Alison Bingeman

Alison Bond worked in the film industry for seven years before writing her debut novel How to Be Famous, published in 2005. A graduate of Bournemouth Media School, Alison currently lectures on the harsh realities of the film business as part of their MA screenwriting programme.

Alison Bond

Alison Boshoff

Alison Bowser

Alison Davies is the author of over 30 books. She runs workshops at universities throughout the UK, showing academics, students and early years practitioners how stories can be used as tools for teaching and learning. Alison writes for a wide selection of magazines and her features have also appeared in the Times Education Supplement, Daily Mail and Sunday Express parenting section, and various commercial magazines.

Alison Davies

Alison Entrekin

Alison Goldsworthy has been a political adviser and campaigner for more than twenty years. A former Deputy Chair of the Liberal Democrats, she led the team that built the fastest-growing campaigning organisation in the UK. In 2017 she was a Sloan Fellow at Stanford, co-creating its first depolarisation course. A board member of the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, Alison has won numerous awards for her work. She has written for the Telegraph, Independent, New Statesman, The Times and Financial Times.

Alison Goldsworthy

Alison Goodman lives in bayside Melbourne, Australia with her husband and their indomitable Jack Russell Terrier. Alison was a D.J. O'Hearn Memorial Fellow at Melbourne University, holds a Masters degree, and has taught creative writing at postgraduate level. Her debut novel was the award-winning futuristic thriller, Singing the Dogstar Blues, and her second, the acclaimed adult crime thriller, Killing the Rabbit. She is currently writing full-time and mentoring others through the wild and wonderful process of writing a novel.

Alison Goodman

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and an affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She is an internationally recognised leader in the study of children's learning and development. She writes the Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal and is the author of The Philosophical Baby and co-author of The Scientist in the Crib. She has three sons and lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband, Alvy Ray Smith.

Alison Gopnik

Alison Grade is a career freelancer, serial entrepreneur and founder of the company Mission Accomplished, a consultancy that offers training, mentoring and strategic advice to start - ups and established SMEs principally in the creative industries. She is a NESTA-accredited creative enterprise trainer and has delivered international programmes in association with the British Council. She is the CEO of Screen Central which represents the professional screen community in the West Midlands where she lives.

Alison Grade

Adored for her quick wit, big heart and infamous laugh, Alison is one of the UK’s most popular TV presenters, famed for her hilarious celebrity interviews! The Queen of our hearts presents ITV's 'This Morning' alongside Dermot O’Leary, gearing viewers up for the weekend. 
 
Alison also co-hosts the ultimate televised baking battle, ‘The Great British Bake Off’ and ‘The Great Stand Up to Cancer Bake Off’ for C4, receiving a nomination for the ‘Entertainment Performance’ category in the 2024 RTS Programme Awards with Noel Fielding. 
 
As a firm family favourite into the evening TV schedule, Alison is a Team Captain on Sky TV’s ‘Rob Beckett’s Smart TV’ and continues the late, great Paul O’Grady’s legacy hosting ‘For the Love of Dogs’ for Battersea Dogs Home and ITV.

Alison Hammond

Alison Jameson grew up on a farm in the Irish midlands, a secluded and beautiful place that continues to inspire her work. She is the bestselling author of This Man and Me, which was nominated for the IMPAC Literary Award, and Under My Skin. Her third novel, Little Beauty, was published by Doubleday Ireland in 2013. An English and History graduate of University College Dublin, she worked in advertising for many years before becoming an author. Home is Dublin where she lives with her husband and son.

Alison Jameson

Alison Jefferies, MEd, has worked extensively as an educator. She is a former president of the MD Anderson Cancer Center Faculty and Family Organization and works closely with Lorenzo Cohen to foster health and wellness in individuals and their communities.

Alison Jefferies

Alison Joseph

Alison Kennedy

Alison Leonard

Alison Light

Alison Lurie published ten novels, among them Foreign Affairs (which won the Pulitzer Prize), The Truth About Lorin Jones (winner of the Prix Femina étranger), and The Last Resort. She was also the author of many works of non-fiction, including The Language of Clothes, Don't Tell the Grownups, Familiar Spirits, and two collections of essays and reviews, Reading for Fun and Words and Worlds. She taught literature, folklore and creative writing at Cornell University for many years and was the Whiton Professor of American Literature emerita. She lived in upstate New York but also spent much time in Key West, Florida and in London, all of which provided settings for her fiction. She married the writer Edward Hower, and had three sons and three grandchildren. Alison Lurie died in 2020.

Alison Lurie

Alison MacLeod was raised in Canada and has lived in England since 1987. She is the author of three novels, The Changeling, The Wave Theory of Angels and Unexploded, and of a collection of stories, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction. Unexploded was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2013. Alison MacLeod is Professor of Contemporary Fiction at Chichester University and lives in Brighton.

Alison MacLeod

Alison Maloney has been writing the Strictly Come Dancing annuals for nearly a decade. A multi-faceted and versatile writer, she has also written several other books, including The Mums' Book, Woman's Hour: Words from Wise, Witty and Wonderful Women and The World of Mr Selfridge.

Alison Maloney

Alison Mercer was born in Reading and studied English at University College, Oxford. She lives in Oxfordshire with her husband and two children. She is the author of Stop the Clock and After I Left You. 
 
You can get in touch with Alison via her blog at http://alisonmercerwriter.com, on Facebook at www.facebook.com/AlisonMercerwriter, or talk to her on Twitter: @AlisonLMercer.

Alison Mercer

Alison Miller

Alison Perry is a journalist and mum of twins (and an older daughter who is 9). She is an award winning blogger with her site Not Another Mummy Blog (notanothermummyblog.com) and also hosts the Not Another Mummy Podcast where she has chatted to guests such as Philippa Perry and Emma Bunton. She lives in London and you can find her on Instagram @iamalisonperry

Alison Perry

Alison Plowden

Alison Prince

Alison Roman is the host of the Home Movies series on YouTube and author of the incredibly popular food newsletter, appropriately titled A Newsletter. Prior to that, she was a columnist for the New York Times Food section and a senior food editor at Bon Appétit. The author of Dining In, Nothing Fancy and Sweet Enough, Alison has worked professionally in kitchens such as New York's Momofuku Milk Bar and San Francisco's Quince. Originally from Los Angeles, she now lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their son. She has recently opened her pantry store in Upstate New York called First Bloom. A long-time dream fully realised: a grocery store of her own and a physical manifestation of all her favourite pantry items, curated with love and care. Her platform continues to grow – since her first book, Dining In, her Instagram following has jumped from 66k to 778k.

Alison Roman

Alison Rumfitt is a writer and cultural critic. Her two horror novels Tell Me I'm Worthless and Brainwyrms push the boundaries of both taste and form to the shock of readers everywhere. She has written for Little White Lies and Dazed, and interviewed new Doctor Ncuti Gatwa for Rolling Stone. She's considered herself a fan of Doctor Who ever since her father played her the theme song to scare her when she was about five years old.

Alison Rumfitt

Alison Scott-Wright is a baby-, toddler- and child-sleep expert who also specializes in helping parents with the management of infant and toddler acid reflux and associated dietary intolerances. For over twenty-five years she has worked 'hands-on' with families, sharing her knowledge and expertise with her clients and, most importantly, bringing sleep to thousands of homes. Fifteen years ago, one client named her the Magic Sleep Fairy and the name stuck - in fact, it became the trademarked name of her ever-expanding consultancy business, through which Alison continues to provide practical help, invaluable advice and much-needed support to parents around the world. She is a mother and a grandmother - known by her grandchildren as Mops - and she divides her time between her homes in Turkey and on the south coast of Dorset.

Alison Scott-Wright

Alison Sherlock

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Visnu Sarma

First recorded 1500 years ago, but taking its origins from a far earlier oral tradition, the Pancatantra is ascribed by legend to the celebrated, half-mythical teacher Visnu Sarma. Asked by a great king to awaken the dulled intelligence of his three idle sons, the aging Sarma is said to have composed the great work as a series of entertaining and edifying fables narrated by a wide range of humans and animals, and together intended to provide the young princes with vital guidance for life. Since first leaving India before AD 570, the Pancatantra has been widely translated and has influenced a cast number of works in India, the Arab world and Europe, including the Arabian Nights, the Canterbury Tales and the Fables of La Fontaine. Enduring and profound, it is among the earliest and most popular of all books of fables.

The Pancatantra

Bernard O'Donoghue

Composed during the fourteenth century in the English Midlands, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight describes the events that follow when a mysterious green-coloured knight rides into King Arthur's Camelot in deep mid-winter. The mighty knight presents a challenge to the court: he will allow himself to be struck by one blow, on the condition that he will be allowed to return the strike on the following New Year's Eve. Sir Gawain takes up the challenge, decapitating the stranger - only to see the Green Knight seize up his own severed head and ride away, leaving Gawain to seek him out and honour their pact. Blending Celtic myth and Christian faith, Gawain is among the greatest Middle English poems: a tale of magic, chivalry and seduction.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Penguin Classics

Sarashina

As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams is a unique autobiography in which the anonymous writer known as Lady Sarashina intersperses personal reflections, anecdotes and lyrical poems with accounts of her travels and evocative descriptions of the Japanese countryside. Born in AD 1008, Lady Sarashina felt an acute sense of melancholy that led her to withdraw into the more congenial realm of the imagination - this deeply introspective work presents her vision of the world. While barely alluding to certain aspects of her life such as marriage, she illuminates her pilgrimages to temples and mystical dreams in exquisite prose, describing a profound emotional journey that can be read as a metaphor for life itself.

As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams

Recollections of a Woman in Eleventh-century Japan

Pausanias

Jeffery Lacey

John Newberry

Written by a Greek traveller in the second century ad for a principally Roman audience, Pausanias' Guide to Greece is a comprehensive, extraordinarily literate and well-informed guidebook for tourists of the age. Concentrating on buildings, tombs and statues, it also describes in detail the myths, religious beliefs and historical background behind the monuments considered. In doing so, it preserves Greek legends, quotes classical literature and poetry that would otherwise have been lost, and offers a fascinating depiction of the glory of classical Greece immediately before its third-century decline. This, the second of two volumes, explores Southern Greece including Sparta, Arkadia, Bassae and the games at Olympia. An inspiration to travellers and writers across the ages, including Byron and Shelley, it remains one of the most influential of all travel books.

Guide to Greece

Southern Greece

The King James Bible or Authorized Version (1611) comprises the Old Testament, the Apocrypha and the New Testament, from God's creation of the heaven and earth and the fall of man in Genesis, through the life Jesus Christ, to St John the Divine's foretelling of the end of the world and God's final judgment in Revelation. Among the most influential texts of all time and the cornerstone of the Christian faith, the King James Bible is the work of the great scholars and theologians of the early seventeenth century and reflects their desire for greater stability in the Christian religion. They revised and retranslated existing versions, including that of William Tyndale, to create a standardized Bible that would be accessible to all speakers and readers of English. Definitive and highly readable, this superb edition brings new vigour to one of the finest pieces of English prose.

The Bible

Georg Buchner

Collected in this volume are powerful dramas and psychological fiction by the nineteenth-century iconoclast now recognized as a major figure of world literature. Also included are selections from Büchner's letters and philosophical writings.

Complete Plays, Lenz and Other Writings

Edward Gibbon

Edward Gibbon was one of the world's greatest historians and a towering figure of his age. When he died in 1794 he left behind the unfinished drafts of his Memoirs, which were posthumously edited by his friend Lord Sheffield, and remain an astonishing portrait of a rich, full life. Recounting Gibbon's sickly childhood in London, his disappointment with an Oxford 'steeped in port and prejudice', his successful years in Lausanne, his first and only love affair and the monolithic achievement of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he distils his genius for history into a remarkable gift for autobiography. Candid and detailed, these writings are filled with warmth and intellectual passion.

Memoirs of My Life

Charles-Pierre Baudelaire

Before publishing the sensuous and scandalous poems of Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) had already earned respect as a forthright and witty critic of art and literature. This stimulating selection of criticism reveals him as a worshipper at the altar of beauty, illuminating his belief that the pursuit of this ideal must be paramount in artistic expression. Reviews of exhibitions discuss works by great painters such as Delacroix and Ingres in fascinating detail, and 'Of Virtuous Plays and Novels' sees Baudelaire as an avenging angel in defence of true art. Writings on Poe, Flaubert and Gautier evoke a profound understanding of fellow artists, while his single excursion into musical criticism, 'Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris', displays an incisive awareness of the magical power of suggestion in music.

Selected Writings on Art and Literature

Speaking of Siva is a selection of vacanas or free-verse sayings from the Virasaiva religious movement, dedicated to Siva as the supreme god. Written by four major saints, the greatest exponents of this poetic form, between the tenth and twelfth centuries, they are passionate lyrical expressions of the search for an unpredictable and spontaneous spiritual vision of 'now'. Here, yogic and tantric symbols, riddles and enigmas subvert the language of ordinary experience, as references to night and day, sex and family relationships take on new mystical meanings. These intense poems of personal devotion to a single deity also question traditional belief systems, customs, superstitions, image worship and even moral strictures, in verse that speaks to all men and women regardless of class and caste.

Speaking of Siva

Richard Stoneman

Mystery surrounds the parentage of Alexander, the prince born to Queen Olympias. Is his father Philip, King of Macedonia, or Nectanebo, the mysterious sorcerer who seduced the queen by trickery? One thing is certain: the boy is destined to conquer the known world. He grows up to fulfil this prophecy, building a mighty empire that spans from Greece and Italy to Africa and Asia. Begun soon after the real Alexander's death and expanded in the centuries that followed, The Greek Alexander Myth depicts the life and adventures of one of history's greatest heroes - taming the horse Bucephalus, meeting the Amazons and his quest to defeat the King of Persia. Including such elements of fantasy as Alexander's ascent to heaven borne by eagles, this literary masterpiece brilliantly evokes a lost age of heroism.

The Greek Alexander Romance

Heinrich Heine

A poet whose verse inspired music by Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Brahms, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) was in his lifetime equally admired for his elegant prose. This collection charts the development of that prose, beginning with three meditative works from the Travel Pictures, inspired by Heine's journeys as a young man to Lucca, Venice and the Harz Mountains. Exploring the development of spirituality, the later On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany spans the earliest religious beliefs of the Germanic people to the philosophy of Hegel, and warns with startling force of the dangers of yielding to 'primeval Germanic paganism'. Finally, the Memoirs consider Heine's Jewish heritage and describe his early childhood. As rich in humour, satire, lyricism and anger as his greatest poems, together the pieces offer a fascinating insight into a brilliant and prophetic mind.

The Harz Journey and Selected Prose

Gerald of Wales

Gerald of Wales was among the most dynamic and fascinating churchmen of the twelfth century. A member of one of the leading Norman families involved in the invasion of Ireland, he first visited there in 1183 and later returned in the entourage of Henry II. The resulting Topographia Hiberniae is an extraordinary account of his travels. Here he describes landscapes, fish, birds and animals; recounts the history of Ireland's rulers; and tells fantastical stories of magic wells and deadly whirlpools, strange creatures and evil spirits. Written from the point of view of an invader and reformer, this work has been rightly criticized for its portrait of a primitive land, yet it is also one of the most important sources for what is known of Ireland during the Middle Ages.

The History and Topography of Ireland

Thomas Browne

Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82) was a writer of breathtaking range and learning, whose works demonstrate a warm and humorous view of human nature. Religio Medici is a fascinating, witty and intimate exploration of his views on faith and tolerance, while substantial selections from Pseudodoxia Epidemica display Browne's breadth of knowledge and omnivorous curiosity in his account of common errors in a startling array of subjects including sciences, history, literature and philosophy. Hydriotaphia or 'Urn Buriall' is an intriguing meditation on death and the desire for immortality, The Garden of Cyrus considers the mysterious order to be found in nature, and A Letter to a Friend and the aphoristic Christian Morals provide profound spiritual guidance to readers.

The Major Works

Anselm

Mostly written between 1070 and 1080, before he became Archbishop of Canterbury, the prayers and meditations of Anselm of Aosta created a tradition of intimate, intensely personal devotional works written in subtle and theologically daring prose. While the Prayer to God is based on the Lord's Prayer, the Prayer to Christ is inspired by ardent private emotion and other prayers invest saints with individual attributes, with John the Baptist as the friend, Peter as the shepherd and Mary Magdalene as the forgiving lover, among many others. The meditations include a searching exploration of the state of the soul and a lament on the loss of purity, and the Proslogion discusses the mysteries of faith. With their bright imagery, beautiful language and highly original thought, the works of Anselm have secured a lasting place in both religious and secular literature.

The Prayers and Meditations of St. Anselm with the Proslogion

Thomas Nashe

Written in the late sixteenth century, at the pinnacle of the English Renaissance, the rich and ingenious works of Thomas Nashe uniquely reveal the ambivant nature of the Elizabethan era. Mingling the devout and the bawdy, scholarship and slang, they express throughout an irrepressible, inexhaustible wit and an astonishing command of language. This collection of Nashe's finest works includes The Unfortunate Traveller, the sharp and grotesque tale of Jack Wilton, an Englishman travelling through Europe;  Pierce Penniless, a biting satire on the society of his age; Terrors of the Night; Lenten Stuff; the sensual poem The Choice of Valentines; and extracts from Christ's Tears over Jerusalem and other works. Wide-ranging in subject, all capture the unique voice and fantastic ingenuity of one of the most entertaining Elizabethan writers - a man regarded by his contemporaries as the 'English Juvenal'.

The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works

Valmiki

Warrior-prince Rama is about to be crowned Young King, when he hears the devastating news that his father, King of Ayodhya, has been tricked into banishing him to the forest. His devoted wife Sita insists on accompanying him in exile, but the evil ten-headed lord Ravana has fallen deeply in love with the beautiful princess and steals her away. Aided by Hanuman, mighty captain of the monkeys, Rama sets out across the world to find her and destroy Ravana in a deadly battle. Rama the Steadfast was composed in the oral tradition in about the fifth century BC and has been retold over the generations ever since. With its fantastical characters ranging from monsters to apes, a very human hero and its profound moral purpose, it is one of the greatest of all Indian tales.

Rama the Steadfast

An Early Form of the Ramayana

Ryszard Kapuscinski

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Shah of Shahs depicts the final years of the Shah in Iran, and is a compelling meditation on the nature of revolution and the devastating results of fear. Here, Kapuscinski describes the tyrannical monarch, who, despite his cruel oppression of the Iranian people, sees himself as the father of a nation, who can turn a backward country into a great power - a vain hope that proves a complete failure. Yet even as Iran becomes a 'behemoth of riches' and as the Shah lives like a European billionaire, its people live in a climate of fear, terrorized by the secret police. Told with intense power and feeling, Kapuscinski portrays the inevitable build-up to revolution - a cataclysmic upheaval that delivered Iran into the rule of the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Shah of Shahs

After the deposition of Haile Selassie in 1974, which ended the ancient rule of the Abyssinian monarchy, Ryszard Kapuscinski travelled to Ethiopia and sought out surviving courtiers to tell their stories. Here, their eloquent and ironic voices depict the lavish, corrupt world they had known - from the rituals, hierarchies and intrigues at court to the vagaries of a ruler who maintained absolute power over his impoverished people. They describe his inexorable downfall as the Ethiopian military approach, strange omens appear in the sky and courtiers vanish, until only the Emperor and his valet remain in the deserted palace, awaiting their fate. Dramatic and mesmerising, The Emperor is one of the great works of reportage and a haunting epitaph on the last moments of a dying regime.

The Emperor

Michael Alexander

Beowulf is the greatest surviving work of literature in Old English, unparalleled in its epic grandeur and scope. It tells the story of the heroic Beowulf and of his battles, first with the monster Grendel, who has laid waste to the great hall of the Danish king Hrothgar, then with Grendel's avenging mother, and finally with a dragon that threatens to devastate his homeland. Through its blend of myth and history, Beowulf vividly evokes a twilight world in which men and supernatural forces live side by side, and celebrates the endurance of the human spirit in a transient world.

Beowulf

A Glossed Text

Karl Marx

The "forgotten" second volume of Capital, Marx's world-shaking analysis of economics, politics, and history, contains the vital discussion of commodity, the cornerstone to Marx's theories.

Capital

Volume II

Unfinished at the time of Marx's death in 1883 and first published with a preface by Frederick Engels in 1894, the third volume of Das Kapital strove to combine the theories and concepts of the two previous volumes in order to prove conclusively that capitalism is inherently unworkable as a permanent system for society. Here, Marx asserts controversially that - regardless of the efforts of individual capitalists, public authorities or even generous philanthropists - any market economy is inevitably doomed to endure a series of worsening, explosive crises leading finally to complete collapse. But healso offers an inspirational and compelling prediction: that the end of capitalism will culminate, ultimately, in the birth of a far greater form of society.

Volume III

Frances Burney

Novelist and playwright Frances (Fanny) Burney, 1752-1840, was also a prolific writer of journals and letters, beginning with the diary she started at fifteen and continuing until the end of her eventful life. From her youth in London high society to a period in the court of  Queen Charlotte and her years interned in France with her husband Alexandre d'Arblay during the Napoleonic Wars, she captured the changing times around her, creating brilliantly comic and candid portraits of those she encountered - including the 'mad' King George, Samuel Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick and a charismatic Napoleon Bonaparte. She also describes, in her most moving piece, undergoing a mastectomy at fifty-nine without anaesthetic. Whether a carefree young girl or a mature woman, Fanny Burney's forthright, intimate and wickedly perceptive voice brings her world powerfully to life.

Journals and Letters

Elie Wiesel

Marion Wiesel

Born into a Jewish ghetto in Hungary, as a child,  Elie Wiesel was sent to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. This is his account of that atrocity: the ever-increasing horrors he endured, the loss of his family and his struggle to survive in a world that stripped him of humanity, dignity and faith. Describing in simple terms the tragic murder of a people from a survivor's perspective, Night is among the most personal, intimate and poignant of all accounts of the Holocaust. A compelling consideration of the darkest side of human nature and the enduring power of hope, it remains one of the most important works of the twentieth century.

Night

Alexander Humboldt

One of the greatest nineteenth-century scientist-explorers, Alexander von Humboldt traversed the tropical Spanish Americas between 1799 and 1804. By the time of his death in 1859, he had won international fame for his scientific discoveries, his observations of Native American peoples and his detailed descriptions of the flora and fauna of the 'new continent'. The first to draw and speculate on Aztec art, to observe reverse polarity in magnetism and to discover why America is called America, his writings profoundly influenced the course of Victorian culture, causing Darwin to reflect: 'He alone gives any notion of the feelings which are raised in the mind on first entering the Tropics'.

Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent

John Donne

Regarded by many as the greatest of the Metaphysical poets, John Donne (1572-1631) was also among the most intriguing figures of the Elizabethan age. A sensualist who composed erotic and playful love poetry in his youth, he was raised a Catholic but later became one of the most admired Protestant preachers of his time. The Selected Poems reflects this wide diversity, and includes his youthful Songs and Sonnets, epigrams, elegies, letters, satires, and the profoundly moving Divine Poems composed towards the end of his life. From joyful poems such as 'The Flea', which transforms the image of a louse into something marvellous, to the intimate and intense Holy Sonnets, Donne breathed new vigour into poetry by drawing lucid and often startling metaphors from the world in which he lived. His poems remain among the most passionate, profound and spiritual in the English language.

Selected Poems: Donne

Jacobo di Voragine

One of the central texts of the Middle Ages, The Golden Legend deeply influenced the imagery of poetry, painting and stained glass with its fascinating descriptions of saints' lives and religious festivals. By creating a single-volume sourcebook of core Christian stories, Jacobus de Voragine (c. 1229-98) attracted a huge audience across Europe. This selection of over seventy biographies ranges from the first Apostles and Roman martyrs to near-contemporaries such as St Dominic, St Francis of Assissi and St Elizabeth of Hungary. Here, witnesses to the true faith endure horrific tortures; reformed prostitutes win divine forgiveness; while other women live disguised as monks or nobly resist lustful tyrants. Lucid and compelling, The Golden Legend offers an enthralling insight into the medieval mind.

The Golden Legend

Robert Irwin

Spanning the fifth century to the sixteenth, and ranging from Afghanistan to Spain, this unique collection provides a profound insight into the sheer vitality and depth of Classical Arabic literature. From the earliest surviving fragments of The Thousand and One Nights to the elegant beauty and profound power of the Qur'an - believed by the Islamic faith to contain the actual words of Allah - it includes translated extracts from all the major works of the period, alongside many less well-known but equally fascinating pieces. Exploring such traditional themes as lovesick yearning and fated doom, and considering subjects as diverse as the etiquette of falling in love with slave-girls and the terrors of the sea, this compelling anthology of poetry and prose brilliantly illuminates a body of writing that has been unjustly neglected by the west for centuries.

The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature

Richard Hakluyt

Renaissance diplomat and part-time spy, William Hakluyt was also England's first serious geographer, gathering together a wealth of accounts about the wide-ranging travels and discoveries of the sixteenth-century English. One of the epics of this great period of expansion, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation describes, in the words of the explorers themselves, an astonishing era in which the English grew rapidly aware of the sheer size and strangeness of their world. Mingling accounts of the journeys of renowned adventurers such as Drake and Frobisher with descriptions by other explorers and traders to reveal a nation beginning to dominate the seas, Hakluyt's great work was originally intended principally to assist navigation and trade. It also presents one of the first and greatest modern portraits of the globe.

Voyages and Discoveries

Charles Darwin

The Autobiographies of Charles Darwin (1809-82) provide a fascinating glimpse into the mind of one of the world's intellectual giants. They begin with engaging memories of his childhood and youth and of his burgeoning scientific curiosity and love of the natural world, which led to him joining the expedition on the Beagle. Darwin follows this with survey of his career and ends with a reckoning of his life's work. Interspersed with these recollections are fascinating portraits - from his devoted wife Emma and his talented father, both bullying and kind, to the leading figures of the Victorian scientific world he counted among his friends, including Lyell and Huxley. Honest and illuminating, these memoirs reveal a man who was isolated by his controversial beliefs and whose towering achievements were attained by a life-long passion for the discoveries of science.

Autobiographies

John Stuart Mill

John Robson

One of the greatest prodigies of his era, John Stuart Mill (1806-73) was studying arithmetic and Greek by the age of three, as part of an astonishingly intense education at his father's hand. Intellectually brilliant, fearless and profound, he became a leading Victorian liberal thinker, whose works - including On Liberty, Utilitarianism, The Subjection of Women and this Autobiography - are among the crowning achievements of the age. Here he describes the pressures placed on him by his childhood, the mental breakdown he suffered as a young man, his struggle to understand a world of feelings and emotions far removed from his father's strict didacticism, and the later development of his own radical beliefs. A moving account of an extraordinary life, this great autobiography reveals a man of deep integrity, constantly searching for truth.

Autobiography

Mr Gum

Mr Gumpy

Mr Majeika

Mrs Pepperpot Picture Books

Ms Rachel

Mummy Fairy

From the bestselling novel I'm Travelling Alone, two dynamic characters are born. 
Police investigators Holger Munch and Mia Krüger work together to solve the most complex crimes in Oslo, catching serial killers before they strike again but their personal lives are not simple either. As people, they could not be more different but as they battle their own demons their unlikely pairing make Munch and Krüger the best kind of classic detective duo.

Munch and Krüger

Murakami Collectible Classics

Murder House Serial

Murder Is Forever

Murdoku

My Brother's Famous Bottom

My Kitchen

My Love Story with Yamada-kun at Lv999

My Secret Unicorn

My Secret World

My Struggle

My Totally Secret Diary

Myron Bolitar

NYPD Red

Nat the Cat

Natalie Haynes Stands Up For the Classics

Natural Histories

Negima

Neil Gaiman Full-Cast Radio Adaptations

New Beginnings

New History of Britain

New Voices in Food

Nexus Confessions

From the turn of the century, through two world wars and a depression, the Neyler family face heartbreak and tragedy together.

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