Aaron Dignan is the founder of The Ready--a global organizational transformation and coaching practice--that helps companies large and small adopt new forms of self-organization and dynamic teaming. Clients include Johnson &amp; Johnson, Microsoft, Lloyds Bank, Citibank, Boeing, Mailchimp, Airbnb, Dropbox, and charity: water. 
 
He is also the founder of Murmur--a SaaS startup that helps teams scale culture through the magic of working agreements. The Murmur platform will allow every team on the planet to define and share their ways of working. 
 
Dignan is the author of Brave New Work (2019) and Game Frame (2011), co-host of the Brave New Work podcast, and a friend to misfit toys.

Aaron Dignan

Aaron Edwards is a senior lecturer in defence and international affairs at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, specialising in terrorism and counter-insurgency. He is the author and editor of several books, including Defending the Realm: The Politics of Britain’s Small Wars Since 1945, and has lectured all over the world on aspects of national and international security. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Aaron Edwards

Aaron Robertson is a writer, an editor, and a translator of Italian literature. His translation of Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon was short-listed for the 2020 PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award, and in 2021 he received a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, n+1, The Point, and Literary Hub, among other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Aaron Robertson

Aaron Shapiro

Aaron T Beck

Aaron Vallance

Aaron Young was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, and read Politics and Communications at The University of Liverpool. He is a BAFTA-nominated director, producer and executive producer with over 20 years of experience across projects for the BBC, PBS, Channel 4, Channel 5, UKTV, UK Film Council and Arts Council England. A long-time collaborator of acclaimed historian, James Holland, he is the producer and director of the BAFTA-shortlisted BBC titles ‘Battle of Britain: The Real Story’ and, ‘Dam Busters: The Race to Smash the German Dams’, as well as ‘The Battle for Malta’, ‘Normandy ’44: The Battle Beyond D-Day’, the RTS-nominated ‘Imphal &amp; Kohima: Britain’s Greatest Battle.’, and the 3-part series, 'Normandy '44: D-Day and the Battle for France. His most recent credits include 'Hidden Histories of WWII', 'Lost Temples of Cambodia', the RTS-winning ‘Lost Home Movies of Nazi Germany’, and ‘Prue Leith: Journey with My Daughter’. Aaron was named in the inaugural list of BAFTA ‘Brits to Watch.’ He is the co-owner of award-winning film and television production company, Bright Button Productions, and lives with his wife and children in Poundbury, Dorset.

Aaron Young

Aatish Taseer

Abbe Prevost

Abbey Bryant is an NYC-based award-winning illustrator. With her BFA in Children's Book Illustration, her notable illustrated books include Nautilus award winner Hazel Mist, Hypnotist as well as an Enchanted Fairy House Kit with Scholastic's Klutz! 
 
As a queer illustrator, LGBTQ+ themes and stories hold a spot near to her heart. Most days she can be found around the city drawing New Yorkers or sketching trees at the park.

Abbey Bryant

Abbey Clancy is a model, television presenter and the host of chart-topping podcast The Therapy Crouch. She was the runner-up of Britain's Next Top Model in 2006, winner of Strictly Come Dancing in 2013 and went on to present Britain's Next Top Model. Later this year she will host Celebrity Homes on ITV.

Abbey Clancy

Abbie Greaves studied at Cambridge University before working in a literary agency for a number of years. She was inspired to write her first novel, The Silent Treatment, after reading a newspaper article about a boy in Japan who had never seen his parents speak to one another before. 
 
Abbie lives in Brighton with her boyfriend.

Abbie Greaves

Abbie Ross is a British author and psychotherapist. Her first book, Hippy Dinners, a funny and poignant memoir of her bohemian childhood in 1970s North Wales, has been optioned by Baby Cow, who are developing it into an 8-part television series. 
Before turning to writing, Abbie had a successful career as a producer at Aardman Animations, the acclaimed studios behind Wallace &amp; Gromit and the film Chicken Run. 
Today, she divides her time between her thriving psychotherapy practice in Bristol, and her writing, and finds that the two careers complement each other perfectly.

Abbie Ross

Abbie Spallen

Abbie Taylor lives in Dublin. She works as a doctor and has two daughters.

Abbie Taylor

Abby L Yates co-founded the Ghostbusters with Erin Gilbert. Ghosts from Our Past was her first book, now finally back in print.

Abby L Yates

Abby Lee

Abby Rawlinson is an integrative therapist with a private practice based in east London, UK. Her work mixes traditional psychotherapeutic theories with cutting-edge, evidence-based techniques into a style that feels relatable, down-to-earth, and compassionate. Abby regularly contributes to articles, including but not limited to Stylist, Elle, BBC, Harpers Bazaar, Sheerluxe, Women's Health, and Psychologies. She can be found on Instagram @therapywithabby or online at therapywithabby.co.uk

Abby Rawlinson

Abby Wambach is a two-time Olympic gold medallist, FIFA World Cup champion, six-time winner of the U.S. Soccer Athlete of the Year award and one of Time’s Most Influential People. She is a founder of Treat Media, an award-winning media company that makes art for humans who want to stay human. Abby is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Wolfpack and the New York Times bestseller Forward. Named one of the ‘50 Most Powerful People in Podcasting,’ she is co-host of the chart-topping podcast We Can Do Hard Things, which has received over a half billion plays. Abby is an executive producer of the Sundance award-winning film Come See Me in the Good Light, part owner of the NWSL’s Angel City Football Club and sits on multiple boards. Her most recent book, We Can Do Hard Things: Answers to Life’s 20 Questions, created with Glennon Doyle, Amanda Doyle and Treat Media, is being hailed as ‘the guidebook for being alive.’

Abby Wambach

Abel &amp; Cole’s story starts in 1988 with Keith Abel flogging potatoes door-to-door. ‘Of course potatoes are organic,’ he thought, ‘they’re vegetables’. However, he quickly discovered how unnecessarily complicated our food system had become and, consequently, realised the huge benefits of going organic and never looked back. In fact, Abel &amp; Cole still get veg from the farm where Keith's first organic spuds came from. 
To this day, their priorities remain the same. Now, selling 100% organic produce, Abel &amp; Cole believe that organic farming (a holistic system that encourages biodiversity) is the very best way to go. It protects our countryside and the critters that inhabit it, insists on the very best animal welfare, supports your local community and, frankly, tastes heaps better. Abel &amp; Cole think so anyway.

Abel & Cole Limited

Abhijit Banerjee, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). In 2011, he was named one of Foreign Policy magazine’s top 100 global thinkers. Banerjee served on the U.N. Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.

Abhijit V. Banerjee

Abhishek Mukherjee, 30, is a Delhi-based journalist. He holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from Delhi University, a post-graduate diploma in journalism from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Raipur. He also likes dogs.

Abhishek Mukherjee

Abi Elphinstone grew up in Scotland where she spent most of her childhood running wild across the moors, hiding in tree houses and building dens in the woods. After being coaxed out of her tree house, she studied English at Bristol University and then worked as an English teacher in Africa, Berkshire and London. She is the bestselling and multi-award shortlisted author of RUMBLESTAR (first in The Unmapped Chronicles), SKY SONG &amp; THE DREAMSNATCHER TRILOGY, published by S&amp;S. When she's not writing, Abi volunteers for Beanstalk, speaks in schools and travels the world looking for her next story.

Abi Elphinstone

Abi Falase is a Black British writer and director, reimagining fundamental societal concepts in inventive new worlds. Abi has written and directed a number of plays, including The Village and Rush with the Almedia Theatre, as well as Rift for Immediate Theatre and was shortlisted for the BBC Scriptworks ‘A Thousand Stories’ scriptwriting competition in 2021.

Abi Falase

Abi Titmuss

Abie Longstaff is the eldest of six children and grew up in Australia, Hong Kong and France. She knows all about squabbling, chaos and bossing younger sisters around. So she logically began her career as a barrister. She started writing when her children were born. Her favourite childhood books were Hating Alison Ashley, A Little Princess, Maura's Angel and The Black Stallion and she sneakily reads them again sometimes. Abie lives in Hove with her family.

Abie Longstaff

Abigail Ahern

Abigail Balfe is a queer, auDHD author-illustrator and Emmy award-winning creative based in Brighton. Before writing books full-time, Abigail led digital campaigns for pop stars such as One Direction and Little Mix, and for TV broadcasters including Channel 4 and Netflix. She also performed stand-up comedy and won several small trophies for her onstage humour, which featured life-size illustrations, ridiculous songs, and rambling stories about her family. In 2023, Abigail was named one of the Top 50 Influential Neurodivergent Women in the UK.

Abigail Balfe

Abigail Docherty

Abigail Foster is a Chartered Accountant and founder of Elent Finance, a financial education company designed to demystify the world of finance and empower you to achieve financial wellbeing. 
 
Abigail has worked with leading financial institutions across the UK, including HMRC, the Bank of England and Downing Street, and global companies such as Google and Goldman Sachs. She hosts a weekly money segment on LBC radio and has also appeared as a finance expert on ITV, Channel 5 and Sky News.

Abigail Foster

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Michael Griesbach

___________________________ 
THE BESTSELLING BOOK ON THE CASE IN THE HIT NETFLIX SERIES MAKING A MURDERER 
 
This is the story of one of America's most notorious wrongful convictions. 
 
Steven Avery is a Wisconsin man who spent eighteen years in prison for the violent assault of Penny Beernsten. But two years after he was exonerated, just when he was poised to reap millions in his wrongful conviction lawsuit, Steven Avery was arrested for the brutal murder of Teresa Halbach. The 'Innocent Man' had turned into a cold-blooded killer. 
 
Or had he? 
 
Michael Griesbach is a veteran prosecutor who worked with the Wisconsin Innocence Project on the case which led to Avery's exoneration in 2003. Examining both trials in depth and presenting an alternative view of the Teresa Halbach case, The Innocent Killer exposes the failings of the justice system and its devastating consequences for both the accused and the victims.

The Innocent Killer

Kevin Ashton

WINNER OF THE 800-CEO-READ BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2015 
 
In the vein of Susan Cain's QUIET and Malcolm Gladwell's DAVID AND GOLIATH, HOW TO FLY A HORSE is a smart, empowering book that dispels the myths around genius and creativity. 
 
There is a myth about how something new comes to be; that geniuses have dramatic moments of insight where great things and thoughts are born whole. Symphonies are composed complete. Science is accomplished with eureka shrieks. Businesses are built by magic touch. 
 
The myth is wrong. Anyone can create. 
 
Acclaimed technology pioneer Kevin Ashton takes us behind the scenes of creation to reveal the true process of discovery and how ‘new’ comes to be. From Archimedes to Apple, from Kandinsky to the Coke can, from the Wright brothers – who set out to ‘fly a horse’ – to Woody Allen, he exposes the seemingly unremarkable individuals, gradual steps, multiple failures and countless ordinary and often uncredited acts that led to our most astounding breakthroughs.

How To Fly A Horse

The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery

Mark Beeman

John Kounios

Where do great ideas come from? 
What actually happens in your brain during a ‘Eureka’ moment? 
How can we have more of them? 
 
John Kounios and Mark Beeman, leading experts on the neural bases of insight and creative thinking, have conducted pioneering neuroimaging research examining brain activity at and before these moments of clarity. In The Eureka Factor they reveal exactly how sudden insights are formed in the brain, how we can increase our chances of generating them, and how they impact our thinking. 
 
Helping to unlock the mechanisms behind intuitive flashes and inspiration, this ground-breaking account not only explains the science of insight, but also describes the keys to innovation and creativity.

The Eureka Factor

Creative Insights and the Brain

Barry Cryer

Graeme Garden

Tim Brooke-Taylor

Jack Dee

Know your Mornington Crescent from your Cheddar Gorge? 
 
Are you partial to a bad-tempered clavier? 
 
Would you like some unhelpful travel advice? 
 
Featuring the very best moments from a forty-year history of broadcasting, Stephen Fry introduces this indispensable companion to I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, the Radio 4 comedy series which attracts millions of listeners each week. 
 
Featuring hilarious excerpts from the show's favourite games including: The Uxbridge English Dictionary, Famous First Words, the Trail of the Lonesome Pun and Late Arrivals as well as much much more, this book is essential for Clue fans young and old. 
 
For those new to Clue, there's a Beginner's Guide on how to play Mornington Crescent and numerous games which are fun and easy to play at home and guaranteed to entertain.

I’m Sorry I Haven't a Clue: The Best of Forty Years

Foreword by Stephen Fry

Chloe Combi

Featured on the Podcast You Don't Know Me hosted by Chloe Combi - an exploration into the lives of global Gen Z 
 
'An important and timely book. These are voices that need to be heard.' - Anthony Horowitz 
 
The world is changing by the day. Today's teenagers are growing up in a world of widening social inequality, political apathy and economic uncertainty. 
 
They join gangs, and are kind. 
They're obese, and they're more health-conscious than any generation before. 
They have underage sex, and they're less likely to get pregnant young. 
They drink, and they go teetotal. 
They watch porn, and they shun it. 
They go to church, and they have no religion. 
They're a menace to society. They are society. 
 
Curious, creative and worried about the future, Generation Z have grown up in a world of unprecedented connection, and ever-increasing division. Chloe Combi has travelled around the UK, talking with teenagers from all kinds of backgrounds about their lives, their fears and their dreams, uncovering some truly surprising stories about a generation often stereotyped and dismissed. 
 
Told in their voices, Generation Z is a shocking, enlightening and funny portrait of how it feels to be young in modern Britain, and what it takes to survive and thrive on the journey to adulthood.

Generation Z

Their Voices, Their Lives

Azar Nafisi

From the author of the bestselling memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran comes a powerful and passionate case for the vital role of fiction today. 
 
Ten years ago, Azar Nafisi electrified readers with her million-copy bestseller, Reading Lolita in Tehran, which told the story of how, against the backdrop of morality squads and executions, she taught The Great Gatsby and other classics to her eager students in Iran. In this exhilarating follow-up, Nafisi has written the book her fans have been waiting for: an impassioned, beguiling and utterly original tribute to the vital importance of fiction in a democratic society. 
 
Taking her cue from a challenge thrown to her at a reading, she energetically responds to those who say fiction has nothing to teach us today. Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favourite novels, she invites us to join her as citizens of her 'Republic of Imagination', a country where the villains are conformity, and orthodoxy and the only passport to entry is a free mind and a willingness to dream.

The Republic of Imagination

Elena Gorokhova

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WILLIAM SAROYAN INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR WRITING 
 
‘Incredibly powerful … by the time you reach the end, you’ll have experienced the laughter, sorrow, joy, regret, love and hurt of a real life.’ Alan Alda 
 
‘The possibility of leaving Russia was never as thrilling as the prospect of leaving my mother.’ 
 
When Elena Gorokhova arrives in America, the only link back to her Russian past is a suitcase filled with twenty kilograms of what used to be her life. Navigating a country she had been taught to fear, Elena begins to carve out a new life in an unfamiliar world. 
 
Before the birth of Elena's daughter, her mother comes to visit and stays for twenty-four years. Elena, must struggle with the challenge of raising an American daughter whilst living with her controlling mother, a mirror image of her Motherland. 
 
Russian Tattoo is the story of what it means to be an outsider, and what happens when the cultures of our past and present collide. Above all, it is an insightful portrait of mothers and daughters.

Russian Tattoo

Matthew Parker

THE TOP 10 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
'Completely fascinating, authoritative and intriguing' William Boyd 
 
'The big bang of Bond books... Beautiful, brilliant' Tony Parsons 
_______________________________________________________________________ 
 
Goldeneye: the story of Ian Fleming in Jamaica and the creation of British national icon, James Bond. 
 
From 1946 until the end of his life, Ian Fleming lived for two months of every year at Goldeneye - the house he built on a point of high land overlooking a small white sand beach on Jamaica's north coast. All the James Bond novels and stories were written here. 
 
Fleming adored the Jamaica he had discovered, at the time an imperial backwater that seemed unchanged from the glory days of the empire. Amid its stunning natural beauty, the austerity and decline of post-war Britain could be forgotten. For Fleming, Jamaica offered the perfect mixture of British old-fashioned conservatism and imperial values, alongside the dangerous and sensual: the same curious combination that made his novels so appealing, and successful. The spirit of the island - its exotic beauty, its unpredictability, its melancholy, its love of exaggeration and gothic melodrama - infuses his writing. 
 
Fleming threw himself into the island's hedonistic Jet Set party scene: Hollywood giants, and the cream of British aristocracy, the theatre, literary society and the secret services spent their time here drinking and bed-hopping. But while the whites partied, Jamaican blacks were rising up to demand respect and self-government. And as the imperial hero James Bond - projecting British power across the world - became ever more anachronistic and fantastical, so his popularity soared. 
 
Drawing on extensive interviews with Ian's family, his Jamaican lover Blanche Blackwell and many other islanders, Goldeneye is a beautifully written, revealing and original exploration of a crucially important part of Ian Fleming's life and work.

Goldeneye

Where Bond was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica

Simon Heffer

In his best-selling Strictly English Simon Heffer explained how to write and speak our language well. In Simply English he offers an entertaining and supremely useful A–Z guide to frequent errors, common misunderstandings and stylistic howlers. What is the difference between amend and emend, between imply and infer, and between uninterested and disinterested? When should one put owing to rather than due to? Why should the temptation to write actually, basically or at this moment in time always be strenuously resisted? How does one use an apostrophe correctly, ensure that one understands what alibi really means, and avoid the perils of the double negative? 
 
With articles on everything from punctuation to tabloid English to adverbs and adjectives, Simply English is the essential companion for anyone who cares about the language and wants to use it correctly.

Simply English

An A-Z of Avoidable Errors

Thomas Harding

In July 2012 Thomas Harding’s fourteen-year-old son Kadian was killed in a bicycle accident. Shortly afterwards Thomas began to write. This book is the result. 
 
Beginning on the day of Kadian’s death, and continuing to the one-year anniversary, and beyond, Kadian Journal is at once a record of grief, a moving tribute to a lost son, and a celebration of a life lived to its fullest.

Kadian Journal

Jamie Bartlett

From the creator of hit podcast The Missing Cryptoqueen 
______________________________ 
Guns. Sex. Drugs. Murder. 
The Dark Net is just a click away. 
 
Beyond the familiar online world that most of us inhabit lies a vast network of sites, communities and cultures where freedom is pushed to its limits. A world that is as creative and complex as it is dangerous and disturbing. A world that is much closer than you think. 
 
The Dark Net is a revelatory examination of the internet today, and of its most innovative and dangerous subcultures, stretching from secret Facebook groups to the encrypted and hidden Tor network. In it, Bartlett goes in search of the people behind the screen, meeting trolls and pornographers, drug dealers and hackers, political extremists and computer scientists, Bitcoin programmers and self-harmers, libertarians and vigilantes. 
 
Based on extensive first-hand experience, exclusive interviews and shocking documentary evidence, The Dark Net offers a startling glimpse of human nature under the conditions of freedom and anonymity, and shines a light on an enigmatic and ever-changing world.

The Dark Net

London Review Of Books

Autobiography has been an essential element of the London Review of Books since its founding in 1979. This volume collects many outstanding pieces of memoir that first appeared in the LRB’s pages. 
 
Here, Lorna Sage remembers growing up with her grandfather during the Second World War, Jenny Diski imagines her own burial, and Hilary Mantel tackles a strongman on her hospital bed. Julian Barnes writes about not getting the Booker Prize. Andrew O’Hagan confesses to his past as a schoolboy bully. A. J. P. Taylor hallucinates. Alan Bennett reports on the lady who lives in his drive. Tariq Ali relates his misadventures in Pyongyang. Anne Enright describes her obsession with Henrietta Lacks, the woman whose cells grow in petri dishes around the world. Frank Kermode tells his wartime stories. Terry Castle recounts her complicated friendship with Susan Sontag. There are reports from poker tables and coal mines, and stories of double agents, online romance and stigmata. 
 
With a preface by Alan Bennett, Meeting the Devil displays the range of power and delight possible in the study of self-portrait.

Meeting the Devil

A Book of Memoir

Scott Stossel

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER and SHORTLISTED FOR THE WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE 2015 
 
As recently as thirty-five years ago, anxiety did not exist as a diagnostic category. Today, it is the most common form of officially classified mental illness. Scott Stossel gracefully guides us across the terrain of an affliction that is pervasive yet too often misunderstood. 
 
Drawing on his own long-standing battle with anxiety, Stossel presents an astonishing history, at once intimate and authoritative, of the efforts to understand the condition from medical, cultural, philosophical and experiential perspectives. He ranges from the earliest medical reports of Galen and Hippocrates, through later observations by Robert Burton and Søren Kierkegaard, to the investigations by great nineteenth-century scientists, such as Charles Darwin, William James and Sigmund Freud, as they began to explore its sources and causes, to the latest research by neuroscientists and geneticists. Stossel reports on famous individuals who struggled with anxiety, as well as the afflicted generations of his own family. His portrait of anxiety reveals not only the emotion’s myriad manifestations and the anguish it produces, but also the countless psychotherapies, medications and other (often outlandish) treatments that have been developed to counteract it. Stossel vividly depicts anxiety’s human toll – its crippling impact, its devastating power to paralyse – while at the same time exploring how those who suffer from it find ways to manage and control it. 
 
My Age of Anxiety is learned and empathetic, humorous and inspirational, offering the reader great insight into the biological, cultural and environmental factors that contribute to the affliction.

My Age of Anxiety

Dylan Jones

One Day: Saturday 13 July 1985, nearly two billion people woke up with one purpose. Nearly a third of humanity knew where they were going to be that day. Watching, listening to, attending: Live Aid. 
One Decade: Britain in the Eighties was different. The culture was different, the politics were different, and our engagement with the world was different. And it was just one day in 1985 that showed how different it was. 
 
In One Day, One Decade Dylan Jones tells the story of the Eighties through that day at Wembley, sweeping backwards to the end of the Seventies, and forward to the start of the Nineties. It draws on his personal reminiscences and perspective of music, media, fashion, politics and all forms of pop culture to frame the decade. 
 
This is a big book but not a exhaustive and dry social history. Live Aid was the decade’s pinch point, when a nation's attitudes and expectations were somehow captured and changed forever. The author suggests that before Live Aid, Britain was one place, and after Live Aid it was another. 
 
Britain in the Eighties was a juxtaposition of militancy and profligacy, a country where industry was being broken down, societies were being demolished, and unemployment became an inevitable lifestyle choice: yet the Eighties was also the apotheosis of pop culture, a decade where entertainment, opinion and subjectivity were more important than ever before. 
 
Dylan Jones was at the heart of the 1980s editing the seminal magazines i-D and The Face. He was one of the Blitz Kids and was both a commentator and one of the style-makers of the time. This is a controversial book, a story told from the inside by one who was at the centre of events.

The Eighties

One Day, One Decade

Tony Fletcher

'I was no longer fitting in at school. I was unsure of my friends, and they were increasingly unsure of me. I wanted to be a rock star. But while all around, voices were starting to break, acne beginning to appear, facial hair sprouting, I remained all flabby flesh and innate scruff, with a high-pitched whine and not a muscle to my name. I was the runt of the class and rarely allowed to forget it. I had no father at home to help me out, and could hardly talk to my mum. So I took solace in The Jam.' 
 
As a boy, Tony Fletcher frequently felt out of place. Yet somehow he secured a ringside seat for one of the most creative periods in British cultural history. 
 
Boy About Town tells the story of the bestselling author’s formative years in the pre- and post-punk music scenes of London, counting down, from fifty to number one: attendance at seminal gigs and encounters with musical heroes; schoolboy projects that became national success stories; the style culture of punks, mods and skinheads and the tribal violence that enveloped them; life as a latchkey kid in a single-parent household; weekends on the football terraces in a quest for street credibility; and the teenage boy’s unending obsession with losing his virginity. 
 
Boy About Town is an evocative, bittersweet, amusing and wholly original account of growing up and coming of age in the glory days of the 1970s.

Boy About Town

Simon Heffer's new book forms an ambitious exploration of the making of the Victorian age and the Victorian mind. 
 
Britain in the 1840s was a country wracked by poverty, unrest and uncertainty, where there were attempts to assassinate the Queen and her prime minister, and the ruling class lived in fear of riot and revolution. By the 1880s it was a confident nation of progress and prosperity, transformed not just by industrialisation but by new attitudes to politics, education, women and the working class. That it should have changed so radically was very largely the work of an astonishingly dynamic and high-minded group of people – politicians and philanthropists, writers and thinkers – who in a matter of decades fundamentally remade the country, its institutions and its mindset, and laid the foundations for modern society. 
 
It traces the evolution of British democracy and shows how early laissez-faire attitudes to the lot of the less fortunate turned into campaigns to improve their lives and prospects. It analyses the birth of new attitudes to education, religion and science. And it shows how even such aesthetic issues as taste in architecture were swept in to broader debates about the direction that the country should take. In the process, Simon Heffer looks at the lives and deeds of major politicians, from the devout and principled Gladstone to the unscrupulous Disraeli; at the intellectual arguments that raged among writers and thinkers such as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, and Samuel Butler; and at the 'great projects' of the age, from the Great Exhibition to the Albert Memorial. Drawing heavily on previously unpublished documents, he offers a superbly nuanced insight into life in an extraordinary era, populated by extraordinary people – and how our forebears’ pursuit of perfection gave birth to modern Britain.

High Minds

The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain

Katie Waldegrave

Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge, were life-long friends. They were also the daughters of best friends: William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the two poetic geniuses who shaped the Romantic Age. 
 
Living in the shadow of their fathers’ extraordinary fame brought Sara and Dora great privilege, but at a terrible cost. In different ways, each father almost destroyed his daughter. Growing up in the shadow of genius, each girl made it her life’s ambition to dedicate herself to her father’s writing and reputation. Anorexia, drug addiction and depression were part of the legacy of fame, but so too were great friendship and love. 
 
Drawing on a host of new sources, Katie Waldegrave tells the never-before-told story of how two young women, born into greatness, shaped their own legacies.

The Poets' Daughters

Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge

David McKie

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
Surnames are much more than convenient identity tags; they are windows into our families’ pasts. Some suggest ancestral trades (Butcher, Smith, Roper) or physical appearance (Long, Brown, Thynne). Some provide clues to where we come from (McDonald, Evans, Patel). And some – Rymer, Brocklebank, Stolbof – offer a hint of something just a little more exotic or esoteric. 
 
All are grist to the mill for David McKie who, in What’s in a Surname?, sets off on a journey around Britain to find out how such appellations have evolved and what they tell us about ourselves. En route he looks at the surname’s tentative beginnings in medieval times, and the myriad routes by which particular names became established. He considers some curious byways: the rise and fall of the multi-barrel surname and the Victorian reinvention of ‘embarrassing’ surnames among them. He considers whether fortune favours those whose surnames come at the beginning of the alphabet. And he celebrates the remarkable and the quirky, from the fearsome Ridley (the cry of which once struck terror in the hearts of their neighbours) to the legend-encrusted Tichborne, whose most famous holders were destined to suffer misfortune and controversy. Elegiac and amusing by turns, he offers a wonderfully entertaining wander along the footpaths of the nation’s history and culture, celebrating not just the Smiths and Joneses of these islands but the Chaceporcs and Swetinbeddes, too.

What's in a Surname?

A Journey from Abercrombie to Zwicker

Duncan Hamilton

The two time winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award on George Best, considered the greatest footballer of our time. 
 
No other imposed himself so completely on to the romantic imagination. No other was so emblematic of the era during which he flourished. And no other will ever be as memorable as George Best. 
 
On the field Best's skills were sublime and almost other-worldly. Off it, he had a magnetic appeal. He was treated like a pop icon and a pin-up; a fashion-model and a sex-symbol. Every man envied him and every woman adored him. 
 
To mark the 50th anniversary of his debut for Manchester United, Duncan Hamilton examines Best's crowded life and premature death. But most importantly, Hamilton presents Best at his glorious peak - the precocious goals, the labyrinthine runs, the poise and balletic balance and the body swerves. 
 
This is George Best: footballing immortal.

Immortal

_____________________________________ 
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
WINNER OF THE JQ WINGATE PRIZE 2015 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD 
 
'A gripping thriller, an unspeakable crime, an essential history.' JOHN LE CARRÉ 
_____________________________________ 
Hanns Alexander was the son of a prosperous German family who fled Berlin for London in the 1930s, becoming an investigator of war crimes. 
 
Rudolf Höss was a farmer and soldier who became the Kommandant of Auschwitz Concentration Camp and oversaw the deaths of over a million men, women and children. 
 
The hunt was on. 
 
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the first British War Crimes Investigation Team is assembled to hunt down the senior Nazi officials responsible for the greatest atrocities the world has ever seen. Lieutenant Hanns Alexander is one of the lead investigators, Rudolf Höss his most elusive target. 
 
In this book Thomas Harding reveals for the very first time the full account of Höss’ capture. Moving from the Middle-Eastern campaigns of the First World War to bohemian Berlin in the 1920s, to the horror of the concentration camps and the trials in Belsen and Nuremberg, Hanns and Rudolf tells the story of two German men whose lives diverged, and intersected, in an astonishing way.

Hanns and Rudolf

The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz

Jon Naismith

If you love QI you will love The Unbelievable Truth the most successful BBC Radio 4 panel show fronted by David Mitchell is all about identifying the unbeilevable truths from the lies. 
 
Enter Mr David Mitchell’s amazing Cabinet of Curiosities and prepare to marvel at this hand-picked and lavishly illustrated compendium of incredible facts, each one painstakingly culled from the hugely acclaimed BBC Radio and Australian TV show The Unbelievable Truth. 
 
PLUS – try your own truth-detection skills over a series of ingenious comic essays on a diverse range of subjects from Armadillos to Sir Walter Raleigh by the show’s co-inventor Dr Graeme Garden – each essay contains FIVE incredible truths, tantalisingly concealed amongst a host of barely credible lies. 
 
The Unbelievable Truth is hosted by the award-winning actor, comedian and writer David Mitchell, and was first broadcast on Radio 4 in 2006, since then it has become one of BBC Radio’s most popular and successful shows.

The Unbelievable Truth

Andrew Lycett

The definitive biography of Wilkie Collins: the Victorian novelist, playwright, author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White, who lived a life of sensation. 
 
Wilkie Collins, author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White, was the master of the Victorian sensation novel, but he also had a complex private life that could have come straight out of one of his bestselling novels. While his books focused on uncovering family secrets, Wilkie was determined to keep his own unconventional domestic arrangements – living with two women, neither of them his wife – hidden from the outside world. 
 
In this colourful investigative biography, set against the backdrop of Victorian London, Andrew Lycett brings to life one of England’s greatest writers and reveals a brilliant, contrary and sensual man, deeply committed to his work.

Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation

Ursula Buchan

SHORTLISTED FOR INSPIRATIONAL BOOK OF THE YEAR AT THE 2014 GARDEN MEDIA GUILD AWARDS. 
 
The wonderfully evocative story of how Britain’s World War Two gardeners – with great ingenuity, invincible good humour and extraordinary fortitude – dug for victory on home turf. 
 
A Green and Pleasant Land tells the intriguing and inspiring story of how Britain's wartime government encouraged and cajoled its citizens to grow their own fruit and vegetables. As the Second World War began in earnest and a whole nation listened to wireless broadcasts, dug holes for Anderson shelters, counted their coupons and made do and mended, so too were they instructed to ‘Dig for Victory’. 
 
Ordinary people, as well as gardening experts, rose to the challenge: gardens, scrubland, allotments and even public parks were soon helping to feed a nation deprived of fresh produce. As Ursula Buchan reveals, this practical contribution to the Home Front was tackled with thrifty ingenuity, grumbling humour and extraordinary fortitude. The simple act of turning over soil and tending new plants became important psychologically for a population under constant threat of bombing and even invasion. Gardening reminded people that their country and its more innocent and insular pursuits were worth fighting for. Gardening in wartime Britain was a part of the fight for freedom.

A Green and Pleasant Land

How England’s Gardeners Fought the Second World War

Neil Powell

Benjamin Britten was the greatest English composer of the twentieth century and one of the outstanding musicians of his age. 
 
Born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, in 1913, Britten was the youngest child of a dentist father and amateur musician mother. After studying at the Royal College of Music, he became a vital part of London’s creative and intellectual life during the 1930s, collaborating with W. H. Auden and meeting his lifelong partner, the tenor Peter Pears. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Britten and Pears were already in America, earning a precarious living as freelance musicians before re-crossing the Atlantic by ship in the perilous days of 1942. 
 
But the east coast of England was where Britten, as he himself said, belonged: this was where he returned to write his most famous opera, Peter Grimes, and – with Pears and Eric Crozier – to found the Aldeburgh Festival in 1948. In the years that followed, his worldwide reputation grew steadily, helped by a busy schedule of international tours and, for many, crowned by the extraordinary success of his War Requiem. Meanwhile, his festival went from strength to strength, its progress symbolised by the opening of Snape Maltings Concert Hall in 1967. 
 
Britten was a mass of paradoxes: a solitary, introspective thinker who came to ebullient life in the company of young people, for whom he composed some of his most memorable works; a man of the political left who was on the friendliest terms with members of the royal family; a composer inspired by some of the twentieth century’s deepest preoccupations who combined innovation with a profound understanding of musical tradition. Devoted to his friends, protégés and fellow musicians, he was, above all, someone who lived for music. 
 
Neil Powell’s book is the landmark biography for Britten’s centenary year: a subtle and moving portrait of a brilliant, complex and ultimately loveable man.

Benjamin Britten

A Life For Music

Marci Shore

A superb account of complex psyche of Eastern Europe in the wake of the revolutions of 1989 and the opening of the communist archives. 
 
In the tradition of Timothy Garton Ash’s The File, Yale historian and prize-winning author Marci Shore draws upon intimate understanding to illuminate the afterlife of totalitarianism. The Taste of Ashes spans from Berlin to Moscow, moving from Vienna in Europe’s west through Prague, Bratislava, Warsaw and Bucharest to Vilnius and Kiev in the post-communist east. The result is a shimmering literary examination of the ghost of communism – no longer Marx’s 'spectre to come' but a haunting presence of the past. 
 
Marci Shore builds her history around people she came to know over the course of the two decades since communism came to an end in Eastern Europe: her colleagues and friends, once-communists and once-dissidents, the accusers and the accused, the interrogators and the interrogated, Zionists, Bundists, Stalinists and their children and grandchildren. For them, the post-communist moment has not closed but rather has summoned up the past: revolution in 1968, Stalinism, the Second World War, the Holocaust. The end of communism had a dark side. As Shore pulls the reader into her journey of discovery, reading the archival records of people who are themselves confronting the traumas of former lives, she reveals the intertwining of the personal and the political, of love and cruelty, of intimacy and betrayal. The result is a lyrical and sometimes heartbreaking portrayal of how history moves and what history means.

The Taste of Ashes

Alexandra Heminsley

_____________________________ 
'If you've ever wept, "Why Do I Want To Run?", your answer is here.' CAITLIN MORAN 
 
Alexandra Heminsley had high hopes: the arse of an athlete, the waist of a supermodel, the speed of a gazelle. Defeated by gyms and bored of yoga, she decided to run. 
 
Her first attempt did not end well. 
 
Six years later, she has run five marathons in two continents. 
 
But, as her dad says, you run with your head as much as with your legs. So, while this is a book about running, it's not just about running. 
 
You could say it's about ambition (yes, getting out of bed on a rainy Sunday morning counts), relationships (including talking to the intimidating staff in the trainer shop), as well as your body (your boobs don't have to wobble when you run). But it's also about realising that you can do more than you ever thought possible. 
 
Very funny, very honest and very emotional, whether you're in serious training or thinking about running for the bus, this is a book for anyone who after wine and crisps for supper a few too many times thinks they might . . . just might . . . like to run like a girl. 
_____________________________ 
Here's what people are saying about Running Like A Girl - and what it's inspired them to do! 
 
'This book has changed my attitude, I loved it from page one and found it totally relatable for the normal woman... A real inspiration' - Clairol on Amazon, 5 stars 
 
'I adored this book... this is a must read' - Emily on Amazon, 5 stars 
 
'really opened my eyes and inspired me to continue running, fantastic read' - Kiyone on Amazon, 5 stars 
 
'I was so happy to start reading this fabulous book and realise that there was someone else out there who thought exactly as I did about 'not being a runner'' - J. Watson on Amazon, 5 stars 
 
'It's not often I find a book that I can't put down and this is the first for ages! ... this book echoes so many of my own limiting beliefs constructed around this subject and it was a delight to hear how Alex faced up to her own demons and finally freed her running spirit. Even if you never want to be a runner this is a fun read and an inspirational journey.' - Joy on Amazon, 5 stars 
 
'Inspirational... Would recommend this book to anyone thinking of running! Very well put together and has lots of information and tips' - Maria on Amazon, 5 stars 
 
'I laughed out loud... for anyone wanting to get into running you will be thinking of Alexandra when you are out there taking your first few strides, and you will be grinning!' - J. Dunne on Amazon, 5 stars 
 
'The best thing about it is how inspiring the journey it is, how much it makes you want to get out there and run yourself. Such a fantastic aid to the beginning of your running journey' - Emma on Amazon, 5 stars 
 
'I have been fighting with my running demons for over 12 months and had convinced myself that I couldn't run. This book has inspired me to put my trainers on, join a club and enter three events' - Chimaera on Amazon, 5 stars 
 
'Laugh-out-loud funny in places but real, genuine experience of the world of running from someone who's been there, picked up the battered trainers and just run with it' - Helen on Amazon, 5 stars 
 
'hilarious - it just kept me hooked!' - Denise on Amazon, 5 stars

Running Like a Girl

Max Daly

Steve Sampson

A timely and gripping investigation of illegal drugs in the UK. Filled with fascinating and shocking case studies gathered over twenty years of investigative reporting, it explodes many of the myths and misconceptions about drug use, and makes a compelling case for a new way forward. 
 
Looking at the dealers, the users, the police and the politicians, Narcomania charts how consumption and markets have fragmented and changed over the last decade; follows the money to reveal where Britain's licit and illicit economies overlap; explains where each of the major recreational drugs comes from; and maps which drugs are popular in different parts of the country. It will explode many of the myths and misconceptions about drug use, and tap into fraught debates about how politicians, parents and police should respond. 
 
In the wake of the internet boom, globalisation and a decade of decadence, Britain sits at a crossroads in the legalisation-versus-intolerance debate. While other nations have succeeded with progressive experiments, inertia and self-contradiction define British drug policy to the detriment of everyone except the criminal underworld. Unsurprisingly, in the light of this book, our politicians are confused about what will please or displease the all-important middle class electorate. Equally unsurprisingly, however, so much myth and confusion surrounds the subject that clarity must be brought to chaos if the wisdom of the crowd is ever to surface....

Narcomania

How Britain Got Hooked On Drugs

A Journey Through Britain's Drug World

To this day, they were, their fans believe, the best band in the world. Critics and sales figures told a similar story. Yet for all their brilliance and adoration – their famously energetic live shows routinely interrupted by stage invasions – The Smiths were continually plagued by their reticence to play the game, and by the time of 1987’s Strangeways Here We Come, they had split. 
 
Tony Fletcher’s A Light That Never Goes Out – part celebration, part paean – moves from Manchester in the nineteenth-century to the present day to tell the complete story of The Smiths. The product of extensive research and unprecedented access, it will serve to confirm The Smiths as one of the most important and influential rock groups of all time.

A Light That Never Goes Out

The Enduring Saga of the Smiths

Kevin Jackson

1922. The spectacular year that F. Scott Fitzgerald chose as a backdrop for his most famous novel The Great Gatsby. It was also the year where James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land were published, Alfred Hitchcock directed his first feature, the Ottoman Empire collapsed, Louis Armstrong took the train from New Orleans to Chicago and made Jazz the defining music of the age, and Hollywood transformed the nature of fame. 
 
Constellation of Genius is the gloriously entertaining journey through the diaries of the actors, anthropologists, artists, dancers, designers, film-makers, philosophers, playwrights, politicians and scientists whose lives and works collided over twelve months, creating a frenzy of innovation and the beginning of a new era.

Constellation of Genius

1922: Modernism and All That Jazz

Alex Stone

Alex Stone, part of the underground magic circuit, is determined to take his lifelong hobby to the professional level, to reach the pinnacle of this bizarre world and become a master magician. 
 
Combining his passion for magic with his studies in Physics, Stone takes us on a journey through a strange and colourful subculture of brilliant characters - a blind card sharp, street-hustlers, Las Vegas showmen and world-leading scientists - as he seeks answers to the questions about the limits of perception and the psychology of deception and decision-making. By pulling back the curtain, Stone reveals the principles and history of some of the greatest tricks ever performed.

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