Dave Gibbons

John Gibbons is an environmental journalist and commentator who has been speaking about climate change in Ireland for over a decade. The Lie of the Land is his first book.

John Gibbons

Stella Gibbons was born in London in 1902. She went to the North London Collegiate School and studied journalism at University College, London. She then worked for ten years on various papers, including the Evening Standard. Stella Gibbons is the author of twenty-five novels, three volumes of short stories, and four volumes of poetry. Her first novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932) was an immediate success and won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1933. Among her works are Nightingale Wood (1938), The Bachelor (1944), Westwood (1946), and Starlight (1967). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. Stella Gibbons died in 1989.

Stella Gibbons

Edward Gibbon

Lewis Grassic Gibbon

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Virginia Woolf

With this sixth volume The Hogarth Press completes a major literary undertaking - the publication of the complete essays of Virginia Woolf. In this, the last decade of her life, Woolf wrote distinguished literary essays on Turgenev, Goldsmith, Congreve, Gibbon and Horace Walpole. In addition, there are a number of more political essays, such as 'Why Art To-Day Follows Politics', 'Women Must Weep' (a cut-down version of Three Guineas and never before reprinted), 'Royalty' (rejected by Picture Post in 1939 as 'an attack on the Royal family, and on the institution of kingship in this country'), 'Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid', and even 'America, which I Have Never Seen...' ('['Americans are] the most interesting people in the world - they face the future, not the past'). In 'The Leaning Tower' (1940), Virginia Woolf faced the future and looked forward to a more democratic post-war age: 'will there be no more towers and no more classes and shall we stand, without hedges between us, on the common ground?' Woolf stimulates her readers to think for themselves, so she 'never forges manifestos, issues guidelines, or gives instructions that must be followed to the letter' (Maria DiBattista). 
 
In providing an authoritative text, introduction and annotations to Virginia Woolf's essays, Stuart N. Clarke has prepared a common ground - for students, common readers and scholars alike - so that all can come to Woolf without specialised knowledge.

Essays Virginia Woolf Vol.6

Courtney Gustafson

People kept asking: Why would you have cats that don’t love you back? 
 
The morning after Courtney Gustafson moved into an old house in the Poets Square neighbourhood of Tucson, Arizona, she noticed tiny pawprints all over her driveway. They were the first evidence of a colony of feral cats who would, in time, become part of her family and help pierce a personal darkness she’d wrestled with for much of her life. 
 
Beebs was the first cat to appear, allowing herself to be petted in the driveway. And then came so many others. There was Monkey, the hissing, dark-blotched calico, and Reverse Monkey, her timid, white-blotched opposite. There were Sad Boy and Lola, the inseparable pair who made their way across the internet and into strangers’ wedding vows. There was the sweet, serene Dr. Big Butt, who brought lessons about grief. And there was Goldie, the tiny king of Poets Square: sick, skinny, but completely unafraid. These cats – and many, many others – would expand her world spectacularly. 
 
Poets Square is a love letter to community in a broken society, told through the cats Courtney meets in dark alleys, neglected homes and her own driveway; cats she cherishes and must sometimes let go. Above all, she explores what her encounters with feral cats can teach us about care, connectedness and the power 
of hope.

Poets Square

A Memoir in Thirty Cats

John O'Farrell

'This week the first pet passports came into effect. Around the country dogs have been hopping into photo booths and trying to look as relaxed as possible, which is not easy when you know you're not allowed on the chair.' 
 
Gathered here are the best of John O'Farrell's newspaper columns for the Guardian and the Independent which saw him win the coveted Best Columnist of the Year Award at the prestigious British Liars Awards. Among many other things, he claims that the only conviction in the Tory Party will be when Jeffrey Archer gets sent to prison; that scientists have created a genetically superior monkey which will advertise lapsang souchong instead of PG Tips; and that with the election of George W. Bush, the global village has finally got its own global village idiot.

Global Village Idiot

Previously published as Poets Square: A Memoir in Thirty Cats 
 
People kept asking: Why would you have cats that don’t love you back? 
 
The morning after Courtney Gustafson moved into an old house in the Poets Square neighbourhood of Tucson, Arizona, she noticed tiny pawprints all over her driveway. They were the first evidence of a colony of feral cats who would, in time, become part of her family and help pierce a personal darkness she’d wrestled with for much of her life. 
 
Beebs was the first cat to appear, allowing herself to be petted in the driveway. And then came so many others. There was Monkey, the hissing, dark-blotched calico, and Reverse Monkey, her timid, white-blotched opposite. There were Sad Boy and Lola, the inseparable pair who made their way across the internet and into strangers’ wedding vows. There was the sweet, serene Dr. Big Butt, who brought lessons about grief. And there was Goldie, the tiny king of Poets Square: sick, skinny, but completely unafraid. These cats – and many, many others – would expand her world spectacularly. 
 
Poets Square is a love letter to community in a broken society, told through the cats Courtney meets in dark alleys, neglected homes and her own driveway; cats she cherishes and must sometimes let go. Above all, she explores what her encounters with feral cats can teach us about care, connectedness and the power of hope.

The Cats of Poets Square

A Memoir in Thirty Feral Cats

Roger Deakin

Wildwood is a remarkable celebration of the transforming magic of trees, exploring the 'fifth element' of wood as it exists in nature, in our souls, in our culture and our lives. 
 
From the walnut tree at his Suffolk home, Roger Deakin embarks upon a quest that takes him through Britain, across Europe, to Central Asia and Australia, in search of what lies behind man's profound and enduring connection with wood and with trees. 
 
Meeting woodlanders of all kinds, he lives in shacks and cabins, travels in search of the wild apple groves of Kazakhstan, goes coppicing in Suffolk, swims beneath the walnut trees of the Haut-Languedoc, and hunts bushplums with Aboriginal women in the outback.

Wildwood

A Journey Through Trees

Sarah Symmons

Goya was born in 1746.  By the time he was 47 he was the highest paid and most famous artist in Spain, had gone profoundly deaf and six of his seven children had died.  He worked for three Spanish monarchs, the duke of Wellington, the Spanish aristocracy and intelligentsia, and for Napoleon's brother.  One Spanish prince called him 'the painting monkey', contemporary critics called him 'the philosopher painter'.  His friends called him Paco, and 'Our Dear Goya'.  A local newspaper referred to one of his portraits as bringing honour to the whole Spanish nation.  He learned to lip-read and speak in sign language; he painted with his fingers, a palette knife and with the pointed end of his paintbrush; he invented engraving techniques which are still in use by modern artists; his 'Nude Maja', 'The Third of May' and 'Saturn devouring his son' are ranked among the most powerful and mysterious paintings in the history of European art. From an early age Goya was anxious to preserve a record of his life, but few of his writings have survived and his most personal records appear in his letters.  He corresponded regularly with the aristocracy and the monarchy, as well as with friends.  Goya's surviving letters reveal a highly emotional man, prepared to state his feelings as passionately to the authorities of a Cathedral as to a close friend.  His letters make few concessions and are literary works in their own right.  Uniquely individual, they signal a new attitude on the part of a fine artist towards his profession, his social position and his sources of inspiration.  These writings look forward to the great artistic testaments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Delacroix's Diary, the letters of Van Gogh and Dali's Diary of a Genius.  From this new collection of letters, many translated into English for the first time, Goya emerges as witty, passionate and unexpectedly vulnerable.

Goya

A Life in Letters

Peter Matthiessen

During the 1970s and 1980s, Peter Matthiessen took part in a number of expeditions to Africa, witnessing first-hand the continent’s many and diverse peoples and wildlife. The fruits of these journeys are three of the most impressive essays on the natural world of the late twentieth century. 
 
The Tree where Man Was Born documents wild landscapes, peoples and animals, observed in a series of journeys in East Africa, from the Sudan, south through Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, exploring the Serengeti, the Maasai Mara, the Ngorongoro crater and the archaeological sites of the Rift Valley. 
 
African Silences recounts two expeditions made to West and Central Africa, including Zaire (as it then was), Gabon and the Central African Republic. 
 
Sand Rivers describes the Selous game reserve in Southern Tanzania, one of the largest, but least-known refuges for animals left on earth, and provides an unforgettable portrait of this area and the fierce, lonely men who created it. 
 
These three classic works represent Matthiessen the naturalist at his finest; written an all-encompassing curiosity and knowledge that brings alive the people, places and wildlife he encounters, and updated with a new introduction by the author.

An African Trilogy

Jem Roberts

As a wise ape once observed, space is big – vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly so. However, if you look too closely at space, it becomes nothing but lumps of rock and sundry gases. Sometimes it's necessary to take a step back, and let a few billion years go by, before any of the true wonder and scope of the cosmos becomes apparent. 
 
Similarly, the late 20th century author, humorist and thinker Douglas Adams was big – vastly, hugely and thoroughly mind-bogglingly so, both in physical terms, and as a writer who has touched millions of readers, firing up millions of cerebellums all over planet Earth, for over 35 years – and for nearly half of that time, he hasn't even been alive. 
 
It would be ridiculous to pretend that Douglas Adams's life and work has gone unexamined since his dismayingly early death at 49 but throughout the decade since the last book to tackle the subject, the universes Adams created have continued to develop, to beguile and expand minds, and will undoubtedly do so for generations to come. 
 
An all-new approach to the most celebrated creation of Douglas Adams is therefore most welcome, and The Frood tells the story of Adams's explosive but agonizingly constructed fictional universe, from his initial inspirations to the posthumous sequel(s) and adaptations, bringing together a thousand tales of life as part of the British Comedy movements of the late 70s and 80s along the way. With the benefit of hindsight and much time passed, friends and colleagues have been interviewed for a fresh take on the man and his works.

The Frood

The Authorised and Very Official History of Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Ben Rawlence

A ground-breaking and beautifully written investigation into the Arctic Treeline with an urgent environmental message. 
 
'Evocative, wise and unflinching' Jay Griffiths, author of Wild 
 
The Arctic treeline is the frontline of climate change, where the trees have been creeping towards the pole for fifty years already. 
 
Scientists are only just beginning to understand the astonishing significance of these northern forests for all life on Earth. At the treeline, Rawlence witnesses the accelerating impact of climate change and the devastating legacies of colonialism and capitalism. But he also finds reasons for hope. Humans are creatures of the forest; we have always evolved with trees and The Treeline asks us where our co-evolution might take us next. 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES CROPPER WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 
 
'A moving, thoughtful, deeply reported elegy for our vanishing world and a map of the one to come' Nathaniel Rich, author of Losing Earth 
 
'A lyrical and passionate book... The Treeline is a sobering, powerful account of how trees might just save the world, as long as we are sensible enough to let them' Mail on Sunday 
 
'Ben Rawlence circumnavigates the very top of the globe - returning with a warning, in this enthralling and wonderfully written book' Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees

The Treeline

The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth

Elena Passarello

Beginning with Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth recently found in the Siberian permafrost, each of the sixteen essays in Animals Strike Curious Poses investigates a different famous animal named and immortalised by humans. Here are the starling that inspired Mozart with its song, Darwin’s tortoise Harriet, and in an extraordinary essay, Jumbo the elephant (and how they tried to electrocute him). Modelled loosely on a medieval bestiary, these witty , playful, provocative essays traverse history, myth, science and more, introducing a stunning new writer to British readers.

Animals Strike Curious Poses

Aya Koda

An immersive journey through trees in Japan by celebrated writer Aya Koda – now available in English for the first time 
‘Trees are not just living things, but feeling beings, like us. Better keep a watchful eye over them…’ 
Ezo spruce, hinoki, cherry blossoms. Persimmon, maple, cypress. The trees of Japan cast a spell on those who visit its landscape. But as a child, writer Aya Koda realized they were more than objects of beauty. Gifted a sapling by her father, she learned that we depend on trees as much as they do on us – and spent a lifetime trying to understand them. 
Mesmerising and poignant, Tree is written in a Japanese genre called zuihitsu which means ‘following the brush’. Here we follow Aya Koda on a journey to discover Japan’s most remarkable trees. As she witnesses landslides and forests of falling ash, she encounters fresh saplings and ancient, ungovernable roots, learning how each tree contains its own unique story. 
Now translated into English for the first time, Koda’s work echoes down the generations, reminding us that trees hold a mirror to who we are, and what we leave behind.

Tree

When Roger Deakin died in August 2006, his death was considered by many to be a great loss to literature. Notes From Walnut Tree Farm collects together the jottings, musings and observations with which he filled a series of notebooks for the last six years of his life. In this beautiful illustrated collection, descriptions of walks on Mellis Common and thoughts on the importance of nature sit side by side with memories of the past and musings about literature, while perfectly rendered observations of the tiny, missable visual details of everyday life are skilfully woven with a gentle, wise philosophy. 
 
Organised into twelve months of impressions, the notes reveal a passionate but gentle character and his extraordinary, restless curiosity. Capturing Deakin's unique turn of phrase and inspired use of language, and infused throughout with the magically meditative tranquillity of Walnut Tree Farm, this is a charming introduction to one of the most important of modern nature writers, or the perfect follow-up to Wildwood and Waterlog.

Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses. 
 
 In these interwoven essays, Robin Wall Kimmerer leads general readers and scientists alike to an understanding of how mosses live and how their lives are intertwined with the lives of countless other beings. Kimmerer explains the biology of mosses clearly and artfully, while at the same time reflecting on what these fascinating organisms have to teach us. 
 
 Drawing on her experiences as a scientist, a mother, and a Native American, Kimmerer explains the stories of mosses in scientific terms as well as within the framework of indigenous ways of knowing. In her book, the natural history and cultural relationships of mosses become a powerful metaphor for ways of living in the world.

Gathering Moss

A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

Sabrina Imbler

Join science journalist Sabrina Imbler on an astonishing journey which will completely redefine the way you think about nature and the ocean 
 
'An astonishing debut' GUARDIAN 
'Reveals just as much about our fascinating, mysterious world as it does about our fascinating, mysterious selves' NEW YORK TIMES 
 
In My Life in Sea Creatures we encounter: the mother octopus, starving herself while watching over her eggs; the yeti crab, thriving in crushing pressure and oppressive darkness; the cuttlefish, able to change its appearance in a fraction of a second; and many other creatures lurking in the depths of the ocean. 
 
Imbler's work weaves the wonders of marine biology with their own identity as a queer, non-binary mixed-race writer. They implicitly connect endangered sea life to marginalised human communities and shatter our preconceptions about the sea and what it means to survive. 
 
'A miraculous, transcendental book' ED YONG 
'Profound, surprising and thrillingly strange. I love it' SY MONTGOMERY 
'Astounding' PHILIP HOARE 
'A revelation' ISABELLA TREE 
 
***LA TIMES BOOK PRIZE WINNER***

My Life in Sea Creatures

A young queer science writer’s reflections on identity and the ocean

Alfred Russel Wallace

Racked with fever, virtually broke and earning a precarious living through sending back to London the plumes of beautiful birds, Wallace (1823-1913) ultimately became one of the most heroic and admirable of all scientist-explorers. Whether living with Hill Dyaks or hunting Orang-Utans or sailing on a junk to the unbelievably remote Aru islands, Wallace opens our eyes to a now long vanished world. 
 
Great Journeys allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries &ndash; but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own. Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things: Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent and implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and flowers new to science. Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which so much was still to be discovered.

Borneo, Celebes, Aru

Henry Walter Bates

One of the most impressive of all Victorian scientists but also a marvellous writer, Bates' (1825-1892) account of his years in the upper reaches of the Amazon is almost too good to be true - a great monument to human inquisitiveness as he battles great hoards of malevolent reptiles and insects in his quest for ever more obscure specimens on ever more narrow and creeper-choked tributaries. 
 
Great Journeys allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries &ndash; but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own. Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things: Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent and implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and flowers new to science. Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which so much was still to be discovered.

In the Heart of the Amazon Forest

Hugh Warwick

Discover the many wonders of the hedgehog: a funny, charming creature of the countryside. 
 
Carrying its secrets beneath patterned spinesand roaming our fields, parks and gardens, why is it that the hedgehog fascinates so many of us? In A Prickly Affair, Hugh Warwick - life member of the British Hedgehog Preservation Society - explores the quirky humour, misunderstanding and affection that characterises our feelings for this marvellous beast, going all out to explain the charm of the hedgehog. 
 
Although hedgehog psychics and the International Hedgehog Olympics may be too much even for him...

A Prickly Affair

The Charm of the Hedgehog

Allen Ginsberg

William S. Burroughs

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William Burroughs closed his classic debut novel, Junky, by saying he had determined to search out a drug he called 'Yage' which he believed transmitted telepathic powers, a drug that could be 'the final fix'. In The Yage Letters - a mix of travel writing, satire, psychedelia and epistolary novel - he journeys through South America, writing to his friend Allen Ginsberg about his experiments with the strange drug, using it to travel through time and space, to derange his senses - the perfect drug for the author of the wild decentred books that followed. Years later, Ginsberg writes back as he follows in Burroughs' footsteps, and the drug worse and more profound than he had imagined.

The Yage Letters

Redux

Charles Darwin

Karl Marx

Friedrich Engels

To mark the publication of Stop What You're Doing and Read This!, a collection of essays celebrating reading, Vintage Classics are releasing 12 limited edition themed ebook 'bundles', to tempt readers to discover and rediscover great books. 
 
THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES &amp; THE VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE 
INTRODUCED BY DARWIN'S GREAT GREAT GRANDDAUGHTER RUTH PADEL 
When the eminent naturalist Charles Darwin returned from South America on board the H.M.S Beagle in 1836, he brought with him the notes and evidence which would form the basis of his landmark theory of evolution of species by a process of natural selection. This theory, published as The Origin of Species in 1859, is the basis of modern biology and the concept of biodiversity. It also sparked a fierce scientific, religious and philosophical debate which still continues today. 
 
THE COMMUNISTY MANIFESTO 
INTRODUCED BY DAVID AARONOVITCH 
The Communist Manifesto was first published in London, by two young men in their late twenties, in 1848. Its impact reverberated across the globe and throughout the next century, and it has come to be recognised as one of the most important political texts ever written. Maintaining that the history of all societies is a history of class struggle, the manifesto proclaims that communism is the only route to equality, and is a call to action aimed at the proletariat. It is an essential read for anyone seeking to understand our modern political landscape.

Stop What You’re Doing and Read…Books That Changed the World: The Origin of Species & The Communist Manifesto

Gilbert White

The letters of the eminent naturalist Gilbert White are full of precise, unaffected and delightful observations of the wildlife of his beloved village of Selborne, describing the habits, colours and songs of birds from lapwings to barn-owls, wrens to house-martins. Here too are exquisite writings on trees, fossils, bats and rainfall, filled with intellectual curiosity and joy in the natural world. 
 
Generations of inhabitants have helped shape the English countryside - but it has profoundly shaped us too.It has provoked a huge variety of responses from artists, writers, musicians and people who live and work on the land - as well as those who are travelling through it.English Journeys celebrates this long tradition with a series of twenty books on all aspects of the countryside, from stargazey pie and country churches, to man's relationship with nature and songs celebrating the patterns of the countryside (as well as ghosts and love-struck soldiers).

Birds of Selborne

Orlando Figes

From Orlando Figes, international bestselling author of A People's Tragedy, Just Send Me Word is the moving true story of two young Russians whose love survived Stalin's Gulag. 
 
Lev and Svetlana, kept apart for fourteen years by the Second World War and the Gulag, stayed true to each other and exchanged thousands of secret letters as Lev battled to survive in Stalin's camps. Using this remarkable cache of smuggled correspondence, Orlando Figes tells the tale of two incredible people who, swept along in the very worst of times, kept their devotion alive. 
 
Orlando Figes was granted exclusive access to the thousands of letters between Lev and Sveta that form the foundation of Just Send Me Word, and he was able to interview the couple in person, then in their nineties. These real-time and largely uncensored letters form the largest cache of Gulag letters ever found. 
 
Reviews: 
 
'One is overcome with admiration for the kindness, bravery and generosity of people in terrible peril ... It is impossible to read without shedding tears' Simon Sebag Montefiore, Financial Times 
 
'This powerful narrative by a distinguished historian will take its place not just in history but in literature' Robert Massie 
 
'Electrifying, passionate, devoted, despairing, exhilarating ... a tale of hope, resilience, grit and love' The Times 
 
 
 
'Moving ... a remarkable discovery' Max Hastings, Sunday Times 
 
'The gulag story lacks individuals for us to sympathise with: a Primo Levi, an Anne Frank or even an Oskar Schindler. Just Send Me Word may well be the book to change that' Oliver Bullough, Independent 
 
'Immensely touching ... [a] heartening gem of a book' Anna Reid, Literary Review 
 
'The remarkable true story of a love affair between two Soviet citizens ... as much a literary challenge as a historical one: the book can be read as a non-fiction novel' Telegraph 
 
'Remarkable ... Figes, selecting and then interpreting this mass of letters, makes them tell two kinds of story. The first is a uniquely detailed narrative of the gulag, of the callous, slatternly universe which consumed millions of lives ... The second is about two people determined not to lose each other' Neal Ascherson, Guardian 
 
'A quiet, moving and memorable account of life in a totalitarian state ... The book often reads like a novel ... captivating' Evening Standard 
 
'Orlando Figes has wrought something beautiful from dark times' Ian Thomson, Observer 
 
'A heart-rending record of extraordinary human endurance' Kirkus Reviews 
 
'[A] remarkable tale of love and devotion during the worst years of the USSR ... [Figes's] fine narrative pacing enhances this moving, memorable story' Publishers Weekly 
 
About the author: 
 
Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of Peasant Russia, Civil War, A People's Tragedy, Natasha's Dance, The Whisperers and Crimea. He lives in Cambridge and London. His books have been translated into over twenty languages.

Just Send Me Word

A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag

Andrew Solomon

'How much do I beat myself up about the fact that he's my son? A lot.' 
 
On 14 December 2012, twenty-year-old Adam Lanza shot his mother dead, then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, opened fire and killed twenty children and six adults. No motive has ever been uncovered. 
 
Adam Lanza's father is still searching for answers and in this moving interview Andrew Solomon tells his story. 
 
This ebook also includes a chapter on children who commit crime from Solomon's Wellcome Trust Book Prize-winning book, Far from the Tree: Parents, children and the search for identity. ('A book everyone should read' Julie Myerson; 'Extraordinary, moving' Spectator)

The Reckoning

John Gray

In The Soul of the Marionette, John Gray draws together the religious, philosophic and fantastical traditions that question the very idea of human freedom. We flatter ourselves about the nature of free will and yet the most enormous forces - biological, physical, metaphysical - constrain our every action. Many writers and intellectuals have always understood this, but instead of embracing our condition we battle against it, with everyone from world conquerors to modern scientists dreaming of a 'human dominion' almost comically at odds with our true state. 
 
This is a stimulating and enraging meditation on everything from cybernetics to the fairground marionettes of the title.

The Soul of the Marionette

A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom

Jessica J. Lee

A seed slips beyond a garden wall. A seaweed drifts through an ocean. A tree is planted on a shifting border. A shrub is uprooted from its culture and its land. What happens when these plants leave their original homes and put down roots elsewhere? 
 
Born in Canada to a Taiwanese mother and a Welsh father, steeped in both literary and scientific traditions, Jessica J. Lee is a perfectly placed observer of our world in motion. 
 
In this vibrant book of linked essays she explores the entanglements of the plant and human worlds, and the echoes and counterpoints she detects in the migration of plants and people - and the language we use to describe them. 
 
Each of the plants considered in this collection are somehow perceived as being "out of place"- whether weeds, samples collected through imperial science, or crops introduced and transformed by our hand. 
 
Combining memoir, history, and scientific research in precise and poetic prose, Jessica J. Lee meditates on the question of how both plants and people come to belong - or not - as they border cross, and reveals how all our futures are more entwined than we might imagine.

Dispersals

On Plants, Borders and Belonging

Hunter S Thompson

With 'long hair in the wind, beards and bandanas flapping, earrings, chain whips . . . and Harleys flashing chrome', the Hell's Angels erupted into 1960s America paralysing whole towns with fear. Determined to discover the truths behind the terrifying reputation of those marauding biker gangs, Hunter S. Thompson spent a year on the road with the Angels, documenting his hair-raising experiences with Charger Charley, Big Frank, Little Jesus and the Gimp. Hell's Angels was the result: a masterpiece of underground reportage whose free-wheeling, impressionistic style created the legend of Gonzo journalism, and made Thompson's name as the wild man of American writing.

Hell's Angels

Marina Warner

In early 1994 Marina Warner delivered the prestigious Reith Lectures for the BBC. In a series of six lectures, she takes areas of contemporary concern and relates them to stories from mythology and fairy tale which continue to grip the modern imagination. 
 
She analyses the fury about single mothers and the anxiety about masculinity in the light of ideals about male heroism and control; the current despair about children and the loss of childhood innocence; the changing attitude of myths about wild men and beasts and the undertow of racism which is expressed in myths about savages and cannibals. The last lecture, on home, brings the themes together to examine ideas about who we are and where we belong, with reference to the British nation and its way of telling its own history. 
 
Using a range of examples from video games to Turner's paintings, from popular films to Keats, Marina Warner interweaves her critique of fantasy, dream and prejudice.

Managing Monsters

David Lines

Continuing the tradition of parodying all things sacred, the author of The XXXX Files and PMT takes up the reigns of satire by rewriting the essential 1970s hippy handbook Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Instead of a seagull for a hero, this updated classic features a bloated, cynical, grungy pigeon, who looks not to the skies for inspiration, but to the London Underground. Cutting corners wherever possible and living the life of a fully fledged MTV-generation feral pigeon, Jonathan's rite of passage is more a celebration of modern-day teenage apathy set against a backdrop of 90s Pop Culture and Victorian underground architecture than a voyage of delicious self-discovery. Matching the original page-for-page in content and layout, Jonathan Livingston Trafalgar Square Pigeon is a modern-day morality tale that will, by its very nature, attract plenty of attention whilst ever so gently ruffling a few feathers along the way.

Jonathan Livingston Trafalgar Square Pigeon

'Woman, who is equal to the moon in the flower of youth, 
Is equal to a little old ape after the onset of old age' 
 
This remarkable collection brings together a host of writings from across different regions and cultures of the Middle Ages, from the ninth to the fifteenth century. They are arranged to follow the life stages of a Medieval woman living a secular existence, from infancy and girlhood, through marriage and motherhood, to widowhood and old age. Some women are famous or captured in exceptional circumstances, many more are anonymous: an abandoned baby in Italy, or an epitaph for the female leader of a Synagogue, speaking across the ages. 
 
This selection contains an introduction discussing the Medieval woman's status, separate introductions to each chapter, notes and a bibliography.

Medieval Writings on Secular Women

George Orwell

In the winter of 1945-6, George Orwell was recently widowed, in poor health and living in bombed-out London under the deprivations of rationing – yet in this unpromising context, he wrote a series of essays celebrating the small joys of everyday life. This new anthology, edited by Rebecca Solnit, challenges the dominant image of Orwell as the austere author of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. He instead emerges as an enthusiast of English cooking; a lover of gardening and the countryside; a leisurely pub drinker; an observer of the elm tree and blackbird’s song; a devotee of murder mystery novels and ‘good bad books’. 
 
These essays were not escapist for Orwell; rather, they deepened his political commitments. Attending to the world through the senses, trusting your own judgement and valuing ordinary joys are ways of preserving individuality and humanity in the face of propaganda, totalitarianism and despair. These small pleasures, far from trivial, become for Orwell fortifications of the self.

Orwell's Pleasures

Jonathan Swift

'... a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food...' 
 
Swift's devastating short satire on how to solve a famine 
 
Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. 
 
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). Swift's works available in Penguin Classics are Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal and Other Writings.

A Modest Proposal

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