Evelyn Waugh was born in Hampstead in 1903 and educated at Hertford College, Oxford. In 1928 he published his first novel, Decline and Fall, which was soon followed by Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938). During these years he also travelled extensively and converted to Catholicism. In 1939 Waugh was commissioned in the Royal Marines and later transferred to the Royal Horse Guards, experiences which informed his Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-61). His most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited (1945), was written while on leave from the army. Waugh died in 1966.

Evelyn Waugh

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Siddhartha Mukherjee

** NEW YORK TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER ** 
 
The Gene is the story of one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in our history from the author of The Emperor of All Maladies. 
 
The story begins in an Augustinian abbey in 1856, and takes the reader from Darwin’s groundbreaking theory of evolution, to the horrors of Nazi eugenics, to present day and beyond - as we learn to “read” and “write” the human genome that unleashes the potential to change the fates and identities of our children. 
 
Majestic in its scope and ambition, The Gene provides us with a definitive account of the epic history of the quest to decipher the master-code that makes and defines humans – and paints a fascinating vision of both humanity’s past and future. 
 
For fans of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking and Being Mortal by Atul Gwande. 
 
‘Siddhartha Mukherjee is the perfect person to guide us through the past, present, and future of genome science’ Bill Gates 
 
‘A thrilling and comprehensive account of what seems certain to be the most radical, controversial and, to borrow from the subtitle, intimate science of our time…Read this book and steel yourself for what comes next’ Sunday Times

The Gene

An Intimate History

Rachel Maddow

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
Oil. 
 
Corrupt? Yes. 
 
 Unimaginably lucrative? Of course. 
 
 But, the enemy of democracy? 
 
 Blowout is the oil and gas industry as we've never seen it before, as told by America's most incisive political journalist, Rachel Maddow. A blackly comic journey from Washington to Siberia, to deep within the earth's crust and the icy Arctic seas, it reveals is not just the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas but why the Russian government hacked the 2016 U.S. election. 
 
 This is our final wake-up call: to stop subsidizing oil and gas, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of the world's most destructive industry before it destroys our democracy 
 
 'It takes enormous talent to balance brutal honesty with scorching wit. Rachel Maddow has it in spades... Each page in Blowout is a revelation into the depth of corruption and greed that is infused into the international economy' David Lammy, MP

Blowout

Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth

Michael Booth

'The next Bill Bryson.’ New York Times 
 
Michael Booth has had his fill of celebrity chefs and their 'on the table in five minutes' recipes. He wants to learn how to cook properly, so he burns his cookery books and, together with his young family, heads for a new life in Paris - reasoning that, if anyone can be trusted to make food complicated, it's the French. 
 
Embarking on the ultimate foodie's fantasy, he enrols at the world's most famous cooking school, Le Cordon Bleu, where wise and battle-scarred French chefs commence their transformation of him into a professional cook. 
 
Along the way Booth shares the insider tips and secret techniques of classical cuisine. His odyssey takes him from trauma to triumph, ending in the white-hot heat of the Michelin-starred kitchen of the greatest chef in France.

Doing without Delia

Tales of Triumph and Disaster in a French Kitchen

Michael Sissons

The rural fuse has been lit. The countryside is tinder-dry. Post offices and banks, shops and schools are closing. Farmers are going out of business. Houses are becoming unaffordable as prices soar ad poverty grows. Pollution and over-exploitation are destroying landscapes. Many rural communities are on the verge of collapse. Some fear the foot- and - mouth crisis will prove to be the last straw. This book offers disturbing evidence of the background to the crisis. 
 
A Countryside For All is a rallying cry for action, pointing ways towards a presciption for the future. This volume tackles many of the issues in a variety of new and original ways. Possibly the most controversial and radical call is for the creation of a Department for the Countryside, with a Secretary of State for the Countryside- who would be responsible for setting a coherent set of policies to reverse the decline of rural Britain. 
 
This timely book outlines the main problems facing the countryside, and starts to bring together a balanced range of proposals. Thought-provoking, filled with common sense, often controversial but always fascinating, it points the way forward for the countryside, and for town and country as a whole.

A Countryside For All

The Future of Rural Britain

Susan Orlean

Susan Orlean first met John Laroche when visiting Florida to write for the New Yorker about his arrest for stealing rare ghost orchids from a nature reserve. Fascinated both by Laroche and the world she uncovered of orchid collectors and growers, she stayed on, to write this magical exploration of obsession and the strange world both of the orchid obsessives and of Florida, that haunting and weird 'debatable land' of swamps and condos, retirement communities and real-estate scams. 
 
The world of the orchid hunters, breeders and showmen, their rivalries, vendettas and crimes, smuggling, thefts and worse provide the backdrop to a fascinating exploration of one of the byways of human nature, the obsessive world of the collector, and the haunting beauty of the flowers themselves.

The Orchid Thief

Kapka Kassabova

‘A classic for our times’ MONIQUE ROFFEY 
 
‘Haunting, beautiful… Anima will live with me for a long time’ CAL FLYN 
 
'A book that mesmerises with its sense of adventure and epic sweep, this is creative non-fiction at its best' GUARDIAN 
 
Over the course of one summer, Kapka Kassabova lives with perhaps the last true pastoralists in Europe. 
 
She joins the epic seasonal movement of vast herds of sheep, along with shepherds and dogs, to find pasture in the mountains. As she becomes attuned to the sacrifices inherent in this isolated existence, Kassabova finds herself drawn deeper into the tangled relationships at the heart of this small community. 
 
Anima is a spellbinding portrayal of the human–animal interdependence in pastoral life, and a plea for a different way of living – one where we might all begin to heal our broken relationship with the natural world. 
 
‘An extraordinary work of exploration, both inner and outer. It should be required reading for everyone thinking about our human environment: which is to say, all of us’ THE TABLET

Anima

A Wild Pastoral

Gavin Knight

The Penwith Peninsula in Cornwall is where the land ends. In The Swordfish and the Star Gavin Knight takes us into this huddle of grey roofs at the edge of the sea at the beginning of the twenty-first century. 
 
He catches the stories of a whole community, but especially those still working this last frontier: the Cornish fishermen. These are the dreamers and fighters who every day prepare for battle with the vast grey Atlantic. Cornwall and its seas are brought to life, mixing drinking and drugs and sea spray, moonlit beaches and shattering storms, myth and urban myth. The result is an arresting tapestry of a place we thought we knew; the precarious reality of life in Cornwall today emerges from behind our idyllic holiday snaps and picture postcards. Even the quaint fishermen’s pubs on the quay at Newlyn, including the Swordfish and its neighbour the Star, turn out to be places where squalls can blow up, and down again, in an instant. 
 
Based on immersive research and rich with the voices of a cast of remarkable characters, this is an eye-opening, dramatic, poignant account of life on Britain’s most dangerous stretch of coast. 
 
Praise for Hood Rat 
'A gripping novelistic immersion' Louis Theroux 
'A must-read' Owen Jones 
'Britain's Gomorrah' Independent

The Swordfish and the Star

Life on Cornwall's most treacherous stretch of coast

Gretchen McCulloch

THE ACCLAIMED NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. 
 
Have you ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message? Wondered where memes came from? Fret no more: Because Internet is the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that's a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are. 
 
'McCulloch is such a disarming writer - lucid, friendly, unequivocally excited about her subject - that I began to marvel at the flexibility of the online language she describes, with its numerous shades of subtlety.' New York Times

Because Internet

Understanding how language is changing

Andrew Hodges

The official book behind the Academy Award-winning film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley 
 
Alan Turing was the mathematician whose cipher-cracking transformed the Second World War. Taken on by British Intelligence in 1938, as a shy young Cambridge don, he combined brilliant logic with a flair for engineering. In 1940 his machines were breaking the Enigma-enciphered messages of Nazi Germany’s air force. He then headed the penetration of the super-secure U-boat communications. 
 
But his vision went far beyond this achievement. Before the war he had invented the concept of the universal machine, and in 1945 he turned this into the first design for a digital computer. 
 
Turing's far-sighted plans for the digital era forged ahead into a vision for Artificial Intelligence. However, in 1952 his homosexuality rendered him a criminal and he was subjected to humiliating treatment. In 1954, aged 41, Alan Turing took his own life.

Alan Turing: The Enigma

The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game

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