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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Robert Macfarlane

'Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save...' 
 
From the vast underground mycelial networks by which trees communicate to the ice-blue depths of glacial moulins, and from North Yorkshire to the Lofoten Islands, Robert Macfarlane traces a voyage through the worlds beneath our feet. 
 
He reaches back into the deep history of the planet, through the layers of rock and ancient buried objects, and forward to the future, the legacy of the anthropocene and the world we bequeath our descendants. 
 
Underland is Macfarlane at his dazzling best - the lyrical, the political and the philosophical come together in this profound exploration of the relationship between landscape and the human heart.

Underland

A Deep Time Journey

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett

'Deliciously tactile and meditative . . . to read this is to luxuriate in the land, and to connect to it and oneself' Bernardine Evaristo 
 
What fills my lungs is wider than breath could be. It is a place and a language torn, matted and melded; flowered and chiming with bones. That breath is that place and until I get there I will not really be breathing. 
 
Spurred on by her father's declining health and inspired by the history he once wrote of his small Devon village, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett delves through layers of memory, language and natural history to tell a powerful story of how the land shapes us and speaks to us. The Grassling is a book about roots: what it means to belong when the soil beneath our feet is constantly shifting, when the people and places that nurtured us are slipping away.

The Grassling

Julian Hoffman

All across the world, irreplaceable habitats are under threat. Unique ecosystems of plants and animals are being destroyed by human activies. From the tiny to the vast, from prairie to meadow, and from Kent to Hungary, America to India, they are disappearing. 
 
Irreplaceable captures the haunting beauty of these landscapes, including the rare species that call them home. And it reveals the human communities which form around these special places - from grassroots campaigners to professional conservationists and academics - committed to saving them from extinction. Ultimately it asks what a deep emotional connection to the land might offer us, and why we must fight for its continued survival.

Irreplaceable

The fight to save our wild places

Aldo Leopold

'One of the most influential books about the natural world ever published' Paul Kingsnorth, Guardian 
 
'There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot,' begins Aldo Leopold's totemic work of ecological thought. Ranging from lyrical observations of the changing seasons over a year on his Wisconsin farm to his hugely influential idea of a 'land ethic' signifying moral equilibrium between humans and all other life on earth, A Sand County Almanac changed perceptions of the natural world and helped give birth to the modern conservation movement. 
 
'An unequivocal statement of conscience that will carry down the generations ... his argument seems more urgently true now than ever' The New York Times

A Sand County Almanac

And Sketches Here and There

John Craven

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, John was, to children and parents alike, a friendly guide to the big wide world as the presenter of the world's first news programme for children, Newsround. And then, for a new audience, in 1989, John hosted the first episode of Countryfile - a show that he's now presented for almost three decades. 
 
In this funny, moving and unique first memoir, John recounts his childhood, the high points and low points of one of the longest entertaining careers in history, and the people, family and animals in his own life that have shaped it.

Headlines and Hedgerows

A Memoir

Elli H. Radinger

Love your family, care for your those around you, never give up and always find time to have fun - these are the golden rules of wolves. These remarkably intelligent animals take empathetic care of their old and injured, bring up their young lovingly and are able to forget everything when playing. They think, dream, make plans, communicate intelligently with one another - and behave more like humans than any other animal. 
 
Elli H. Radinger, wolf expert and naturalist, tells readers of astonishing and hitherto unknown facts about the lives of wolves and demonstrates the many ways in which we can improve our own lives by learning from them.

The Wisdom of Wolves

How Wolves Can Teach Us To Be More Human

Tom Nancollas

Lighthouses are striking totems of our relationship to the sea. For many, they encapsulate a romantic vision of solitary homes amongst the waves, but their original purpose was much more utilitarian than that. Today we still depend upon their guiding lights for the safe passage of ships. Nowhere is this truer than in the rock lighthouses of Great Britain and Ireland which form a ring of twenty towers built between 1811 and 1904, so-called because they were constructed on desolate rock formations in the middle of the sea, and made of granite to withstand the power of its waves. 
 
Seashaken Houses is a lyrical exploration of these singular towers, the people who risked their lives building and rebuilding them, those that inhabited their circular rooms, and the ways in which we value emblems of our history in a changing world.

Seashaken Houses

A Lighthouse History from Eddystone to Fastnet

David Christian

How did we get from the Big Bang to today's staggering complexity, in which seven billion humans are connected into networks powerful enough to transform the planet? And why, in comparison, are our closest primate relatives reduced to near-extinction? 
 
Big History creator David Christian gives the answers in a mind-expanding cosmological detective story told on the grandest possible scale. He traces how, during eight key thresholds, the right conditions have allowed new forms of complexity to arise, from stars to galaxies, Earth to homo sapiens, agriculture to fossil fuels. This last mega-innovation gave us an energy bonanza that brought huge benefits to mankind, yet also threatens to shake apart everything we have created. 
 
This global origin story is one that we could only begin to tell recently, thanks to the underlying unity of modern knowledge. Panoramic in scope and thrillingly told, Origin Story reveals what we learn about human existence when we consider it from a universal scale.

Origin Story

A Big History of Everything

Adam Weymouth

The Yukon River is over 2,000 miles long, flowing northwest from Canada through the Yukon Territory and Alaska to the Bering Sea. Setting out to explore one of the most ruggedly beautiful and remote regions of North America, Adam Weymouth journeyed by canoe on a four-month odyssey through this untrammelled wilderness, encountering the people who have lived there for generations. The Yukon's inhabitants have long depended on the king salmon who each year migrate the entire river to reach their spawning grounds. Now the salmon numbers have dwindled, and the encroachment of the modern world has changed the way of life on the Yukon, perhaps for ever. 
 
Weymouth's searing portraits of these people and landscapes offer an elegiac glimpse of a disappearing world. Kings of the Yukon is an extraordinary adventure, told by a powerful new voice.

Kings of the Yukon

An Alaskan River Journey

Will Millard

Growing up on the Cambridgeshire Fens, Will Millard never felt more at home than when he was out with his granddad on the riverbank whiling away the day catching fish. As he grew older his competitive urge to catch more and bigger fish led him away from that natural connection between him, his grandfather and the rivers of his home and into large commercial fisheries catching fish after fish. That is, until the fateful day he let a record-breaking sand eel slip through his fingers and he knew that he had lost the magic of those days down by the river, and that something had to change. Armed with his late grandfather's well-thumbed fishing encyclopaedia Will set out on a quest to get back to his roots and catch some of our great forgotten fish species, hidden deep in our lost waterways. 
 
The Old Man and the Sand Eel is at its heart the story of three generations of men trying to figure out what it is to be a man, a father and a fisherman. It plots Will's scaly stepping stones back to his childhood innocence and late granddad, and a return to the importance of understanding the truly feral through a child's eyes, when anything was possible and the wild was everywhere.

The Old Man and the Sand Eel

James Rebanks

I am the luckiest man alive, because I get to live and work in the most beautiful place on earth: Matterdale in the English Lake District. 
 
When I was a child we didn't really go anywhere, except a week in the Isle of Man when I was about ten years old, and I never left Britain until I was twenty. 
 
Even now, years later, the best bit of any travelling is coming home. 
 
Bringing us into the world of shepherd's baking competitions, sheep shows and moments out on the fell watching the sheep run away home, James Rebanks interweaves thoughts and reflections on the art of shepherding with his photographs of the valley, people and animals that make up the daily life of the fells. A life lived by the three hundred surviving fell farming families, this is a book of photos and words filled with reverence and love.

The Illustrated Herdwick Shepherd

Jacqueline Yallop

On her fortieth birthday Jacqueline Yallop built a pig sty in rural south-west France. She and her husband Ed had decided to turn their Aveyron cottage and garden into a small holding. They bought two pigs - Big and Little - to rear and slaughter. The locals were full of advice, and with just a small amount of plastic poles and metallic string and some new Wellington boots, they were off. 
 
They will cultivate the land. They will raise, then kill and eat their pigs. Or so they keep telling themselves. Because the reality is so very different from the romantic dreams of two stubborn English writers . . .

Big Pig, Little Pig

A Year on a Smallholding in South-West France

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

Ulrich Raulff

The relationship between horses and humans is an ancient, profound and complex one. For millennia horses provided the strength and speed that humans lacked. How we travelled, farmed and fought was dictated by the needs of this extraordinary animal. They were sculpted, painted, cherished, admired; they were thrashed, abused and exposed to terrible danger. And then, suddenly, in the 20th century the links were broken and the millions of horses that shared our existence almost vanished. Farewell to the Horse is an engaging, brilliantly written and moving discussion of the endlessly various creature who has so often shared and shaped our fate.

Farewell to the Horse

The Final Century of Our Relationship

Wendell Berry

'He is unlike anybody else writing today ... After Donald Trump's election, we urgently need to rediscover the best of radical America. An essential part of that story is Wendell Berry. Few of us can live, or even aspire to, his kind of life. But nobody can risk ignoring him' Andrew Marr 
 
'Wendell Berry is the most important writer and thinker that you have (probably) never heard of. He is an American sage' James Rebanks 
 
Wendell Berry is 'something of an anachronism'. He began his life as the old times and the last of the old-time people were dying out, and continues to this day in the old ways: a team of work horses and a pencil are his preferred working tools. The writings gathered in The World-Ending Fire are the unique product of a life spent farming the fields of rural Kentucky with mules and horses, and of the rich, intimate knowledge of the land cultivated by this work. These are essays written in defiance of the false call to progress, and in defence of the local landscapes that provide our cultural heritage, our history, our home.

The World-Ending Fire

The Essential Wendell Berry

Isobel Charman

The creation of a zoo in Dickensian London - when only one other existed across the world - is a story of jaw-dropping audacity. It is the story of trailblazing scientists, rival zookeepers and aristocratic naturalists collecting amazing animals from all four corners of the globe. 
 
It is the story of a weird and wonderful oasis in the heart of a swirling city, and of incredible characters, both human and animal - from Stamford Raffles and Charles Darwin to Jenny the orang-utan and Obaysch the celebrity hippo, the first that anyone in Britain had ever seen. 
 
Against a background of global Empire, domestic reform and industrialisation, this is a new history of a new world.

The Zoo

The Wild and Wonderful Tale of the Founding of London Zoo

Fredrik Sjöberg

Stories just begin. We rarely know where and almost never why. It doesn't matter. Nothing is certain any longer. I just want to shut my eyes, point at random and say, as a sort of experiment, that once, when I was sixteen years old, I spent a whole night singing romantic songs in the top of a pine tree. That's where it may have started. 
 
In this follow-up to The Fly Trap, Sjöberg continues to explore the pleasures and trials of those who spend their time tracing the smallest details of the natural world. In these two tales, he calls on his childhood memories and experience as a hoverfly collector, and follows the trail of long forgotten entomologists before him who left their native Sweden for the United States. From Stockholm to the Grand Canyon, Sjöberg contemplates the richness of life and the strange paths it leads us on.

The Art of Flight

First issued to airmen in 1952, this reprint of The Air Ministry's Arctic Survival pamphlet includes emergency advice to crew operating over arctic regions. 
With original illustrations and text, these survival guides provide an insight to military survival techniques from a by-gone era. 
 
Packed with original line drawings and instruction in: 
 
- The best faces to pull to prevent frostbite and when you can expect bits of you to 'fall off', should you fail 
- How to build a structurally sound igloo 
- How to fashion a mask to prevent snowblindness 
 
 
Focussing on the harshest of situations one can find oneself in, Arctic Survival is one of four reprints of The Air Ministry's emergency survival pamphlets. Others include: 
Jungle Survival 
Desert Survival 
Arctic Survival

Arctic Survival

First issued to airmen in 1952, this reprint of The Air Ministry's Desert Survival pamphlet includes emergency advice to crew operating over desert regions. 
 
With original illustrations and text, these survival guides provide an insight to military survival techniques from a by-gone era. 
 
Packed with original line drawings and instruction in: 
 
- How to find water in a dry stream course 
- How to make a hat out of seat cushions 
- What to do in the event of meeting 'hostile parties' 
 
Focussing on one of the harshest climates on Earth, Desert Survival is one of four reprints of The Air Ministry's emergency survival pamphlets. 
 
Others include: 
Jungle Survival 
Sea Survival 
Arctic Survival

Desert Survival

First issued to airmen in 1952, this reprint of The Air Ministry's Desert Survival pamphlet includes emergency advice to crew operating over desert regions. 
With original illustrations and text, these survival guides provide an insight to military survival techniques from a by-gone era. 
 
Packed with original line drawings and instruction in: 
 
- What to do if 'jungle hiking becomes boring' 
- How to stay safe from poisonous reptiles and insects 
- The benefits of using a 'fire thong' 
 
Focussing on the harshest of situations one can find oneself in, Jungle Survival is one of four reprints of The Air Ministry's emergency survival pamphlets. Others include: 
Jungle Survival 
Desert Survival 
Arctic Survival

Jungle Survival

First issued to airmen in 1952, this reprint of The Air Ministry's Sea Survival pamphlet includes emergency advice to crew operating over sea regions. 
With original illustrations and text, these survival guides provide an insight to military survival techniques from a by-gone era. 
 
Packed with original line drawings and instruction in: 
 
- How to punch man-eating sharks. Which are 'cowards' 
- The pros and cons of drinking 'fish juice' 
- When to smoke 
 
Focussing on the harshest of situations one can find oneself in, Sea Survival is one of four reprints of The Air Ministry's emergency survival pamphlets. Others include: 
Jungle Survival 
Desert Survival 
Arctic Survival

Sea Survival

Gerald Durrell

In this second collection of tales concerning the Durrell family on the island of Corfu, young Gerry continues to be captivated by the fascinating flora and fauna of their adopted home - much to the bemusement and upset of his long suffering siblings and mother. 
 
Whether it's lamp fishing by night or roving the countryside with his mentor Theodore, Gerry encounters intoxicated hedgehogs, tarantulas, dung beetles, water spiders and other animals, some of which become the family's very unwanted pets.

Birds, Beasts and Relatives

Escaping the ills of the British climate, the Durrell family - acne-ridden Margo, gun-toting Leslie, bookworm Lawrence and budding naturalist Gerry, along with their long-suffering mother and Roger the dog - take off for the island of Corfu. 
 
But the Durrells find that, reluctantly, they must share their various villas with a menagerie of local fauna - among them scorpions, geckos, toads, bats and butterflies. 
 
Recounted with immense humour and charm My Family and Other Animals is a wonderful account of a rare, magical childhood.

My Family and Other Animals

Pete Brown

An orchard is not a field.  It's not a forest or a copse.  It couldn't occur naturally; it's definitely cultivated.  But an orchard doesn't override the natural order: it enhances it, dresses it up. It demonstrates that man and nature together can - just occasionally - create something more beautiful and (literally) more fruitful than either could alone. The vivid brightness of the laden trees, studded with jewels, stirs some deep race memory and makes the heart leap.  Here is bounty, and excitement.

The Apple Orchard

The Story of Our Most English Fruit

In the concluding volume of the Corfu trilogy, telling of the Durrell family's five-year sojourn on the idyllic Greek island before the Second World War, young Gerry is turning into the passionate zoologist he has long threatened to become - much to his family's horror. 
 
Whether it's rams attacking their guests or eleven puppies seeking a new home or invasions of scorpions, spiders and geckoes, young Gerry is in heaven. His family, on the other hand, wonder if this is hell . . .

The Garden of the Gods

Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes are grained into our words. Landmarks is about the power of language to shape our sense of place. It is a field guide to the literature of nature, and a glossary containing thousands of remarkable words used in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales to describe land, nature and weather. 
 
Travelling from Cumbria to the Cairngorms, and exploring the landscapes of Roger Deakin, J. A. Baker, Nan Shepherd and others, Robert Macfarlane shows that language, well used, is a keen way of knowing landscape, and a vital means of coming to love it.

Landmarks

Robert Penn

An exuberant tale of craftsmanship for nature lovers and rugged outdoor types everywhere 
 
Robert Penn cut down an ash tree to see how many things could be made from it. After all, ash is the tree we have made the greatest and most varied use of over the course of human history. Journeying from Wales across Europe and Ireland to the USA, Robert finds that the ancient skills and knowledge of the properties of ash, developed over millennia making wheels and arrows, furniture and baseball bats, are far from dead. The book chronicles how the urge to understand and appreciate trees still runs through us all like grain through wood.

The Man Who Made Things Out of Trees

Some people's lives are entirely their own creations. James Rebanks' isn't. The first son of a shepherd, who was the first son of a shepherd himself, he and his family have lived and worked in and around the Lake District for generations. 
 
In evocative and lucid prose, James Rebanks takes us through a shepherd's year, offering a unique account of rural life and a fundamental connection with the land that most of us have lost.

The Shepherd's Life

A Tale of the Lake District

Richard Mabey

While the Lark Rise to Candleford trilogy, Flora Thompson's much-loved portrait of life in the English countryside, has inspired a hit television series, relatively little is known about the author herself. In this highly original book, bestselling biographer and nature writer Richard Mabey sympathetically retraces her life and her transformation from a post-office clerk who left school at fourteen to a sophisticated professional writer. Revealing how a formidable imagination can arise from the humblest of beginnings, Dreams of the Good Life paints a poignant, unforgettable portrait of a working-class woman writer's struggle for creative expression.

Dreams of the Good Life

The Life of Flora Thompson and the Creation of Lark Rise to Candleford

John Stewart Collis

An academic and writer, during the Second World War John Stewart Collis was put to agricultural work. Clearing and thinning an Ash wood, he found a meditative peace and an earnest pleasure in the use of axe and bill-hook. The Wood contains his beautiful, thoughtful writing on the joys of nature and of a life of activity, how a love of the sun affects a man, and the progression of nature that sees each plant - hawthorn, honeysuckle, larch, elder - have its hour. 
 
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).

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