Almudena Solana

Alon Hilu

Alon Ziv has a degree in neuroscience and was awarded the Certificate of Distinction in Teaching in Biology from UCLA.

Alon Ziv

Alonso Cueto

Alphonse Daudet was born in Nimes in 1840. He made his name with gentle stories and novels portraying life in the French provinces, notably Lettres de mon Moulin (1869). He died in 1897. His extraordinary notebooks detailing the effects of syphilis on his life were first published under the title In the Land of Pain by Daudet's widow in 1931. The first English translation by Julian Barnes was published by Cape in 2002.

Alphonse Daudet

Alua Arthur is a death doula, a recovering attorney and the founder of Going with Grace, a death doula training and end-of-life planning organisation. She travels the world as a keynote speaker, addressing audiences at medical and end-of-life conferences, universities, seminaries, senior citizens’ communities, and more. She can be found @going_with_grace and @alualoveslife on Instagram. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

Alua Arthur

Alun Anderson

Alun Carter

Alun Cochrane

Alun Richards

Alvar Ellegard

Alyce Faye Cleese

Alyissa Johnson is a graphic designer and lettering artist who focuses on positivity and feminism. You can find Alyissa playing with her dog Luna or selling prints at a local pop-up shop in Kansas City, Missouri.

Alyissa Johnson

Alys Cummings is a writer and journalist based on the north-east coast. She is an Emerging Creative Associate with New Writing North and a member of their North East Novelists group. As a producer and director, Alys has made documentaries for BBC Panorama on subjects including domestic abuse, the world of the UK’s conspiracy theorists, and avoidable deaths in maternity care. Her most recent film was shortlisted for Scoop of the Year at the British Journalist awards. 
 
Murder Most Cryptic is her first novel, and won Pitch Perfect at the 2024 Bloody Scotland festival.

Alys Cummings

Alys Fowler

Born in Silchester, Hampshire, Alys Fowler had a rural childhood, growing up surrounded by animals in the countryside. She was influenced by her mother's gardening talents and, after leaving school in 1996 she studied at the Royal Horticultural Society, the Royal Botanic Gardens in London, and later the New York Botanical Gardens, returning to the UK to complete a masters at UCL in 2002. 
 
Alys spent some years presenting the long-running BBC series Gardeners' World and has since become a prominent horticultural journalist, writing a popular weekly column in the Guardian.

Alyson Walsh

ALYSSA DAY is an award-winning and New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of romantasy, mystery, and romance whose books have sold more than a million copies and been translated into many languages. She is also a mental health advocate who has lived with depression since she was a teenager. 
 
 
She’s an Ohio State grad and graduated summa cum laude from Capital University Law School and practiced as a trial lawyer for a decade, when she also served as an advocate for at-risk children. She lives in Florida with her Navy Guy husband, has two amazing kids, and rescues dogs. Especially pugs. So Many Pugs.

Alyssa Day

Alyssa Villaire is a writer of young adult fantasy. While she's based in Los Angeles, most of her stories harken back to the places where she grew up—from the woods of rural Indiana to the lakeshores of Wisconsin and Michigan. She has published short stories in Luna Station Quarterly and in an anthology titled Journeys to Uncharted Lands. When she’s not writing, Alyssa is probably eating spicy food, watching horror movies, or waiting in a virtual Ticketmaster line.

Alyssa Villaire

Alyssa Wees grew up writing stories starring her Beanie Babies, in between training in ballet and watching lots of Disney movies. She earned a BA in English from Creighton University and an MFA in Fiction Writing from Columbia College Chicago. She lives outside of Chicago with her family.

Alyssa Wees

Alzheimer's Society

Aman Sethi

Amanda Archer

Amanda Barry

Amanda Berriman was born in Germany and grew up in Edinburgh, reading books, playing music, writing stories and climbing hills. She works as a primary school teacher and lives on the edge of the Peak District with her husband, two children and dogs.

Amanda Berriman

Amanda Berry

Amanda Brunker

Amanda Doyle is a Founder of Treat Media, an award-winning media company that makes art for humans who want to stay human. With Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach, she authored We Can Do Hard Things: Answers to Life’s 20 Questions, the book being hailed as ‘the guidebook for being alive.’ Named one of the ‘50 Most Powerful People in Podcasting,’ Amanda is co-host of the chart-topping podcast We Can Do Hard Things, which has received over a half billion plays. She is an executive producer of the Sundance award-winning film Come See Me in the Good Light. Amanda was Vice President and General Counsel of Together Rising, a non-profit organisation which distributed more than $55 million to women, families and children in crisis. Amanda practised law at a global corporate firm and as a Legal Fellow with International Justice Mission in Rwanda, securing land rights for women and accountability for child victims of sexual violence. Her academic and political work sits at the intersection of social, institutional and interpersonal systems of violence, oppression and liberation – laser-focused on practical justice in everyday lived experience.

Amanda Doyle

Amanda Eyre Ward

Amanda Eyre Ward is the critically acclaimed author of seven novels, including How to Be Lost, Close Your Eyes, The Same Sky, and The Nearness of You. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her family.

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Leo Tolstoy

Describing Tolstoy's crisis of depression and estrangement from the world, A Confession (1879) is an autobiographical work of exceptional emotional honesty. By the time he was fifty, Tolstoy had already written the novels that would assure him of literary immortality; he had a wife, a large estate and numerous children; he was 'a happy man' and in good health - yet life had lost its meaning. In this poignant confessional fragment, he records a period of his life when he began to turn away from fiction and aesthetics, and to search instead for 'a practical religion not promising future bliss, but giving bliss on earth'.

A Confession and Other Religious Writings

Chrétien de Troyes

Taking the legends surrounding King Arthur and weaving in new psychological elements of personal desire and courtly manner, Chrétien de Troyes fashioned a new form of medieval Romance. The Knight of the Cart is the first telling of the adulterous relationship between Lancelot and Arthur's Queen Guinevere, and in The Knight with the Lion Yvain neglects his bride in his quest for greater glory. Erec and Enide explores a knight's conflict between love and honour, Cligés exalts the possibility of pure love outside marriage, while the haunting The Story of the Grail chronicles the legendary quest. Rich in symbolism, these evocative tales combine closely observed detail with fantastic adventure to create a compelling world that profoundly influenced Malory, and are the basis of the Arthurian legends we know today.

Arthurian Romances

Eric Griffiths

Matthew Reynolds

Dante Alighieri created poetry of unparalleled force and beauty that proved influential far beyond the borders of his native Italy and beyond his own time. This new collection brings together selections from a wide variety of English translations of Dante's poetry including the passionate Vita Nuova and the Commedia - his epic tale of one man's journey into the after-life.  It also includes extracts from a wealth of poems inspired by his work - including Spenser's Faerie Queen, Milton's Paradise Lost, Ezra Pound's Cantos and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Covering the period from Chaucer to the present day, this is a remarkable exploration of the heritage provided by one of the most inspirational poets of all time.

Dante in English

Hippocrates

This work is a sampling of the Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of ancient Greek medical works. At the beginning, and interspersed throughout, there are discussions on the philosophy of being a physician. There is a large section about how to treat limb fractures, and the section called The Nature of Man describes the physiological theories of the time. The book ends with a discussion of embryology and a brief anatomical description of the heart.

Hippocratic Writings

Plutarch

Plutarch's vivid and engaging portraits of the Spartans and their customs are a major source of our knowledge about the rise and fall of this remarkable Greek city-state between the sixth and third centuries BC. Through his Lives of Sparta's leaders and his recording of memorable Spartan Sayings he depicts a people who lived frugally and mastered their emotions in all aspects of life, who also disposed of unhealthy babies in a deep chasm, introduced a gruelling regime of military training for boys, and treated their serfs brutally. Rich in anecdote and detail, Plutarch's writing brings to life the personalities and achievements of Sparta with unparalleled flair and humanity.

On Sparta

Livy

Livy (c. 59 BC-AD 17) dedicated most of his life to writing some 142 volumes of history, the first five of which comprise The Early History of Rome. With stylistic brilliance, he chronicles nearly 400 years of history, from the founding of Rome (traditionally dated to 757 BC) to the Gallic invasion in 386 BC - an era which witnessed the reign of seven kings, the establishment of the Republic, civil strife and brutal conflict. Bringing compelling characters to life, and re-presenting familiar tales - including the tragedy of Coriolanus and the story of Romulus and Remus - The Early History is a truly epic work, and a passionate warning that Rome should learn from its history.

The Early History of Rome

Gregory of Tours

Written following the collapse of Rome's secular control over western Europe, the History of Gregory (c. AD 539-594) is a fascinating exploration of the events that shaped sixth-century France. This volume contains all ten books from the work, the last seven of which provide an in-depth description of Gregory's own era, in which he played an important role as Bishop of Tours. With skill and eloquence, Gregory brings the age vividly to life, as he relates the exploits of missionaries, martyrs, kings and queens - including the quarrelling sons of Lothar I, and the ruthless Queen Fredegund, third wife of Chilperic. Portraying an age of staggering cruelty and rapid change, this is a powerful depiction of the turbulent progression of faith at a time of political and social chaos.

The History of the Franks

H. Woudhuysen

The era between the accession of Henry VIII and the crisis of the English republic in 1659 formed one of the most fertile epochs in world literature. This anthology offers a broad selection of its poetry, and includes a wide range of works by the great poets of the age - notably Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Sepnser, John Donne, William Shakespeare and John Milton. Poems by less well-known writers also feature prominently - among them significant female poets such as Lady Mary Wroth and Katherine Philips. Compelling and exhilarating, this landmark collection illuminates a time of astonishing innovation, imagination and diversity.

The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse

1509-1659

Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill's six-volume history of the cataclysm that swept the world remains the definitive history of the Second World War. Lucid, dramatic, remarkable both for its breadth and sweep and for its sense of personal involvement, it is universally acknowledged as a magnificent reconstruction and is an enduring, compelling work that led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Closing the Ring chronicles the period between June 1943 and July 1944 as the Allies consolidated their gains towards a drive to victory - the fall of Mussolini, Hitler's 'secret weapon', the mounting air offensive on Germany, strategies to defeat Japan and the plans for D Day.

Closing the Ring

The Second World War

Winston Churchill's six-volume history of the Second World War.

The Gathering Storm

Winston Churchill's six-volume history of the cataclysm that swept the world remains the definitive history of the Second World War. Lucid, dramatic, remarkable both for its breadth and sweep and for its sense of personal involvement, it is universally acknowledged as a magnificent reconstruction and is an enduring, compelling work that led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. The Grand Alliance recounts the momentous events of 1941 surrounding America's entry into the War and Hitler's march on Russia - the continuing onslaught on British civilians during the Blitz, Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and the alliance between Britain and America that shaped the outcome of the War.

The Grand Alliance

Winston Churchill's six-volume history of the cataclysm that swept the world remains the definitive history of the Second World War. Lucid, dramatic, remarkable both for its breadth and sweep and for its sense of personal involvement, it is universally acknowledged as a magnificent reconstruction and is an enduring, compelling work that led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. The Hinge of Fate describes how the tide of the war gradually turned for Britain and its allies from constant defeat to almost unbroken successes - Japan's successful assault on the Pacific, Britain's attempts to aid a beleaguered Russia and the defeat of Rommel at the Battle of Alamein.

The Hinge of Fate

Winston Churchill's six-volume history of the cataclysm that swept the world remains the definitive history of the Second World War. Lucid, dramatic, remarkable both for its breadth and sweep and for its sense of personal involvement, it is universally acknowledged as a magnificent reconstruction and is an enduring, compelling work that led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Their Finest Hour enthrallingly recounts key events and battles from May to December 1940 as Britain stood isolated while Nazi Germany pursued its seemingly unconquerable war path - the fall of France, Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, the horrors of the Blitz and Hitler's plans to invade and crush Russia, his sole ally in Europe.

Their Finest Hour

Winston Churchill's six-volume history of the cataclysm that swept the world remains the definitive history of the Second World War. Lucid, dramatic, remarkable both for its breadth and sweep and for its sense of personal involvement, it is universally acknowledged as a magnificent reconstruction and is an enduring, compelling work that led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Triumph and Tragedy recounts the dramatic months as the War drew to a close - the Normandy landings, the liberation of Western Europe, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the surrender of Germany and Japan.

Triumph and Tragedy

Christina Rossetti

Rossetti is unique among Victorian poets for the sheer range of her subject matter and the variety of her verse form.  This collection brings together fantasy poems, such as Goblin Market, and terrifyingly vivid verses for children, love lyrics and sonnets, and the vast body of her devotional poetry.  Rossetti's poems weave connections between love and death, triumph and loss, heavenly joys and earthly pleasures.  The directness and clarity of her lyrics still have the power to startle us with their truth and beauty.

Complete Poems

Snorri Sturluson

This compelling Icelandic history describes the life of King Harald Hardradi, from his battles across Europe and Russia to his final assault on England in 1066, less than three weeks before the invasion of William the Conqueror. It was a battle that led to his death and marked the end of an era in which Europe had been dominated by the threat of Scandinavian forces. Despite England's triumph, it also played a crucial part in fatally weakening the English army immediately prior to the Norman Conquest, changing the course of history. Taken from the Heimskringla - Snorri Sturluson's complete account of Norway from prehistoric times to 1177 - this is a brilliantly human depiction of the turbulent life and savage death of the last great Norse warrior-king.

King Harald's Saga

Francois Voltaire

Also known as the Lettres anglaises ou philosophiques, Voltaire's response to his exile in England offered the French public of 1734 a panoramic view of British culture. Perceiving them as a veiled attack against the ancien regime, however, the French government ordered the letters burned and Voltaire persecuted.

Letters on England

William Carlos Williams

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In his work as a physician, Williams had learnt the skill of objective observation which he applied to his poetry, examining, as he said, 'the particular to discover the universal'. Marked by a vernacular American speech and direct observation of the landscape and people of his native New Jersey, his poetry explores the 'raw merging of American pastoral and urban squalor. Emotionally restrained but rich in sensory experience, the poems were written according to the guiding concept: 'no ideas but in things' and those 'things', a red wheelbarrow, a group of trees, a river, convey the local and the particular with a vivid intensity.

Selected Poems

Quintus Curtius Rufus

Alexander the Great (356-323 BC), who led the Macedonian army to victory in Egypt, Syria, Persia and India, was perhaps the most successful conqueror the world has ever seen. Yet although no other individual has attracted so much speculation across the centuries, Alexander himself remains an enigma. Curtius' History offers a great deal of information unobtainable from other sources of the time. A compelling narrative of a turbulent era, the work recounts events on a heroic scale, detailing court intrigue, stirring speeches and brutal battles - among them, those of Macedonia's great war with Persia, which was to culminate in Alexander's final triumph over King Darius and the defeat of an ancient and mighty empire. It also provides by far the most plausible and haunting portrait of Alexander we possess: a brilliantly realized image of a man ruined by constant good fortune in his youth.

The History of Alexander

A. S. Byatt

George Eliot

The works collected in this volume provide an illuminating introduction to George Eliot's incisive views on religion, art and science, and the nature and purpose of fiction. Essays such as 'Evangelical Teaching' show her rejecting her earlier religious beliefs, while 'Woman in France' questions conventional ideas about female virtues and marriage, and 'Notes on Form in Art' sets out theories of idealism and realism that she developed further in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. It also includes selections from Eliot's translations of works by Strauss and Feuerbach that challenged many ideas about Christianity; excerpts from her poems; and reviews of writers such as Wollstonecraft, Goethe and Browning. Wonderfully rich in imagery and observations, these pieces reveal the intellectual development of this most challenging and rewarding of writers.

Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings

Geoffrey Chaucer

At the Tabard Inn in Southwark, a jovial group of pilgrims assembles, including an unscrupulous Pardoner, a noble-minded Knight, a ribald Miller, the lusty Wife of Bath, and Chaucer himself. As they set out on their journey towards the shrine of Thomas a Becket in Canterbury, each character agrees to tell a tale. The twenty-four tales that follow are by turns learned, fantastic, pious, melancholy and lewd, and together offer an unrivalled glimpse into the mind and spirit of medieval England.

The Canterbury Tales

Leon Alberti

Artist, architect, poet and philosopher, Leon Battista Alberti revolutionized the history of art with his theories of perspective in On Painting (1435). Inspired by the order and beauty inherent in nature, his groundbreaking work sets out the principles of distance, dimension and proportion; instructs the painter on how to use the rules of composition, representation, light and colour to create work that is graceful and pleasing to the eye; and stipulates the moral and artistic pre-requisites of the successful painter. On Painting had an immediate and profound influence on Italian Renaissance artists including Ghiberti, Fra Angelico and Veneziano and on later figures such as Leonardo da Vinci, and remains a compelling theory of art.

On Painting

Ignatius of Loyola

Joseph Munitiz

One of the key figures in Christian history, St. Ignatius of Loyola (c. 1491-1556) was a passionate and unique spiritual thinker and visionary. The works gathered here provide a first-hand, personal introduction to this remarkable character: a man who turned away from the Spanish nobility to create the revolutionary Jesuit Order, inspired by the desire to help people follow Christ. His Reminiscences describe his early life, his religious conversion following near-paralysis in battle, and his spiritual and physical ordeals as he struggled to assist those in need, including plague, persecution and imprisonment. The Spiritual Exercises offer guidelines to those seeking the will of God, and the Spiritual Diary shows Ignatius in daily mystical contact with God during a personal strugg;e. The Letters collected here provide an insight into Ignatius' ceaseless campaign to assist those seeking enlightenment and to direct the young Society of Jesus.

Personal Writings

Hildegard of Bingen

Benedictine nun, poet and musician, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was one of the most remarkable figures of the Middle Ages. She undertook preaching tours throughout the German empire at the age of sixty, and was consulted not only by her religious contemporaries but also by kings and emperors, yet it is largely for her apocalyptic and mystical writings that she is remembered. This volume includes selections from her three visionary works, her treatises on medicine and the natural world, her devotional songs, and fascinating letters to prominent figures of her time. Dealing with such eternal subjects as the relationship between humans and nature, and men and women, Hildegard's works show her to be a wide-ranging thinker who created such fresh, startling images and ideas that her writings have been compared to Dante and Blake.

Selected Writings

Burrows

A New Year's feast at King Arthur's court is interrupted by the appearance of a gigantic Green Knight, resplendent on horseback. He challenges any one of Arthur's men to behead him, provided that if he survives he can return the blow a year later. Sir Gawain accepts the challenge and decapitates the knight - but the mysterious warrior cheats death and vanishes, bearing his head with him. The following winter Gawain sets out to find the Knight in the wild Northern lands and to keep his side of the bargain. One of the great masterpieces of Middle English poetry, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight magically combines elements of fairy tale and heroic sagas with the pageantry, chivalry and courtly love of medieval Romance.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Bamba Suso

Banna Kanute

Sunjata Keita was the founder of one of the greatest empires of Western Africa. These two epic accounts of his life portray a greedy, slow-witted child - said to have crawled until the age of seven - who grew up as prophecy foretold to become a mighty warrior, renowned for his bravery and superhuman strength. They describe how, with the help of his sister, who seduced their arch-enemy Sumanguru into revealing his secret powers, Sunjata defeated the  Susu overlords and created the Mali Empire which would last for two centuries. Based on events from the early thirteenth century, these tales of heroism and magic are still celebrated across West Africa as part of a living epic oral tradition.

Sunjata

Gambian Versions of the Mande Epic

Mary Prince

The History of Mary Prince (1831) was the first narrative of a black woman to be published in Britain. It describes Prince's sufferings as a slave in Bermuda, Turks Island and Antigua, and her eventual arrival in London with her brutal owner Mr Wood in 1828. Prince escaped from him and sought assistance from the Anti-Slavery Society, where she dictated her remarkable story to Susanna Strickland (later Moodie). A moving and graphic document, The History drew attention to the continuation of slavery in the Caribbean, despite an 1807 Act of Parliament officially ending the slave trade. It inspired two libel actions and ran into three editions in the year of its publication. This powerful rallying cry for emancipation remains an extraordinary testament to Prince's ill-treatment, suffering and survival.

The History of Mary Prince

A West Indian Slave

Edward Gibbon

Edward Gibbon's six-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88) is among the most magnificent and ambitious narratives in European literature. Its subject is the fate of one of the world's greatest civilizations over thirteen centuries - its rulers, wars and society, and the events that led to its disastrous collapse. Here, in volumes three and four, Gibbon vividly recounts the waves of barbarian invaders under commanders such as Alaric and Attila, who overran and eventually destroyed the West. He then turns his gaze to events in the East, where even the achievements of the Byzantine emperor Justinian and the campaigns of the brilliant military leader Belisarius could not conceal the fundamental weaknesses of their empire.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Wendy Doniger

The earliest of the four Hindu religious scriptures known as the Vedas, and the first extensive composition to survive in any Indo-European language, the Rig Veda (c. 1200-900 BC) is a collection of over 1,000 individual Sanskrit hymns. A work of intricate beauty, it provides a unique insight into early Indian mythology, religion and culture. This selection of 108 of the hymns, chosen for their eloquence and wisdom, focuses on the enduring themes of creation, sacrifice, death, women, the sacred plant soma and the gods. Inspirational and profound, it provides a fascinating introduction to one of the founding texts of Hindu scripture - an awesome and venerable ancient work of Vedic ritual, prayer, philosophy, legend and faith.

The Rig Veda

John Mandeville

Ostensibly written by an English knight, the Travels purport to relate his experiences in the Holy Land, Egypt, India and China. Mandeville claims to have served in the Great Khan's army, and to have travelled in 'the lands beyond' - countries populated by dog-headed men, cannibals, Amazons and Pygmies. Although Marco Polo's slightly earlier narrative ultimately proved more factually accurate, Mandeville's was widely known, used by Columbus, Leonardo da Vinci and Martin Frobisher, and inspiring writers as diverse as Swift, Defoe and Coleridge. This intriguing blend of fact, exaggeration and absurdity offers both fascinating insight into and subtle criticism of fourteenth-century conceptions of the world.

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