With his great gift as a social satirist of his contemporaryupper-class Edwardian world, Saki is one of the few undisputed English masters of the short story.

The Complete Short Stories

R. C. Sherriff

Set in the First World War, Journey's End concerns a group of British officers on the front line and opens in a dugout in the trenches in France. Raleigh, a new eighteen-year-old officer fresh out of English public school, joins the besieged company of his friend and cricketing hero Stanhope, and finds him dramatically changed ... 
 
Laurence Olivier starred as Stanhope in the first performance of Journey's End in 1928; the play was an instant stage success and remains a remarkable anti-war classic.

Journey's End

George Orwell

Gordon Comstock loathes dull, middle-class respectability and worship of money. He gives up a 'good job' in advertising to work part-time in a bookshop, giving him more time to write. But he slides instead into a self-induced poverty that destroys his creativity and his spirit. Only Rosemary, ever-faithful Rosemary, has the strength to challenge his commitment to his chosen way of life. Through the character of Gordon Comstock, Orwell reveals his own disaffection with the society he once himself renounced.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Penguin Modern Classics

Intimidated by her father, the rector of Knype Hill, Dorothy performs her submissive roles of dutiful daughter and bullied housekeeper. Her thoughts are taken up with the costumes she is making for the church school play, by the hopelessness of preaching to the poor and by debts she cannot pay in 1930s Depression England. Suddenly her routine shatters and Dorothy finds herself down and out in London. She is wearing silk stockings, has money in her pocket and cannot remember her name. Orwell leads us through a landscape of unemployment, poverty and hunger, where Dorothy's faith is challenged by a social reality that changes her life.

A Clergyman's Daughter

Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges was a literary spellbinder whose tales of magic, mystery and murder are shot through with deep philosophical paradoxes. This collection brings together many of his stories, including the celebrated &quot;Library of Babel&quot;.

Labyrinths

Auden, Day, Lewis, Spender, MacNeice and the other key poets of the Thirties were children of the First World War, obsessed by war and by communalism, by the class-struggle and a passionate belief in poets as people whose actions are as publically important as their poems.For them, the Spanish Civil War epitomized the mood of the times, as their symbolic obsessions were transmuted into tragic reality. But from within their strongly defined unity of ideals, an astonishingly varied body of poetry emerged. 
 
Robin Skelton has arranged the poetry to make an illuminating &lsquo;critical essay&rsquo; of the period, and in his introduction he brilliantly probes the moods and mores of an intensely troubled and creative decade.

Poetry of the Thirties

Patrick Kavanagh

He did not ask things to have a meaning or to tell a story. To be was the only story 
 
A semi-autobiographical novel from the author of The Green Fool and The Great Hunger 
 
A man's mother can be a terrible burden sometimes. For Tarry Flynn - poet, farmer and lover-from-afar of beautiful young virgins - the responsibility of family, farm, poetic inspiration and his own unyielding lust is a heavy one. The only solution is to rise above all - or escape over the nearest horizon. 
 
Patrick Kavanagh's Tarry Flynn is an idyllic and beautifully evocative account of life as it was lived in Ireland in the 1930s.

Tarry Flynn

'Nobody before Borges had ever attempted this strange and wonderful mixture of arcana, popular literature, national myth, the nature of time and classical themes.  Now we can see it in all its intense and disturbing brilliance, certain that we will never see anything like it again' - Justin Cartwright, Independent on Sunday

Fictions

Primo Levi

Primo Levi was among the greatest witnesses to twentieth-century atrocity. In this gripping novel, based on a true story, he reveals the extraordinary lives of the Russian, Polish and Jewish partisans trapped behind enemy lines during the Second World War. Wracked by fear, hunger and fierce rivalries, they link up, fall apart, struggle to stay alive and to sabotage the efforts of the all-powerful German army. A compelling tale of action, resistance and epic adventure, it also reveals Levi's characteristic compassion and deep insight into the moral dilemmas of total war. It ranks alongside THE PERIOD TABLE and IF THIS IS A MAN as one of the rare authentic masterpieces of our times.

If Not Now, When?

Selected Poems brings together some two hundred poems - the largest collection of Borges' poetry ever assembled in English, including many never previously translated. The brilliance of the Spanish originals is matched with luminous English versions rendered by a remarkable cast of translators, among them W.S. Merwin, John Updike, Robert Fitzgerald, Mark Strand and Alastair Reid.

Selected Poems

Borges' stories have a deceptively simple, almost laconic style. In maddeningly ingenious stories that play with the very form of the short story, Borges returns again and again to his themes: dreams, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gaucho knife-fighters, transparent tigers and the elusive nature of identity itself.

The Aleph

Jody Tiflin has the urge for rebellion, but he also wants to be loved. In THE RED PONY, Jody begins to learn about adulthood - its pain, its responsibilities and its problems - through his acceptance of his father's gifts. First he is given a red pony, and later he is promised the colt of a bay mare. Yet both of these gifts bring him tragedy as well as joy, and Jody is taught not only the harsh lessons of life and death, but made painfully aware of the fallibilty of adults.

The Red Pony

Jean-Paul Sartre

These three plays, diverse in subject but thematically coherent, illuminate one of Sartre's major philosophical concerns: the struggle to live and act freely in a complex and constricting world. Lucifer and the Lord, Sartre's favourite among his plays, explores this theme in depth, dealing in the process with fundamental questions of faith and disillusionment; in Huis Clos - arguably Sartre's most important play - he contends that 'Hell is other people', and details the afterlife of three souls trapped together in locked room and the torments that they inflict on each other; while The Respectable Prostitute, set in the Deep South of America, is concerned with racism, subjugation and the demands of conscience.

Huis Clos and Other Plays

John Dos Passos

A portrait of New York City, drawn by describing the interconnected lives of dozens of people - bankers, chefs, bums, cabdrivers and others. Written in an impressionistic style, with vivid descriptions and bursts of overheard conversation, it has more in common with films than traditional novels.

Manhattan Transfer

Thornton Wilder

Finding the theatre of the 1920s lacking in bite and conviction, Thornton Wilder set out to bring back realism and to celebrate the innocent, simple and religious. Yet he also tried to endow individual experience with cosmic significance and Our Town is both an affectionate portrait of American life and 'an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life'. The Skin of our Teeth deals with human survival in a 'comic strip' way, and The Matchmaker is a hilarious farce which urges rebellion against all the constraints that deny a rich, full life.

Our Town and Other Plays

Eugene Ionesco

These three great plays by one of the founding fathers of the theatre of the absurd, are alive and kicking with tragedy and humour, bleakness and farce. In Rhinoceros we are shown the innate brutality of people as everyone, except for Berenger, turn into clumsy, unthinking rhinoceroses. The Chairs depicts the futile struggle of two old people to convey the meaning of life to the rest of humanity, while The Lesson is a chilling, but anarchically funny drama of verbal domination. In these three 'antiplays' dream, nonsense and fantasy combine to create an unsettling, bizarre view of society.

Rhinoceros, The Chairs, The Lesson

Evelyn Waugh

The more startling for the economy of its prose and plot, this novel's story, set among the manicured lawns and euphemisms of Whispering Glades Memorial Park in Hollywood, satirizes the American way of death and offers Waugh's memento mori.

The Loved One

Antoine Saint-Exupery

Antoine de Saint-Exup&eacute;ry, an intrepid and eccentric adventurer, transferred his passion for flying to the written word by writing several classics of aviation literature, including Southern Mail and Night Flight. Based on Saint-Exup&eacute;ry's trail-blazing flights for the French airmail service over the Sahara and later, the Andes, these two novels evoke the tragic courage and nobility of the airborne pioneers who took enormous risks, flying in open cock-pits in planes that were often fragile and unstable.

Southern Mail / Night Flight

Vladimir Nabokov

When Lolita was first published in 1955 it created a sensation and established Nabokov as one of the most original prose writers of the twentieth century. 
 
This annotated edition, a revised and considerably expanded version of the 1970 edition, does full justice to the textual riches of Lolita, illuminating the elaborate verbal textures and showing how they contribute to the novel's overall meaning. Alfred Appel, Jr. also provides fresh observations on the novel's artifice, games and verbal patternings and a delightful biographical vignette of Nabokov. The annotations themselves were prepared in consultation with Nabokov while newly identified allusions were confirmed by him during the final years of his life.

The Annotated Lolita

An ancient bridge collapses over a gorge in Peru, hurling five people into the abyss. It seems a meaningless human tragedy. But one witness, a Franciscan monk, believes the deaths might not be as random as they appear. Convinced that the disaster is a punishment sent from Heaven, the monk sets out to discover all he can about the travellers. The five strangers were connected in some way, he thinks. There must be a purpose behind their deaths. But are their lost lives the result of sin? ... Or of love?

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Barry Hines

Life is tough and cheerless for Billy Casper, a disillusioned teenager growing up in a small Yorkshire mining town. Violence is commonplace and he is frequently cold and hungry. Yet he is determined to be a survivor and when he finds Kes, a kestrel hawk he discovers a passion in life. Billy identifies with her proud silence and she inspired in him the trust and love that nothing else can. Intense and raw and bitingly honest, A Kestrel for a Knave was first published in 1968 and was also made into a highly acclaimed film, Kes, directed by Ken Loach.

A Kestrel for a Knave

Kingsley Amis

Jim Dixon has accidentally fallen into a job at one of Britain's new red brick universities. A moderately successful future in the History Department beckons. As long as Jim can survive a madrigal-singing weekend at Professor Welch's, deliver a lecture on 'Merrie England' and resist Christine, the hopelessly desirable girlfriend of Welch's awful son Bertrand.

Lucky Jim

William Yeats

This selection of the works of W B Yeats, includes the final book from the unfairly neglected narrative poem 'The Wanderings of Oisin' and a number of lyrics from Yeats's work as poetic dramatist. It breaks new ground by allowing the reader to engage with a dozen poems in alternative versions; in many other cases it provides significant variants, so that Yeats's struggle to revise his poetry can be experienced with unusual immediacy.

André Gide

'To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom' - Andr&eacute; Gide Michel had been a blindfold scholar until, newly married, he contracted tuberculosis. His will to recover brings self-discovery and the growing desire to rebel against his background of culture, decency and morality. But the freedom from constraints that Michel finds on his restless travels is won at great cost. And freedom itself, he finds, can be a burden. Gide's novel examines the inevitable conflicts that arise when a pleasure seeker challenges conventional society and, without moralizing, it raises complex issues involving the extent of personal responsibility.

The Immoralist

Truman Capote

Holly Golightly, glittering socialite traveller, generally upwards, sometimes sideways and once in a while down.  She's up all night drinking cocktails and breaking hearts.  She's a shoplifter, a delight, a drifter, a tease.  She hasn't got a past.She doesn't want to belong to anything or anyone.  Not to 'Rusty' Trawler, the blue-chinned, cuff-shooting millionaire man about women about town.  Not to Salvatore 'Sally' Tomato, the Mafia sugar-daddy doing life in Sing Sing.  Not to a starving writer.  Not even to her one-eyed rag-bag pirate of a cat.  One day Holly might find somewhere she belongs.  Until then she's travelling.

Breakfast at Tiffany's

Pilgrim Series

Pirate Pete and Princess Polly

Pirate School

Pizza and Taco

Piñata Smashlings

In this historical fiction series, Jean Plaidy traces the private lives and political machinations of the Plantagenet family, from Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine to Edward IV and the Wars of the Roses.

Plantagenet Saga

Plated Prisoner

Play Pals

Played by the Piper

Plumberry School of Comfort Food

Plumdog

Pocket Cats

Pocket Money Puffins

Pocket Wisdom

Pop Legends

Porterhouse is a Cambridge college held fast by the steel cobwebs of tradition. Observe the Masters' attempts to curve these traditions with hilarious and catastropic consequences.

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