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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Edmund Burke

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

Amid the 18th century’s golden generation that included his companions Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson and Edward Gibbon, Burke’s controversial mixture of conservative and subversive theories made him first a marginal figure, and finally a revered theorist – a hero of the Romantics. He warned of the effects of British rule in Ireland, the loss of the American colonies, and most famously, he foresaw the disastrous consequences of revolution in France. This he predicted, would trigger extremism, terror and the atomisation of society – a profound analysis that continues to resonate today. 
 
In this absorbing new biography Conservative MP Jesse Norman gives us Burke anew, vividly depicting his dazzling intellect, imagination and empathy against the rich tapestry of 18th century Europe. Burke’s wisdom, Norman shows, applies well beyond the times of empire to the conventional democratic politics practised in Britain and America today. 
 
We cannot understand the defects of the modern world, or modern politics, without him.

Reflections on The Revolution in France And Other Writings

Naoko Abe

The irresistible story of Japanese cherry blossoms, threatened by political ideology and saved by an unknown Englishman 
 
'This is not just a tale of trees, but of . . . endeavour, war and reconciliation' Sunday Times 
 
Collingwood Ingram, born in 1880, became known as 'Cherry' for his defining obsession. As a young man, he travelled to Japan and learned of the astonishing displays of cherry blossoms, or sakura. 
 
On a return visit in 1926, Ingram witnessed frightening changes to the country's cherry population. A cloned variety was sweeping the landscape and being used as a symbol for Japan's expansionist ambitions. Determined to protect the diversity of the trees, Ingram began sending the rare varieties from his own garden in England back to Japan with the help of a network of 'cherry guardians'. 
 
This is an eloquent portrait of an extraordinary man whose legacy we enjoy every spring, and his unsung place in botanic history. 
 
'Engrossing . . . A portrait of great charm and sophistication' Christopher Harding, Guardian 
 
Winner of the 2020 Award for Excellence from The Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries

'Cherry' Ingram

The Englishman Who Saved Japan’s Blossoms

Sara Wheeler

Conservationist, scholar, soldier, white hunter and fabled lover - Denys Finch Hatton was an aristocrat of leonine nonchalance. After a dazzling career at Eton and Oxford, he sailed in 1910 for British East Africa - still then the land of the pioneer. Sara Wheeler reveals the truth behind his love affairs with the glamorous aviatrix Beryl Markham, and - famously - with Karen Blixen, a romance immortalised in her memoir Out of Africa. 
 
'No one who ever met him', his Times obituary concluded, 'whether man or woman, old or young, white or black, failed to come under his spell'.

Too Close To The Sun

The Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton

Eugene B Sledge

The inspiration behind the HBO series THE PACIFIC 
 
This was a brutish, primitive hatred, as characteristic of the horror of war in the Pacific as the palm trees and the islands... 
 
Landing on the beach at Peleliu in 1944 as a twenty-year-old new recruit to the US Marines, Eugene Sledge can only try desperately to survive. At Peleliu and Okinawa - two of the fiercest and filthiest Pacific battles of WWII - he witnesses the dehumanising brutality displayed by both sides and the animal hatred that each soldier has for his enemy. 
 
During temporary lapses in the fighting, conditions on the islands mean that the Marines often can't wash, stay dry, dig latrines, or even find time to eat. Suffering from constant fear, fatigue, and filth, the struggle of simply living in a combat zone is utterly debilitating. 
 
Yet despite horrendous conditions Sledge finds time to keep notes that he would later turn into a book. Described as one of the finest memoirs to emerge from any war, With the Old Breed tells with compassion and honesty of the cruelty, bravery and deaths of the men he fought alongside, and of his own journey from patriotic innocence to battle-scarred veteran. 
 
'Eugene Sledge became more than a legend with his memoir, With The Old Breed. He became a chronicler, a historian, a storyteller who turns the extremes of the war in the Pacific - the terror, the camaraderie, the banal and the extraordinary - into terms we mortals can grasp' Tom Hanks

With the Old Breed

The World War Two Pacific Classic

Pen Farthing

'Nowzad was a gentle giant when it came to taking treats. He never, ever snatched. To me it was just further evidence that, deep inside, there was a great dog struggling to find his way out' 
 
When Pen Farthing brings stray dogs Nowzad and Tali back from his tour of Afghanistan, little does he know what he has begun. 
 
Suddenly he has four dogs to look after - two of whom have never been house-trained. And soon he is inundated with requests from other Marines and soldiers to help bring their rescued dogs home. Whether it's little Helmand, Fubar or Beardog, Pen does his utmost to give these dogs the chance they deserve. 
 
No Place like Home is the true story of one man's courage and persistence as he struggles to give his dogs at home, and those still in Afghanistan, the best possible chance. It will warm - and break - the hearts of dog lovers everywhere.

No Place Like Home

A New Beginning with the Dogs of Afghanistan

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

John James Audubon

John James Audubon (1785-1851) was for half a century America's dominant wildlife artist. His seminal Birds of America, a collection of 435 life-size prints, is still a standard work, and the name Audubon remains synonymous with birds and bird conservation the world over. Born in Haiti, the illegitimate son of a French sea-captain, he was raised in France and sailed to America at the age of 18 where he went into business and began his study of birds. In 1819 he was briefly jailed for bankruptcy; with no other prospects, he set off on his epic quest to depict America's avifauna, with nothing but his gun, artist's materials, and a young assistant. Floating down the Mississippi, he lived a rugged hand-to-mouth existence while his devoted wife, Lucy, earned money as a tutor to wealthy plantation families. In 1826 he sailed with his partly finished collection to England. Lionized as the 'American woodsman', he hit just the right Romantic note for the era, and was an overnight success, finding printers for his book first in Edinburgh, then London. It was a classic American tale of triumph over adversity. 
Here are vivid 'bird biographies', his correspondence with Lucy, journal accounts of his dramatic river journeys and hunting trips with the Osage Indians, and a generous sampling of brief stories that have long been out of print, 'The Burning of the Forests' and 'Kentucky Barbecue on the Fourth of July' among them. The Audubon Reader is an unforgettable encounter with early America: with its wildlife and birds, with its people and its primordial wilderness.

The Audubon Reader

Maggie Campbell-Culver

Given the extent of his influence on 17th-century life, and his lasting impact on the British landscape it is remarkable that no book has been written before about John Evelyn. He was a longstanding friend of Samuel Pepys (who wrote of him, ' A most excellent person he is, and must be allowed a little for conceitedness; but he may well be so, being a man so much above others.'), a founder-member of the Royal Society and a prolific writer and diarist. He was an early advocate of the garden city but his most important work was Sylva: a Discourse of Forest Trees. Sylva was presented to the Royal Society to promote the planting of timber trees 'for the supply of the Navy, the employment and advantage of the poor as well as the ornamenting of the nation.' He was responsible for the first great raft of tree-planting and for a great influx of tree introductions to Britain. 
 
Maggie Campbell-Culver's book, like Sylva, has at its core a section detailing the characteristics, history and uses of 33 trees incorporating the advice Evelyn gave and demonstrating its relevance still in the 20th-century. Not only was Evelyn probably the first horticultural writer to show an appreciation of the aesthetic benefits of trees in our landscape, he is shown to be a founder-father of the modern conservation movement.

A Passion For Trees

The Legacy Of John Evelyn

Frank Ching

Frank Ching brings to life 900 years of Chinese history through his own fascinating family tree. Beginning with his search for the grave of his first recorded ancestor, the 11th century poet Qin Guan, and ending with a moving account of his relationship with his father, a victim of China's historic upheaval, Frank Ching introduces a colourful cast of characters. His unbroken family line includes - among many others - a lovelorn concubine, a traitor, a military hero, an imperial ghost-writer, a minister of punishments and a woman noted for her skills in both verse and martial arts. There is scarcely an aspect of Chinese life, from shamanism to violent rebellion, that Ching doesn't touch upon in this fascinating work. Through his vivid and personal portraits of his ancestors the history of China itself unfolds: from the days of the ancient empire to its radical transformation today.

Ancestors

The story of China told through the lives of an extraordinary family

Stephen Anderton

Christopher Lloyd (Christo) was one of the greatest English gardeners of the twentieth century, perhaps the finest plantsman of them all. His creation is the garden at Great Dixter in East Sussex, and it is a tribute to his vision and achievement that, after his death in 2006, the Heritage Lottery Fund made a grant of £4 million to help preserve it for the nation. This enjoyable and revealing book - the first biography of Christo - is also the story of Dixter from 1910 to 2006, a unique unbroken history of one English house and one English garden spanning a century. 
 
It was Christo's father, Nathaniel, who bought the medieval manor at Dixter and called in the fashionable Edwardian architect, Lutyens, to rebuild the house and lay out the garden. And it was his mother, Daisy, who made the first wild garden in the meadows there. Christo was born at Dixter in 1921. Apart from boarding school, war service and a period at horticultural college, he spent his whole life there, constantly re-planting and enriching the garden, while turning out landmark books and exhaustive journalism. Opinionated, argumentative and gloriously eccentric, he changed the face of English gardening through his passions for meadow gardening, dazzling colours and thorough husbandry. 
 
As the baby of a family of six - five boys and a girl - Christo was stifled by his adoring mother. Music-loving and sports-hating, he knew the Latin names of plants before he was eight. This fascinating book reveals what made Christo tick by examining his relationships with his generous but scheming mother, his like-minded friends (such as gardeners Anna Pavord and Beth Chatto) and his colleagues (including his head gardener, Fergus Garrett, a plantsman in Christo's own mould).

Christopher Lloyd

His Life at Great Dixter

Mala Kacenberg

Growing up in a Polish village on the fringes of a deep forest, Mala has a wonderful childhood. But when the German invasion reduces her loved ones to starvation, Mala takes matters into her own hands and sneaks out to find food. On her way back, she is handed a smuggled letter that reveals her family and friends have been rounded up for deportation. With only her cat, Malach for company, she must flee. 
 
Malach becomes her family, her only respite from loneliness, and a guide through unfathomable darkness. Together, they navigate forests, outwit soldiers, and, against all odds, survive.

Mala's Cat

The moving and unforgettable true story of one girl's survival during the Holocaust

Richard Lloyd Parry

** Richard Lloyd Parry is the winner of the 2018 Rathbones Folio Prize ** 
 
In the last years of the twentieth century, Richard Lloyd Parry found himself in the vast island nation of Indonesia, one of the most alluring, mysterious and violent countries in the world. For thirty-two years it had been paralysed by the grip of the dictator and mystic General Suharto. But now the age of Suharto was reaching its end, giving way to a new era of chaos and superstition - the 'time of madness' predicted centuries before by poets and seers. 
 
On the island of Borneo, tribesmen embarked on a savage war of head-hunting and cannibalism. Vast jungles burned uncontrollably; money lost its value; there were plane crashes and volcanic eruptions. After the tumultuous fall of Suharto came the vote of independence from Indonesia for the tiny occupied country of East Timor. And it was here, trapped in the besieged compound of the United Nations, that Lloyd Parry reached his own painful, personal crisis.

In The Time Of Madness

Nicholas Crane

By knowing the shape of our earth we can create maps, survive the oceans, follow rivers, navigate the skies, and travel across the globe. This is the story of our world, of how we discovered what no one thought possible - the shape of the earth. 
 
A thrilling and page-turning account of the first major expedition by data gatherers and qualified observers to interior Peru, to discover the shape and magnitude of the earth. Until humanity discovered this it would be impossible to produce accurate maps and sea charts, without which thousands of lives would be lost, and exact locations of cities, roads and rivers would never be known. This fascinating and dramatic story weaves scientific rigour, egos, funding crises and betrayal with sea voyages, jungles and volcanoes.

Latitude

The astonishing adventure that shaped the world

Vasily Grossman

In the summer of 1941, as the Germans invade Russia, newspaper reporter Vasily Grossman is swept to the frontlines, witnessing some of the most savage atrocities in Russian history. 
 
 As Grossman follows the Red Army from the defence of Moscow, to the carnage at Stalingrad, to the Nazi genocide in Treblinka, his writings paint a vividly raw and devastating account of Operation Barbarossa during World War Two. 
Grossman’s notebooks, war diaries, personal correspondence and newspaper articles are meticulously woven into a gripping narrative and provide a piercing look into the life of the author behind recent Sunday Times bestseller Stalingrad. 
 
A Writer at War stands as an unforgettable eyewitness account of the Eastern Front and places Grossman as the leading Soviet voice of ‘the ruthless truth of war’. 
 
‘A remarkable addition to the literature of 1941 – 1945...a wonderful portrait of the wartime experience of Russia... A worthy memorial to a remarkable man’ Sunday Telegraph

A Writer At War

Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945

Wes Davis

In the bleakest years of the Second World War when it appeared that nothing could slow the advance of the German army, Hitler set his sights on the Mediterranean island of Crete, the ideal staging ground for domination of the Middle East. But German command had not counted on the strength of the Cretan resistance or the eccentric band of British intelligence officers who would stand in their way, conducting audacious sabotage operations in the very shadow of the Nazi occupation force. 
 
The Ariadne Objective tells the remarkable story of the secret war on Crete from the perspective of these amateur soldiers who found themselves serving because, as one of them put it, they had made 'the obsolete choice of Greek at school'. John Pendlebury, a swashbuckling archaeologist with a glass eye and a swordstick; Xan Fielding, a writer who would later produce the English translations of books like Bridge on the River Kwai and Planet of the Apes; Sandy Rendel, a future Times reporter, who prided himself on a disguise that left him looking more ragged and fierce than the Cretans he fought alongside; and Patrick Leigh Fermor, the future travel-writing luminary who, as a teenager in the early 1930s, walked across Europe, a continent already beginning to feel the effects of Hitler's rise to power. 
 
Having infiltrated occupied Crete, these British gentleman spies teamed with Cretan partisans to carry out a cunning plan to disrupt Nazi manoeuvres, culminating in a daring, high-risk plot to abduct the island’s German commander. In this thrilling and little known episode of Second World War history, Wes Davis paints a brilliant portrait of some extraordinary characters and tells a story of triumph against all the odds.

The Ariadne Objective

Patrick Leigh Fermor and the Underground War to Rescue Crete from the Nazis

Henry Hemming

*** The Sunday Times bestseller *** 
 
'Vividly imagined and prodigiously researched' Helen Davies, Sunday Times, Books of the Year 
 
 'Such a rewarding read' John Preston, Daily Mail, Books of the Year 
 
'This odd, secretive man is brought to life', Robbie Millen, The Times, Books of the Year 
 
Maxwell Knight was a paradox. A jazz obsessive and nature enthusiast (he is the author of the definitive work on how to look after a gorilla), he is seen today as one of MI5's greatest spymasters, a man who did more than any other to break up British fascism during the Second World War – in spite of having once belonged to the British Fascisti himself. He was known to his agents and colleagues simply as M, and was rumoured to be part of the inspiration for the character M in the James Bond series. 
 
Knight became a legendary spymaster despite an almost total lack of qualifications. What set him apart from his peers was a mercurial ability to transform almost anyone into a fearless secret agent. He was the first in MI5 to grasp the potential of training female agents. 
 
M is about more than just one man however. In its pages, Hemming reveals for the first time in print the names and stories of seven men and women recruited by Knight, on behalf of MI5, and then asked to infiltrate the most dangerous political organizations in Britain at that time. Until now, their identities have been kept secret outside MI5. Drawn from every walk of life, they led double lives—often at great personal cost—in order to protect the country they loved. With the publication of this book, it will be possible at last to celebrate the lives of these courageous, selfless individuals. 
 
Drawing on declassified documents, private family archives and interviews with retired MI5 officers as well as the families of MI5 agents, M reveals not just the shadowy world of espionage but a brilliant, enigmatic man at its centre.

Maxwell Knight, MI5's Greatest Spymaster

Judith Cook

Simon Forman was one of the most extraordinary personalities of Elizabethan and Jacobean London. 
Charismatic, volatile and ambitious, he was doctor to the giants of the theatre and his 'playbook' contains the first eye-witness accounts of Shakespeare's plays. Like most doctors he was also an astrologer, reading the stars for all and sundry. 
 
Constantly on the fringes of great events and court intrigues, his name has been linked with Sir Walter Raleigh's mysterious group, 'the School of Night' and with the notorious Overbury poisoning case, in which the beautiful Countess of Essex was accused of murder. 
 
Also uncovered is Forman's private world, that of a compulsive womaniser who kept a coded diary, never fully deciphered before, a record of promiscuity as colourful as the journals of Pepys and Boswell.

Dr Simon Forman

Jung Chang

Discover the extraordinary story of the woman who brought China into the modern age, from the bestselling author of Wild Swans 
 
 In this groundbreaking biography, Jung Chang vividly describes how Empress Dowager Cixi – the most important woman in Chinese history – brought a medieval empire into the modern age. Under her, the ancient country attained virtually all the attributes of a modern state and it was she who abolished gruesome punishments like ‘death by a thousand cuts’ and put an end to foot-binding. Jung Chang comprehensively overturns the conventional view of Cixi as a diehard conservative and cruel despot and also takes the reader into the depths of her splendid Summer Palace and the harem of Beijing’s Forbidden City, where she lived surrounded by eunuchs – with one of whom she fell in love, with tragic consequences. 
 
 Packed with drama, fast-paced and gripping, it is both a panoramic depiction of the birth of modern China and an intimate portrait of a woman: as the concubine to a monarch, as the absolute ruler of a third of the world’s population, and as a unique stateswoman. 
 
 ‘Powerful’ Simon Sebag Montefiore 
 
 ‘Truly authoritative’ New York Times 
 
 ‘Wonderful’ Sunday Times 
 
 **Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Biography Prize**

Empress Dowager Cixi

The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

Mark Kurzem

Part thriller, part psychological drama, part puzzle with a strange twist, The Mascot is one of the most astonishing stories to emerge from the Second World War. It tells the remarkable true story of how Alex Kurzem unravelled the shocking secrets of his wartime past. With the support of Mark, his son, Alex began to recall how he evaded the German-led execution squad that decimated his village, but witnessed the murder of his Jewish mother and siblings. He scavenged amongst the trees and protected himself from wolves, before falling into the hands of a Latvian police battalion. The soldiers adopted him as their mascot and Alex accompanied the unit everywhere as it changed its identity and duties to those of an SS unit on the rampage. He even appeared in Nazi propaganda films and newspaper articles, riding into Riga in a military parade... yet he was Jewish. 
 
At the age of five, was Alex Kurzem a collaborator or just a lost little boy? Caught up in a world of war-crime hunters, former war criminals and security agents with unclear agendas, he has since been threatened by many who believe he has betrayed them.

The Mascot

The extraordinary story of a Jewish boy and an SS extermination squad

Jean-Paul Kauffmann

Near the end of his life, the great Romantic artist Eug-ne Delacroix (1798-1863) painted one of the most enigmatic episodes from the Bible: Jacob wrestling with the angel. This painting, which decorates the wall of the Chapel of the Holy Angels in the Paris church of Saint-Sulpice, is Delacroix's "spiritual testament". But Sain-Sulpice is a mysterious church where everything happens behind the scenes. A fan of Inspector Maigret, Jean-Paul Kauffmann investigates the painting and the church, paying particular attention to its hidden history. He searches for clues in a bar in Dieppe, a castle in Quercy, a village in the Argonne, an oak tree in the forest at S-nart, even a golf course in the Loiret. The trail leads him to an art critic, a lecturer at the Louvre, and a sculptor who has a studio in the attic of Saint-Sulpice itself. All these intertwining threads finally come together in a central motif in which Kauffmann himself is involved. There comes a time in which everyone must wrestle with the angel.

Wrestling With The Angel

Suetonius

'Because of his baldness and hairiness, he announced it was a capital offence for anyone either to look down on him as he passed or to mention goats in any context.' 
 
The biography of the brutal, crazed and incestuous Roman Emperor Caligula, who tried to appoint his own horse consul. 
 
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. 
 
Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (c.70-130 CE). Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars is also available in Penguin Classics.

Caligula

Spike Milligan

'I had not informed my parents of my return, I wanted it to be a lovely surprise; it was, for me, they were away ...' 
 
The seventh and last volume of Spike Milligan's memoirs sees our hero returning from war and Italy ... but to what? Aside from shooting large, inaccurate guns at Germans, all he has done for five long years is blow a trumpet, tell rude jokes and write and perform sketches for the entertainment of bored and murderous soldiers - who on earth is going to pay a civilian to do more of that? From the giddy heights of Hackney Empire to a Zurich Freak Show and beyond, Spike makes his way through the backwaters of showbiz, first as band musician then as one-man wild-act and eventually in the company of a group of like-minded comedians called Harry Secombe, Michael Bentine and Peter Sellers. They decide to call themselves The Goons...

Peace Work

John M. Myers

Hugh Glass was left to die. 
 
Attacked 
Whilst hunting in the fur-rich, Native American-held territory of the Upper Missouri River, Hugh Glass was attacked and mauled by grizzly bear. 
 
Hundreds of miles away from help; his fellow hunters were unable to carry him out. Two men were paid to wait for him to die. 
 
Abandoned 
Unable to wait to the end, Glass's comrades left him alone in the wilderness - taking his supplies, his knife, and his rifle. Ultimately taking his life. 
 
Alive 
But Glass didn't die. Inch by inch, he crawled 200 miles toward survival and his revenge. . . 
 
 
Previously published as The Saga of Hugh Glass, The Man Who Returned From The Dead is the remarkable true story behind the film, The Revenant.

The Man Who Returned From The Dead

Alberto Granado

In 1952 Alberto Granado, a young doctor, and his friend Ernesto Guevara, a 23-year-old medical student from a distinguished Buenos Aires family decided to explore their continent. They set off from Cordoba in Argentina on a 1949 Norton 500cc motorbike and travelled through Chile, Peru, Colombia and Venezuela. They worked as casual labourers along the way, as football coaches, medical assistants, and haulage hands. The poverty and exploitation of the native population changed them for ever. Each man later wrote an account of the journey. 
 
Alberto Granado realised later in his life that what they saw and encountered on their journey represented a crucial turning point. It strengthened Alberto's determination to forge his career as a scientist. And it started the process that was to turn Ernesto - the debonair, fun-loving student - into Che, the man who fought for the liberation of Cuba and became the heroic and glamorous warrior fighting for freedom and social justice, who remains to this day in people's minds Latin America's foremost hero and one of the world's great revolutionaries. A companion to Che's Motorcycle Diaries, Alberto Granado's book is a moving and at times hilarious account of how two carefree young men found their true purpose in life.

Travelling With Che Guevara

The Making of a Revolutionary

John Evelyn

Sometimes overshadowed by his friend and contemporary, Samuel Pepys, Evelyn is the other great English diarist. He was a scholar, a scientific amateur, a garden designer and architect, and a founder member of the Royal Society who published a magisterial book about trees, Sylva, and many pamphlets on assorted subjects. 
His great interest as a diarist is that he was privy to all the great men and events of his very long life, from the execution of Charles I to the accession of Queen Anne, whereas Pepys writes of a relatively short period. A personal friend of Charles II, he observed at close quarters- and with some disapproval- that monarch's amorous life, and the diaries contain vivid portraits of Nell Gwynn, other royal mistresses and their children. The personalities of James II, the Dukes of Monmouth and Marlborough, and Judge Jeffreys, also figure largely. 
But this is more than a social record. As a valued administrator, Evelyn was also involved with many serious projects, such as combating the Plague, and rebuilding London after the Great Fire - an enterprise which brought him close to Christopher Wren. 
In all, a vivid portrait of the social, personal and political life of a society in ferment by one of its major players.

The Diary of John Evelyn

Sarah Bakewell

This gripping nineteenth-century adventure stars Jorgen Jorgenson, who ran away to sea at fourteen and began a brilliant career by sailing to establish the first colony in Tasmania. Twists of fortune then found him captaining a warship for Napoleon before joining a British trading voyage to Iceland, where he staged an outrageous coup and ruled the country for two months. 
 
Much lay ahead, from imprisonment in the hulks to patronage by Joseph Banks and travels in Europe as a British spy. But Jorgenson was dogged by his own excesses, and ended up transported as a convict to the very colony he helped to found. Here he reinvented himself again as an explorer, and, despite his sympathy for the people, was caught up in the terrible Aboriginal clearances. Using unpublished sources and letters, Sarah Bakewell tells his astonishing tale with dazzling verve.

The English Dane

From King of Iceland to Tasmanian Convict

James Aldred

Join James Aldred on a captivating journey, encountering master craftsmen, British wildlife, and a deep passion for a remarkable landscape. 
 
There are some moments in childhood that are frozen in time, vivid and vital, an anchor. When James Aldred tracked down an old Romani wagon he once played in, he found himself inside one such moment again. Though brambles had overtaken its rotted boards and its wheels were barely there, it transported him to a magical summer in the New Forest forty years ago and awakened in him the possibility of reliving it with his young family. Pairing an ambition to restore the wagon to its former glory with a determination to share the Forest with his children, he embarked on a remarkable journey. 
 
In his evocative memoir, Aldred chronicles his return to a cherished childhood landscape, rich with the history of the Romani families who once roamed freely there. As he painstakingly restores the wagon, Aldred delves into both the New Forest's natural history and storied past, tracing its roots back to the 16th century and even further to the time of William the Conqueror. Camera traps reveal otters hunting in the brook, while the nearby goshawk nest and fox earth speak to the area's thriving wildlife. 
 
Masterfully observed, A Wagon in the Woods is a celebration of both people and place, and the timeless bond between land, history and the enduring spirit of adventure.

A Wagon in the Woods

Pursuing a dream in an ancient forest

Wangari Maathai

Born in a rural Kenyan village in 1940, Wangari Maathai was already an iconoclast as a child, determined to get an education even though most African girls then were uneducated. In her remarkable and inspiring autobiography, she tells of her studies with Catholic missionaries, earning bachelors and master's degrees in the United States, and becoming the first woman both to earn a PhD and to head a university department in Kenya. She tells of her numerous run-ins with the brutal government of Daniel arap Moi and of the political and personal reasons that compelled her, in 1977, to establish the Green Belt Movement, which spread from Kenya across Africa, and which helps restore indigenous forests while assisting rural women by paying them to plant trees in their villages. 
 
Maathai's extraordinary courage and determination helped transform Kenya's government into the democracy in which she now serves as Deputy Minister for the Environment and Natural Resources and as a Member of Parliament. Eventually her achievement was internationally recognized in the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded in recognition of her 'contribution to sustainable development, human rights, and peace'. 
 
In Unbowed, we are in the presence of a hugely charismatic yet humble woman whose remarkable story carries with it an inspiring message of hope. Hers is an extraordinary story, spanning different worlds and changing times, and revealing what the courage, determination, tenacity and humour of one good woman can achieve; how as small a thing as planting a seedling and watering it can made all the difference in the world.

Unbowed

My Autobiography

Piers Brendon

This illuminating biography of Robert Stephen Hawker (1803-75) unravels fully the famous Cornish parson-poet's rich personality. Drawing on a mass of unpublished material, Piers Brendon re-creates one of the most bizarre of Victorian lives, revealing the mixture of truth, over-simplification and falsehood in the legend which has built up around him. 
 
The popular account depicts Hawker as a youth of wild high spirits who delighted in hoaxes and practical jokes. As an Oxford undergraduate he won the Newdigate Poetry Prize and married his rich 41-year-old godmother. In 1834 he became vicar of Morwenstow and spent the rest of his life in his desolate country parish on the storm-swept coast of north Cornwall. He was a charitable, hard-working Anglo-Catholic but, owing to the remoteness of his position and lack of sympathy from his parishioners, his true genius became warped and he succumbed to wayward eccentricity. 
 
His dress was, to say the least, unorthodox, and he became obsessed with antiquarian lore, lending a haunting reality to the arcane superstitions which he cultivated. He entertained no doubt whatever about the active agency of demons and angels, ghosts and brownies. He talked to birds, invited his nine cats into church and excommunicated one of them when it caught a mouse on Sunday. Out of the timbers of wrecked ships he built a hut, a forbidding sanctuary perched on the high cliff-edge, where he invoked mystic visions and composed romantic poetry. 
 
Piers Brendon here rescues Hawker from legend, and his fascinating book substitutes character for caricature. An even more interesting and idiosyncratic Hawker emerges, scarred and moulded by the stark isolation of his hostile seaboard benefice, a man of remarkable insight and compassion, who submitted in strange ways to his calling, and who, it turns out, proves to have been a true prophet in his yearning exclamation: 'what a life mine would be if it were all written and published in a book.'

Hawker Of Morwenstow

Portrait of an Eccentric Victorian

Catherine Bailey

Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
Berlin, September 1944. Ulrich von Hassell, former ambassador to Italy and a key member of the German Resistance, is executed for his part in an assassination plot against Hitler. In response to the attack, Himmler, leader of the SS, orders the arrest of all the families of the plotters. 
 
In a remote castle in Italy, von Hassell's beloved daughter, Fey, is discovered just when she thought she had escaped the Nazi net. She is arrested and her two sons, aged three and two are seized by the SS. Fey has no idea of her children's fate as she is dragged away on a terrifying journey to the darkest corners of a Europe savaged by war. 
 
Moving from a palazzo in the heart of the Italian countryside to the horrors of Buchenwald, Catherine Bailey tells an extraordinary story of resistance at the heart of the Second World War. The Lost Boys is an illuminating and devastating account of great personal sacrifice, of loss and, above all, of defiance.

The Lost Boys

A Family Ripped Apart by War

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