Carlo Rovelli is an internationally acclaimed writer whose books, including Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, The Order of Time, Helgoland and White Holes, have been number one bestsellers around the world and translated into over forty languages. As a theoretical physicist, he has made significant contributions to the physics of space and time and he is currently directing the quantum gravity research group of the Centre de physique théorique in Marseille, France.

Carlo Rovelli

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Esther Vilar

How far would you go to get someone's attention? 
 
Carlota is a precocious twelve-year-old who is fond of making elaborate inventions and devoted to her astonishingly beautiful yet mildly eccentric, French nanny, Mademoiselle. 
 
Despite being courted by all the eligible bachelors in town, Mademoiselle never shows the tiniest jot of interest in the opposite sex until, on Christmas Day, Carlota's home-made decorations catch fire and the local fire brigade rush to the scene. Among the tall, athletic firefighters there is one short, balding man called Nick Kowalski with whom mademoiselle falls instantly and passionately in love. 
 
She turns to Carlota for help- how can she ever contrive to meet him again and ignite his affections? The answer lies in a box of matches...

The Seven Fires of Mademoiselle

Catherine Fletcher

1527. Gregorio 'The Cavalier' Casali is Henry VIII's man in Rome. An Italian freelance diplomat, he charmed his way into the English service before he was twenty. But now he faces an almighty challenge. Henry wants a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, and Casali must persuade Pope Clement VII of his master's case. 
 
Set against the backdrop of war-torn Renaissance Italy, Our Man in Rome weaves together tales from the grubby underbelly of Tudor politics with a gripping family saga to reveal the extraordinary true story behind history's most infamous divorce. 
 
Through six years of cajoling, threats and bribery, Casali lives by his wits. He manoeuvres his brothers into lucrative diplomatic postings, plays off one master against another, dodges spies, bandits and noblemen alike. But as the years pass and Henry's case drags on, his loyalties are increasingly suspected. What will be Casali's fate? 
 
Drawing on hundreds of unknown archive documents, Our Man in Rome reconstructs his tumultuous life among the great and powerful at this turning point for European history. From the besieged Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome to the splendours of Greenwich Palace, we follow his trail in the service of Henry VIII. Lavish ceremony and glamorous parties stand in contrast to the daily strains of embassy life, as Casali pawns family silver to pay the bills, fights off rapacious in-laws and defends himself in the face of Anne Boleyn's wrath. 
 
This vivid and compelling book will make us think anew about Henry, Catherine and the Tudor world.

Our Man in Rome

Henry VIII and his Italian Ambassador

John Batchelor

An entertaining account of an extraordinary cultural and historical event: - the establishment by one highly intelligent woman of a salon of the arts in a beautiful country house in Northumberland. Wallington Hall was remote from the major centres of artistic activity, such as London and Edinburgh. Yet Pauline Trevelyan single handedly made it the focus of High Victorian cultural life. Among those she attracted into her orbit were Ruskin, Swinburne, the Brownings, the Rossettis (Dante Gabriel, Christina and William Michael), Carlyle, and Millais and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 
The penniless but clever daughter of a clergyman, Pauline Jermyn married an older man whom she met through a shared passion for geology. Sir Walter Trevelyan was a philanthropist, teetotal, vegetarian, pacificist ... and very rich. With his encouragement, she collected works of art and decorated Wallington Hall with a cycle of vast paintings on the history of Northumberland. She was a patron of the arts who provided a fostering environment for many of the geniuses of her day. After her death, Swinburne wept every time her name was mentioned.

Lady Trevelyan and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Daniel Pick

In 1875, General Garibaldi, the legendary military hero of Italian unification, left his island retreat in the Mediterranean for Rome. His battle cry no longer required, he was pursuing a mission that would become an obsession in his old age: to divert the River Tiber from Rome. 
 
Through this forgotten episode, Daniel Pick explores Garibaldi's passionate attachment to Rome and to Italy. In the bitter debate that ensued many myths were laid bare, and prevailing medical, social and political anxieties about the future of the state were exposed. 
 
The flood-prone Tiber had caused havoc, disease and death throughout history. In the capital, the General sought to replace it with a Parisian-style boulevard that would be a wonder of the modern world. But behind his florid promise to revitalise 'Italy' lay a complex and shadowy history, including a traumatic event felt by Garibaldi as the defining tragedy of his life: the loss of his wife Anita. Despite himself, he became embroiled in the political labyrinth of Rome and a drama of thwarted ambition, grand illusion and disillusionment, whose significance was not lost on Garibaldi's later admirer, Benito Mussolini, another self-styled redeemer of the Eternal City and the fever-ridden marshes of Italy.

Rome Or Death

The Obsessions of General Garibaldi

Michael Rips

A refreshing antidote to the saccharine charms of Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence and Frances Mayes' Under the Tuscan Sun, this is the quirky and hilarious memoir of a criminal lawyer who gives up his New York practise to spend a year in the Etruscan town of Sutri, near Rome, where he moves - reluctantly - with his artist wife and baby.  Himself something of an eccentric from a bizarre Nebraskan family, he has spent his adult life living in hotels; and in Sutri, he heads straight for the caf- in the main square.  From there he observes the baroque events of small-town life, conjures up a cast of Italian eccentrics (including Pasquale and his hypersensitive organ of smell), and relishes the weirdness and the wonder of Sutri's history, folklore, architecture and above all its food - particularly the notorious 'fagioli regina' (beans in a tomato and pig skin sauce) and the annual Bean Festival.   Part of the delight of reading this memoir is that it not only evokes the sights and smells of an ancient and little-known town in Southern Italy, and brings its people to extraordinary life, but it also reveals the irresistible foibles and philosophy of a talented and unusual mind. Funny, philosophical and surprisingly moving, this is the story of how a rootless American finds home in the most unexpected places and how Pasquale and his compatriots put life into perspective in the strangest way.

Pasquale's Nose

Miranda France

'Intelligent, insightful, enlightening and gripping' ML Stedman, author of The Light Between Oceans 
 
When fire devastates Turney House, London’s finest stately home, the immaculate Lady Alexandra Marchant demands that everything be restored exactly as it was ‘the day before the fire’. Every charred remnant must be salvaged. Even the famous chandelier will be pieced back together into a flawless reconstruction. 
 
But is it possible, or even desirable, to resurrect the past? And why do we care so much about it? Critics say the restored Turney can never be more than an elegant fake; Lady Alexandra Marchant says Turney’s doors, its café and gift shop, must be re-opened to the paying public as soon as possible. 
 
Ros Freeman is called in as part of the effort, to Turney’s tented village of carvers, gilders, plasterers and stonemasons. Ros loves her work as a paper restorer. She considers herself an expert in uncovering the past, layer by layer, to bring out the truth. And yet in her personal life there are corners, shadows, ghosts, she fails to see. Until a discovery in Turney’s Rose Room challenges her to look again.

The Day Before the Fire

Lauro Martines

When the King of France invaded Italy in 1494, princely states would fall, sending tremors up and down the peninsula. The Medici fled from Florence; the republic sprang back to life; and the French army, occupying the Renaissance city for ten terrifying days, stood on the verge of sacking it. A 'little friar' from Ferrara, Savonarola was alone in knowing how to comfort citizens with his sermons and in urging the King to get out of Florence. 
 
Although the French left a city riven by political factions, the Friar's popular 'party' swiftly prevailed. With Florence at the height of its Renaissance glories, his voice rose above those of all other men. Claiming to be a messenger from God, he attacked evils on all sides - a mercenary Church, the despotism of the Medici, vile political elites, and Pope Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia, whose name itself was a byword for brazen corruption. Savonarola foretold a universal 'scourging', but made pleas, above all, for the renewal of Christianity and for the political voice of the people. His struggle turned into a battle for the 'soul' of Florence. 
 
Excommunicated and silenced, Savonarola spurned Rome and began to preach again, retaining the strong support of the city republic. As the Pope and Medicean conspirators closed in on him, five prominent Florentines were beheaded for plotting against the state, further inflaming the passions already rife in the city. After an abortive trial by fire to shame and discredit him, his enemies set siege to his convent, leading to his arrest and trial on trumped-up charges of heresy. 
 
Savonarola mingled the fervour of religion with the ardour of republican politics. Scourge and Fire is the story of his impact on Florence and of the city's spell over him.

Scourge and Fire

Savonarola and Renaissance Italy

Helen Langdon

Of all Italian painters, Caravaggio (c. 1565-1609) speaks most intensely to the modern world. His early works suggest a fascination with his own youth and sexuality and the trancience of love and beauty his later religious art speaks of violence, passion, solitude and death. Ugly, almost brutal-looking, Caravaggio was constantly embroiled in fights and entangled with the law; the prototype anti-social artist, he moved between the worlds of powerful patrons and the street life of boys and prostitutes. Helen Langdon uncovers his progress from childhood in plague-ridden Milan to wild success in Rome, and eventual exile and persecution in the South, and sets his work against the political, intellectual and spiritual movements of the day. Fully illustrated, her dramatic portrait shows Carravigio's life to be as sensational and enigmatic as his powerful and enduring art.

Caravaggio

Paul Strathern

By the end of the fifteenth century, Florence was well established as the home of the Renaissance. As generous patrons to the likes of Botticelli and Michelangelo, the ruling Medici embodied the progressive humanist spirit of the age, and in Lorenzo the Magnificent they possessed a diplomat capable of guarding the militarily weak city in a climate of constantly shifting allegiances between the major Italian powers. 
 
However, in the form of Savonarola, an unprepossessing provincial monk, Lorenzo found his nemesis. Filled with Old Testament fury and prophecies of doom, Savonarola's sermons reverberated among a disenfranchised population, who preferred medieval Biblical certainties to the philosophical interrogations and intoxicating surface glitter of the Renaissance. Savonarola's aim was to establish a 'City of God' for his followers, a new kind of democratic state, the likes of which the world had never seen before.The battle which this provoked would be a fight to the death, a series of sensational events - invasions, trials by fire, the 'Bonfire of the Vanities', terrible executions and mysterious deaths - featuring a cast of the most important and charismatic Renaissance figures. 
 
This famous struggle has often been portrayed as a simple clash of wills between a benign ruler and religious fanatic, between secular pluralism and repressive extremism. However, in an exhilaratingly rich and deeply researched story, Paul Strathern reveals the paradoxes, self-doubts and political compromises which made the battle for the soul of the Renaissance city one of the most complex and important moments in Western history.

Death in Florence

the Medici, Savonarola and the Battle for the Soul of the Renaissance City

Roberto Calasso

The eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo spent his life executing commissions in churches, palaces, and villas, often covering vast ceilings like those at the Würzburg Residenz in Germany and the Royal Palace in Madrid with frescoes that are among the glories of Western art. The life of an epoch swirled around him - but though his contemporaries appreciated and admired him, they failed to understand him. 
 
Few have even attempted to tackle Tiepolo's series of thirty-three bizarre and haunting etchings, the Capricci and the Scherzi, but Roberto Calasso rises to the challenge, interpreting these etchings as chapters in a dark narrative that contains the secret of Tiepolo's art. Blooming ephebes, female satyrs, Oriental sages, owls, snakes: we will find them all, including Punchinello and Death, within the pages of this book, along with Venus, Time, Moses, numerous angels, Cleopatra and Beatrice of Burgundy - a motley, gypsyish company always on the go. 
 
Calasso makes clear that Tiepolo was more than a dazzling intermezzo in the history of painting. Rather, he represented a particular way of meeting the challenge of form: endowed with a fluid, seemingly effortless style, Tiepolo was the last incarnation of that peculiar Italian virtue sprezzatura, the art of not seeming artful.

Tiepolo Pink

In 1700, a Venetian priest, Fra Benedict Loredan, compiles an assembly of documents - letters, written confessions, top-secret state files, diary excerpts, pieces of a secret chronicle - which together tell the story of two lovers caught up in a dangerous and controversial revolutionary movement which attempted to do away with the two-tiered city of Venice: Leonardo da Vinci's architectural dream to segregate the rich and the poor described in his Notebooks and realised in this novel. At the centre of the narrative are two written confessions, one by a young girl from an aristocratic family - Loredana Loredan Contarini - who writes of her disastrous marriage to a sadomasochistic tyrant and her subsequent involvement with a revolutionary Friar - himself the second confessor.  As both struggle to tell their tales and confess their sins, we are shown around the city of Venice as it might have been in the sixteenth-century and given pieces of a narrative which together form an explosive whole.

Loredana

A Venetian Tale

Kristen Roupenian

She thought, brightly, This is the worst life decision I have ever made! And she marvelled at herself for a while, at the mystery of this person who’d just done this bizarre, inexplicable thing. 
 
Margot meets Robert. They exchange numbers. They text, flirt and eventually have sex – the type of sex you attempt to forget. How could one date go so wrong? 
 
Everything that takes place in Cat Person happens to countless people every day. But Cat Person is not an everyday story. In less than a week, Kristen Roupenian’s New Yorker debut became the most read and shared short story in their website’s history. This is the bad date that went viral. This is the conversation we’re all having. 
 
This gift edition contains photographs by celebrated photographer Elinor Carucci, who was commissioned by the New Yorker to capture the image that accompanied Kristen Roupenian’s Cat Person when it appeared in the magazine. 
 
You Know You Want This, Kristen Roupenian’s debut collection, will be published in February 2019.

Cat Person

Patrick White

Set in Australia in the 1840s, A FRINGE OF LEAVES combines dramatic action with a finely distilled moral vision. Returning home to England from Van Diemen's land, the Bristol Maid is shipwrecked on the Queensland coast and Mrs Roxburgh is taken prisoner by a tribe of aborigines, along with the rest of the passengers and crew. In the course of her escape, she is torn by conflicting loyalties - to her dead husband, to her rescuer, to her own and to her adoptive class.

A Fringe of Leaves

Belinda Jack

Beatrice Cenci was executed in Rome in September 1599: she was said to be sixteen, and was hauntingly beautiful. Her crime was the murder of her father, a member of one of the greatest Roman families, but his cruel treatment of her, including incestuous rape, moved the people of the city to take her side. 
 
Weeping crowds lined the streets, and a special mass is still said in Rome on the anniversary of her death. She was at once innocent and guilty, the victim and the perpetrator of appalling crimes. From that time since, the ambivalent image of Beatrice has attracted writers and artists, and often their obsession with her fed their own self-destruction. In this compelling study, Belinda Jack takes on the dangerous challenge of bringing Beatrice to life, and of tracing her power over those who tried to resurrect her, from the tragedy of Shelley to the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, from the sculpture of Harriet Hosmer and the photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron to the desperate drama of Antonin Artaud. 
 
As we follow the stories of their lives and ambitions, we see how they suffered critical condemnation for their works about Beatrice, and were sometimes pushed to the brink of insanity. Her story, which is one of lust, passion and violence, contains a powerful sense of the forbidden, the taboo that drives people over the edge. Beatrice's Spell is at once scholarly and utterly engrossing, carrying the power of her story through time.

Beatrice's Spell

The Enduring Legend of Beatrice Cenci

Rosalind Belben

To George Lupus, Master of the Quarr Hounds, the fox is a 'gentleman'. The four children all hunt, and are tremendously keen. But Dorothy Lupus dislikes the sport that has been her beloved husband's passion. When a tragedy occurs, Dorothy finds she can't bear the proximity of the kennels across the park. Roguish, Rakish, Harebell, Arcady and Argot, Striver, Decorous, Fearless, Snowmaid... Dorothy wishes never to hear their hullabaloo again. She is adamant...

Hound Music

André Brink

The Blue Door is built around one of the oldest questions in storytelling: What if ...? What if I return home one day to find, behind a familiar door, an unfamiliar world? What if the people closest to me turn out to be strangers? What if strangers start claiming a place in my life I cannot imagine? What if the memories of the most important moments in my life can no longer be trusted? What if I am not who I think I am? 
David le Roux, a teacher recently turned fulltime artist, returns to his studio one afternoon to find his whole familiar world turned upside down. The woman who opens the door and welcomes him as her husband is a complete stranger to him: beautiful and loving, but not the wife he assumes he has been married to for nine years. The children are overjoyed at his return, but he has never set eyes on them before. And when he goes back to the building he believes he lives in, it no longer exists. Has everything in his life been illusion? Or is the past real and only the present a hallucination? In a country like South Africa these questions may decide a whole life. 
Instead of living with the consequences of early choices he now discovers that behind every choice made lurks the possibility of innumerable other choices not made. 
What if, indeed ...?

The Blue Door

Rich Cohen

Rich Cohen's maternal grandfather was called Ben Eisenstadt. Ben was one of those Jews that, with an anger bred of exclusion, went on to reshape the world. He did so by inventing Sweet 'n Low, a granulated sweetener which, in its tiny pink packet, is still found on every table in every diner in America. This simple invention spawned one of the great American fortunes. This is the story of that fortune, how it was made and how it remade and tore apart everyone who touched it. 
 
In Sweet and Low, Rich Cohen - the youngest son of Ben's favourite daughter - takes a journey into his own and his family's past. It is a story of family feuds (his mother was eventually disinherited by her mother), eccentricity verging on madness, gangsters, lawyers, corruption, accountants, ex-wives - a quest for a secret history, a black comedy of the American dream.

Sweet and Low

A Family Story

Rose Tremain

From the author of The Gustav Sonata 
 
A stunning collection of stories: wide-reaching in subject and setting, each beautifully evoked and brilliantly imagined. 
 
Renowned opera singer Antonio Mollini begins construction on what he hopes will be the most beautiful garden in Italy, unaware that its development will have tragic consequence for both him, and his series of lovers. Elsewhere, a farmer's son has high hopes for his inheritance, a young girl dreams of following in the footsteps of a famous arsonist, and the pressure of the annual Gardening Cup exerts a heavy toll on seventeen-year-old Dougie. 
 
Over a million Rose Tremain books sold 
 
‘A writer of exceptional talent ... Tremain is a writer who understands every emotion’ Independent I 
 
‘There are few writers out there with the dexterity or emotional intelligence to rival that of the great Rose Tremain’ Irish Times 
 
‘Tremain has the painterly genius of an Old Master, and she uses it to stunning effect’ The Times 
 
‘Rose Tremain is one of the very finest British novelists’ Salman Rushdie 
 
‘Tremain is a writer of exemplary vision and particularity. The fictional world is rendered with extraordinary vividness’ Marcel Theroux, Guardian

The Garden Of The Villa Mollini

Salvatore, a young watchmaker from Italy, moves to London when the king of his hometown decrees that a period of twenty-six years is to be erased from history, never to be mentioned in public again. Since this constitutes the whole of period of his life Salvatore feels he has no choice but to flee. But in London, what challenges will this man face, who holds so deeply to the importance of time and identity? 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection Evangelista's Fan.

Evangelista's Fan (Storycuts)

Sarvepalli Gopal

Among the few great statesmen to emerge in Asia, Jawaharal Nehru achieved a national metamorphosis in some ways even more astonishing than that of another towering patriarch, Mao Tse-tung. Not only did he wrest from the British their most prized and dearly loved Imperial possession and give his people independence, he brought his culturally rich yet economically improvised nation into the twentieth century as a force to be reasoned with. The first volume of Sarvepalli Gopal’s remarkable biographic, covering Nehru’s youth and ending with Independence in 1947, is written from first-hand knowledge of the man who served for ten years in the Ministry for External Affairs and from the unlimited access granted him by the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to her father’s private papers.

Jawaharlal Nehru;a Biography Volume 1 1889-1947

Diane Seed

The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces is a classic Italian cook book that has sold over a million copies and been translated into 12 languages. For this charming addition Diane Seed has fully revised the recipes, with several delicious and easy recipes. 
 
With flavours bursting from the simplest ingredients, authentic Italian pasta dishes can make home cooking truly sensational. The scent of torn basil leaves; the sizzle of pan-fried prawns; the sight of an olive-studded spaghetti alla puttanesca: pasta sauces invigorate all the senses. In this definitive collection, Diane Seed shares the one hundred best sauce recipes she has encountered in 40 years of living, eating and cooking in Italy. Infinitely varied, it includes specialities from regions across Italy and classic recipes we've come to love that are both delicious and economical, plus a few extra-special dishes that are perfect for occasions. 
 
Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces is an indispensible selection that is as wide-ranging as Italian culture itself. Trusted by cooks for over 25 years, its sensational yet simple recipes are an essential ingredient in every kitchen.

The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces

Random House presents the audiobook edition of You Know You Want This, written by Kristen Roupenian, read by Aubrey Plaza, Jayme Mattler, Molly Pope, Will Damron, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Emily Tremaine, Finn Wittrock, Amy Ryan, Olivia Taylor Dudley, Corey Brill, Jacques Royand and Kristen Roupenian. 
 
The truth was that if a woman bit a man in an office environment, there would be a strong assumption that the man had done something to deserve it . . . 
 
From the creator of Cat Person – the first short story to go viral – comes You Know You Want This, a compulsive collection about sex, dating and modern life. These are stories of women’s lives now. They also happen to be horror stories. In some, women endure the horror. In others, they inflict it. 
 
Here are women at work, at home, on dates, at the doctor’s, with their families and with their friends. Here are women grappling with desire, punishment, guilt and anger. These are stories that make you feel fascinated but repelled, scared but delighted, revolted but aroused. 
 
You Know You Want This shows why Kristen Roupenian is the most audacious new voice in American fiction. Funny, furious, sly and explicit, she takes a long, hard look at the messed-up power dynamic between men and women – and messes it up some more. 
 
(c) 2019, Kristen Roupenian (P) 2019 Penguin Random House LLC

You Know You Want This

Luis Fernando Verissimo

With the knowledge that every mouthful may be your last comes a special flavor, an added piquancy, that is hard to resist. Not for nothing is gluttony a deadly sin. 
 
At first there were ten of them. Once the gilded youth of their city, they would meet each month to dine fabulously and celebrate their friendship and singularity. But 20 years on, the world is not as impressed with them as they anticipated. Indignant girlfriends, distrustful wives, bankruptcy, divorce and death have weakened their bond - until Daniel meets Lucidio. In his new friend Daniel thinks he has found the recipe to reinvigorate their meetings. Lucidio is mysteriously taciturn but in the privacy of Daniel's kitchen, his genius recreates their favourite dishes as a gastronomic experience like no other. One helping is never enough. Particularly for a group that have always wanted more ...

Club Of Angels

Angelica Goodden

A word was coined to describe the condition of people stricken with a new kind of fever when the Swiss-born artist Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807) came to London in 1766. 'The whole world', it was said, 'is Angelicamad.' 
 
One of the most successful women artists in history - a painter who possessed what her friend Goethe called an 'unbelievable' and 'massive' talent - Kauffman became the toast of Georgian England, captivating society with her portraits, mythological scenes and decorative compositions. She knew and painted poets, novelists and playwrights, collaborating with them and illustrating their work; her designs adorned the houses of the Grand Tourists she had met and painted in Italy; actors, statesmen, philosophers, kings and queen sat to her; and she was the force that launched a thousand engravings. Despite rumours of relationships with other artists (including Sir Joshua Reynolds), and an apparently bigamous and annulled first marriage to a pseudo Count, Kauffman was adopted by royalty in England and abroad as a model of social and artistic decorum. 
 
A profoundly learned artist, but one who is loved, above all, for her tender adaptations from classical antiquity and sentimental literature; a commercially successful celebrity yet also a founding member of The Royal Academy of arts; the virginal creator of sexually ambivalent beings who was one of the hardest-headed businesswomen of her age, Kauffman's life and work is full of apparent contradictions explored in this first biography in over 80 years.

Miss Angel

The Art and World of Angelica Kauffman, Eighteenth-Century Icon

Derek Wilson

The greatest of medieval monarchs, Charles the Great (742-814) towers over every notion we have of national heroes and semi-mythical champions. His military conquests exceeded those of Julius Caesar. He had the sagacity and dedication to public service of a Marcus Aurelius. In ruthlessness, as in dedication to personal culture, he was reminiscent of Augustus. But that is only the beginning. 
 
Charlemagne was a phenomenon and phenomena do not die. Later European leaders from Frederick Barbarossa and Charles V to Louis XIV, Napoleon I and Hitler took Charlemagne as their model. His growing mythology inspired the Crusades, fed the concept of chivalry, bolstered absolutist regimes, excited nineteenth-century liberals and emerges today among those who claim Charles the Great as the founder of European unity. 
 
Charlemagne is one of the most remarkable figures in European history: only by understanding him in all his complexity can we begin to understand Europe today. Derek Wilson's biography provides such an opportunity.

Charlemagne

Barbarian and Emperor

Anna Del Conte

From the award-winning and much loved Italian food writer Anna Del Conte comes a beautiful and inspiring book about cooking with children. 
 
Coco is Anna Del Conte's 12-year-old granddaughter and her tireless helper in the kitchen. From a very early age, Coco showed an interest in food and cooking - Anna taught her to smell and taste food, and soon enough Coco was able to start helping, progressing from decorating cakes to making pasta to conjuring up her favourite tagines. 
 
Taking us from the simple dishes of the early stages, through to more complex cooking for older children - by way of meatballs, Coco's first biscuits, lamb with couscous and sweet ricotta pancakes - and illustrated with beautiful photographs, Anna Del Conte brings us the best of all the recipes they have cooked together. In a relaxed, informal style, she shows how to teach children the importance of seasonal food, how to introduce new skills and techniques, and how to choose the best ingredients. But Cooking with Coco is also an inspirational reminder of how much fun families can have together in the kitchen. 
 
Written by an internationally renowned cook, food writer and grandmother, for all the eager - and sometimes mischievous - faces around her table, Cooking with Coco is a book for anyone who wants to introduce children to simple, healthy and delicious cooking and the joy and satisfaction of making it themselves.

Cooking with Coco

Family Recipes to Cook Together

Sally Denton

Roger Morris

Sally Denton and Roger Morris make clear how and why Las Vegas became the greatest 'business success story' of the twentieth century, and how the rest of America ensured this success by contributing capital as well as customers.  Headquarters of a trillion-dollar worldwide empire, the site of unprecedented political and economic power, Las Vegas is by no means an aberrant sin city.  Denton and Morris demonstrate how it has grown out of, and reflects, a corruption and a worship of money that have crept into American life since Prohibition.  They trace the original funds for the founding of the Las Vegas we know today to nationwide narcotics trafficking.  They show how deeply a multiethnic criminal syndicate, in part feeding off gambling profits and the skim in Las Vegas, came to influence American politics and the larger society, and how pervasively its 'style of business' has penetrated the entire nation.  Denton and Morris detail the amazing rise and reach of Meyer Lansky - the mind that ran the city; exactly how criminals, politicians, and businessmen worked together to control Las Vegas; the curious interplay of the city with the fates of Joseph, John F., and Robert Kennedy; how Mormon bankers and Wall Street financiers have bankrolled and profited from casinos ruled by organised crime; how a handful of dedicated journalists and law enforcement officers were destroyed before they could expose the city's secrets.  The Money and the Power is a detailed and illuminating chronicle of an extraordinary place and time - and a provocative reinterpretation of twentieth-century American history.

The Money And The Power

The Rise and Reign of Las Vegas

Dennis Severs

Growing up in California, Dennis Severs fell in love with the England he saw in old black and white movies. At seventeen he came to London, looking for a home with a heart. In 1979 he found one, a run-down silk-weaver's house in Spitalfields, and over the next twenty years he transformed it into an enchanted time-capsule, transporting us back to the eighteenth century. From cellar to roof, he filled 18 Folgate Street with original objects and furniture, found in the local markets, lit by candles and chandeliers. More than that, he invented a family to live here, the Jervis family, Huguenot weavers who fled persecution in France in 1688, and bought the house in 1724. Sounds and scents bring their world to life, always just out of sight - floorboards creak, fires crackle, a kettle hisses on the hob. Visitors step through the frame of time, like entering an old master painting. As we move from room to room on a tour you will never forget, we follow the Jervis story from the days of the Georges and the Regency to harsher Victorian times - and even to the attic room of Scrooge himself.

18 Folgate Street

The Life of a House in Spitalfields

Whether you know him as El Amigo, the Banana Man, the Gringo, or simply Z - whether you even know him at all - Sam Zemurray lived one of the greatest untold American stories of the last hundred years. 
 
A tough, uneducated Russian Jew who found himself and his fortune in turn-of-the-century New Orleans, Zemurray built a fruit-selling empire hustling rotting fruit to market to eke out the slimmest profit, to eventually become a backchannel kingmaker and capitalist revolutionary. The Fish That Ate the Whale spans the transition from Old-World business to New-: from privateer adventurers seeking fortunes in remote frontiers, to buccaneers of high finance and wars fought with media, no-bid contracts, and necessary illusions. 
 
Part of what makes this book so remarkable - and its dubious hero so compelling - is the almost invisible ease with which Cohen's threads intertwine to create a larger pattern that seems so obvious once you step back to see it. Z's story spans the birth of modern foreign relations, the creation of the CIA, smuggling dispossessed Jews out of Europe, the invention of Israel, corporate espionage, the Bay of Pigs, political assassination, and the unspoken motives of the Cold War. It is a twentieth-century epic, and standing at its core is a man unlike any we've seen before or since, who, for good or ill, looked at what was, but saw only what was possible.

The Fish that Ate the Whale

The Life and Times of America's Banana King

Arthur Conan Doyle

Edgar Allan Poe

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 ADVENTURES AND MEMOIRS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES 
A collection of Sherlock Holmes's most memorable and intriguing cases, including adventures with mysterious masked strangers, ingenious heists, murderous plots and hidden jewels, which take the famous detective and his faithful sidekick Dr Watson from the streets of London and the English countryside to a chilling encounter at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. 
 
THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE 
Edgar Allan Poe invented the genre of detective fiction with these three mesmerising stories of a young French eccentric named C. Auguste Dupin: 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', 'The Mystery of Marie Rogêt' and 'The Purloined Letter'. Poe's short mysteries inspired the creation of countless literary sleuths, among them Sherlock Holmes.Today the unique Dupin stories still stand out as utterly engrossing page-turners.

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