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.

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Derek Wilson

The image of Charles II as a randy monarch who dragged the crown through the moral mire and irredeemably weakened its position has persisted throughout the three centuries since John Evelyn gave his judgement.  That judgement, Derek Wilson argues, is okay as far as it goes.  The Restoration court did set an example of cynical libertinism that provoked opposition not only from outraged preachers, but also satirical journalists and angry mobs who pelted royal mistresses and burned down brothels.  But Charles' bedroom antics are symptoms and not causes of social decadence.  Why did Pepys complain 'there is nothing almost but bawdry at court from top to bottom' or Bishop Burnet observe that throughout the three kingdoms people were 'throwing off the very professions of virtue and piety'? The answers must be sought in the traumatic upheaval of the Civil War and its aftermath in the life of Charles Stuart and his people.  In a society that was shaken loose by violent conflict the position of women changed radically.  Many experienced a new freedom and an enhanced power to influence men and events.  Charles grew up with and actually enjoyed the company of strong women.  Ministers complained of his 'effeminate conversation'.  As well as the notorious, grasping mistresses - the leach-like Lady Castlemaine, 'dearest Fubs' K-roualle, the outrageous Nell Gwynn - Charles was influenced by his domineering mother, Henrietta Maria, his 'pushy' nurse, Christabella Wyndham, his much-loved sisters, Mary and 'Minette', his only great love, Lucy Walter, his long-suffering wife, Catherine of Braganza and a cavalcade of devoted royalist ladies, actresses, whores, and ambitious gold-diggers who surrounded him throughout his exile and after his restoration.  It is this miscellany of relationships that Derek Wilson explores and helps us to understand in All the King's Women. These relationships helped to form Charles II's character, shape the course of political events and, ultimately, seal the fate of the dynasty.

All The King's Women

Kingsley Amis

Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
'Endlessly entertaining... Good, rollicking stuff, and a delight to read... Sir Kingsley Amis is surely one of the funniest men alive' Auberon Waugh, Sunday Telegraph 
 
Elegant, provocative and hugely entertaining, Kingsley Amis's memoirs are filled with anecdotes, experiences and portraits of famous friends, family, acquaintances (and a few eminent foes). From his childhood days to Oxford and army life, his travels abroad and his years as a successful novelist, Memoirs offers extraordinary insights into a unique literary life. 
 
© Kingsley Amis 1991 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Memoirs

Edmund de Waal

The definitive illustrated edition of the international bestseller with gorgeous new photography of the celebrated netsuke collection, and sumptuous full-colour images hand-picked by Edmund de Waal from his family archive 
 
264 Japanese wood and ivory carvings, none of them bigger than a matchbox: Edmund de Waal was entranced when he first encountered the collection in his great-uncle Iggie's Tokyo apartment. When he later inherited the 'netsuke', they unlocked a story far larger and more dramatic than he could ever have imagined. From a burgeoning empire in Odessa to fin de siècle Paris, from occupied Vienna to post-war Tokyo, Edmund de Waal traces the netsuke's journey through generations of his remarkable family against the backdrop of a tumultuous century. 
 
This new enhanced ebook is bursting with extra content exclusive to this edition. There are five videos including one of Edmund de Waal discussing the netsuke collection, another of the Paris opera house much frequented by Charles Ephrussi, and a third takes a visit to the sumptuous Palais Ephrussi in Vienna. There is music from Vienna and Tokyo to listen to as you read, a new essay from the author about this illustrated edition, and the full album of Secessionist watercolours painted especially for the family. There is a very moving recording of Edmund de Waal reading the final chapter and lastly, there are the netsuke themselves. Individually animated and intimately displayed, this edition allows each netsuke comes to life, as if you were holding it in the palm of your hand.

The Hare With Amber Eyes

The Illustrated Edition

Tom Brokaw

In this superb book, Tom Brokaw goes out into America, to tell through the stories of individual men and women the story of a generation - America's citizen heroes and heroines who came of age during the Great Depression and the Second World War and went on to build modern America.  This was a generation united by common values - by duty, honour, courage, service and love of family and country. Here you'll meet people like Charles Van Gorder, who set up during D-Day a MASH-like medical facility in the middle of the fighting, and then came home to create a clinic and hospital in his hometown.  You'll hear ex-President George Bush talk about how, as a Navy Air Corps combat pilot, one of his assignments was to read the mail of the enlisted men under him, to be sure no sensitive military information would be compromised.  You'll meet Trudy Elion, winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine, one of the many women in this book who found fulfilling careers in the changed society as a result of the war.  And you'll meet Martha Putney, one of the first black women to serve in the newly formed WACs. In the spirit of Band of Brothers, The Greatest Generation tells the stories of ordinary men and women caught up in extraordinary events - individuals united by a common purpose - working, living and dying in the service of their country.

The Greatest Generation

Edward Pearce

There may be a civil war, starting in the Midlands. The Birmingham garrison have rough-sharpened their swords and barricades have gone up in the town. Wellington is trying to form a government without a majority. The Duke says 'The English people are usually quiet; if not, there are ways of making them.' These are the Days of May, High Summer of English Reform.  The new Whig government has staggered everyone with a reform bill more drastic than all expectations, one to wipe out rotten boroughs and enfranchise industrial towns. It has passed the Commons, been thrown out by the Lords, then, in an election, is massively endorsed. Now in May 1832, the Lords are again blocking it. Political unions formed to promote reform are denounced for Jacobinism and revolution.  One Tory, John Croker, hopes that 'the coming revolutionary regime' will let Princess Victoria 'live quietly as Miss Guelph'.  King William IV, influenced by the Court and Queen Adelaide, refuses to make new peers; stalemate may turn into street fighting. The struggle is recorded here. The players, painted vividly, speak in their own voices from 170-year-old Hansards: the radicals, Cobbett and Hunt; the Ultras, Wetherell and Eldon, resisting all reform; Lord Chancellor Brougham, drunk and brilliant in a great speech; Lord Alport, who manages the nightmare legislative struggle, tempted by suicide; a mad backbencher demanding a day of fasting and penitence.  Here too are the riots and the quiet politics of British constitutional reform.  The outcome - the 1832 Act - is the most important event in the last 300 years of parliamentary history.

Reform!

The Fight for the 1832 Reform Act

Norman Sherry

The years from 1939 to 1955 proved to be the most prolific of Graham Greene's life.  In The Life of Graham Greene, Volume II, Norman Sherry continues his engrossing account, delving deeply and emerging with a portrait of the author at the height of both his spying and literary careers. Greene produced some of his best novels during this time - The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, The Quiet American - and saw the filming of The Fallen Idol and The Third Man.  The same period encompasses his passionate affair with the beautiful American Catherine Watson, who was married to a British peer, the disintegration of his marriage, his long relationship with Dorothy Glover, his activities as a secret agent and his forays into the conflicts in Kenya, Malaya, and French Indo-China.  As with The Life of Graham Greene Volume I:  1904-1939, Norman Sherry succeeds in unlocking the mystery of Greene's character and the alchemic nature of his creative genius.

The Life of Graham Greene Volume 2

1939-1955

The much-anticipated third and final volume of Norman Sherry's biography follows the tireless wanderings of Graham Greene, the writer's final forays into the fulminating trouble spots of the world which beckoned as sirens all his days. From the perils of Batista's Cuba, the privations of the Belgian Congo and the tumult of Haiti, Nicaragua and Panama, to his confrontation with the French mafia, his travels in Spain and, finally, his quiet death in Switzerland at the age of eighty-six. The rigour and attention to detail that gained praise for the first two volumes remains undiminished as Sherry retraces Greene's footsteps, criss-crossing the globe to visit the places that inspired Greene's novels and meeting the people who provided the models for some of literature's most memorable characters: the whiskey priest; the honorary consul; the zany aunt. Never losing sight of the very real religious, emotional and political struggles that made up Greene's complicated personality - his constantly questioned but never abandoned Catholicism, his two long-term affairs with married women, his determination to stand up for the victims of injustice - Sherry illuminates Greene's mind, methods and motivation with an unswervingly critical, yet always compassionate eye. With exclusive access to Greene's letters, journals and dream-diaries, Norman Sherry has written a monumental tribute to one of the greatest of English writers. The three volumes of The Life of Graham Greene will remain the standard work on Greene for decades to come.

The Life of Graham Greene Volume Three

1955 - 1991

Neil Johnson

In these pages you will discover words you never knew existed, and rediscover many that you had forgotten or had given up all hope of ever seeing again. 
 
If the amoindering of our language by fifish chuffs leads you to fleer and the infandous overslipping of orthoepy makes you feel wamble, this is most certainly the book for you. 
 
Prepare to fike, gane and gaure as Dr Johnson certiorates, carrying carotic catachresis to new heights, and providing all lovers of leguleian lexicographical detail with a rich feast of mullock, cultch and peltry.

Dr Johnson's Reliquary of Rediscovered Words

Rosemary Ashton

They were the most remarkable couple in London: the great sage Carlyle, with his vehement prophecies, and his witty, sardonic wife Jane.  It was a strong, close, mutually admiring yet often mutually antagonistic partnership, fascinating to all who observed it. The Carlyles lived at the heart of English life in mid-Victorian London, but both were outsiders, a largely self-educated Scottish pair who took a sometimes caustic look at the society they so influenced - Carlyle through his copious writings, and both through their network of acquaintances and correspondents.  Carlyle's fame was confirmed by his Sartor Resartus of 1843, The French Revolution, his lectures on heroes and hero-worship and by his radical account of contemporary industrial Britain in Past and Present, 1843.  Both husband and wife were great letter-writers, Carlyle commenting on the matters of the day, dashing off pen portraits of those he met and Jane with her brilliant stories and her sharp, dry humour.  Yet despite her brilliance, Jane suffered, especially from Carlyle's infatuation with the lion-hunting Lady Ashburton, and the tensions in their marriage grew.  The letters they wrote, both to each other and to others, make theirs the most well-documented marriage of the nineteenth century and give us an unequalled portrait of a famously unhappy marriage. This moving and vivid biography describes their relationship with each other, from their first meeting in 1821 to Jane's death in 1866, and also their relationship with the world outside.  Rosemary Ashton's inimitable blend of rigorous scholarship, warm sensitivity and lively wit makes this not only a portrait of a marriage but a picture of a whole age, elegant, erudite and entertaining.

Thomas And Jane Carlyle

Portrait of a Marriage

Graham Greene

This play produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company has as its chief characters A. J. Raffles, the literary creation some seventy odd years ago of E. W. Hornung. The cool daring of the impeccable Amateur Cracksman, always torn between the rival claims of burglary and cricket, ensured his popularity in Edwardian England. Evading the dogged pursuit of Inspector Mackenzie of Scotland Yard, Hornung's character eventually met a hero's death in South Africa in the Boer War. 
 
Graham Greene's The Return of A. J. Raffles begins some months after. Raffles' loyal assistant Bunny still mourns his friend's death in Raffles' chambers in Albany, despite the blandishments of Lord Alfred Douglas. A visitor forces his way in - Raffles has cheated death as he once cheated Inspector Mackenzie - and immediately Lord Alfred sees in the Amateur Cracksman and Bunny heaven-sent instruments to revenge and disgrace of Oscar Wilde on his odious father, the Marquess of Queensberry... 
 
Graham Green never fails to surprise and delight admirers of his comic genius, and the twists and turns of this story of Edwardian high life, when Raffles returns to the scene of his earlier triumphs, provide a richly satisfying entertainment.

The Return Of A. J. Raffles

An Edwardian comedy in three acts based somewhat loosely on E.W. Hornung's characters in The Amateur Cracksman

Angelica Malin

Thirty women, from Megan Barton-Hanson and Shaparak Khorsandi to Shon Faye and Stephanie Yeboah write on what single womanhood in the modern age means to them. 
 
 
Have you ever worried about going on holiday alone? 
 
Felt queasy at the thought of Valentine's Day without a date? 
 
Thought to yourself, "I want what she has?" 
 
This book is the tonic you need. 
 
 
ANGELICA MALIN - MEGAN BARTON HANSON - ANNIE LORD - STEPHANIE YEBOAH - SHAPARAK KHORSANDI - POORNA BELL - CHARLIE CRAGGS - REBECCA REID - ASHLEY JAMES - CHANTÉ JOSEPH - ROSIE WILBY - SALMA EL-WARDANY - NATALIE BYRNE - SHON FAYE - VENUS LIBIDO - JESSICA MORGAN - FRANCESCA SPECTER - SHANI SILVER - RACHEL THOMPSON - BELLA DEPAULO - MIA LEVITIN - FELICITY MORSE - KETAKI CHOWKHANI - LUCIE BROWNLEE - CHLOE PIERRE - SOPHIA MONEY-COUTTS - NICOLA SLAWSON - RAHEL AKLILU - SOPHIA LEONIE - ROSE STOKES - MADELEINE SPENCER 
 
Curated by journalist and author Angelica Malin, Unattached explores the nuances of being single today through the voices of thirty women; with personal essays reflecting both the unique challenges (hello, going to a wedding alone), and the glorious benefits (goodbye, joint bank account). 
 
Unattached shines a light on brilliant women stepping into their power, owning being alone, and reveals the true depth of female potential when we choose to go against what society expects of us and revel in our own strength.

Unattached

Empowering Essays on Singlehood

Tim Butcher

For many years Sierra Leone and Liberia have been too dangerous to travel through, bedevilled by a uniquely brutal form of violence from which sprang many of Africa's cruellest contemporary icons - child soldiers, prisoner mutilation, blood diamonds. With their wars officially over, Tim Butcher sets out on a journey across both countries, trekking for 350 miles through remote rainforest and malarial swamps. Just as he followed H M Stanley through the Congo - a journey described in his bestseller Blood River - this time he pursues a trail blazed by Graham Greene in 1935 and immortalised in the travel classic Journey Without Maps. Greene took 26 bearers, a case of scotch, and hammocks in which he and his cousin Barbara were carried. Tim walks every blistering inch to gain an extraordinary ground-level view of a troubled and overlooked region. 
 
As a journalist in Africa, Tim came to know both countries well although the wars made trips to the jungle hinterland far too risky. This is where he now heads, exploring how rebel groups thrived in the bush for so long and whether the devil of war has truly been chased away. He encounters other 'devils', masked figures guarding the spiritual secrets of jungle communities. Some are no more threatening than schoolmasters but others are much more sinister, relying on ritual cannibalism as a source of their magical power. Tim encounters these devils on an epic journey that demands courage, doggedness and good fortune. 
 
Chasing the Devil is a dramatic travel book touching on one of the most fraught parts of the globe at a unique moment in its history. Weaving history and anthropology with personal narrative - as well as new discoveries about Greene - it is as exciting as it is enlightening.

Chasing the Devil

The Search for Africa's Fighting Spirit

Allan Massie

The Royal Stuarts ruled for over 300 years in Scotland and for a century as the Royal Family of Britain and Ireland. They were leading actors in the foremost political dramas of British history - the Scottish Wars of Independence, the Union of the Crowns, the English Civil War and the Restoration - and remain the most controversial and divisive of royal families. 
 
Drawing on the accounts of historians past and present, novels and plays, Allan Massie tells the family's full story, from the salt marshes of Brittany to the thrones of Scotland and England, and then eventual exile. A book which gets beyond the received generalisations, The Royal Stuarts takes us deep into the lives of figures like Mary Queen of Scots, Charles I and Bonnie Prince Charlie, uncovering a family of strong affections and fierce rivalries, the brave and capable, the weak and foolish. 
 
Told with panache and pace, adventurous and opinionated, this is a nuanced history of that remarkable family who, for better or worse, shaped our history and made our country what it is.

The Royal Stuarts

A History of the Family That Shaped Britain

Iris Murdoch

EDITED BY AVRIL HORNER AND ANNE ROWE 
 
‘Destroy this and all letters. And keep your mouth shut’ 
 
This collection of Iris Murdoch’s most interesting and revealing letters gives us a living portrait of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers and thinkers. The letters show a great mind at work – we see the young Murdoch grappling with philosophical questions, as well as feeling her anguish when a novel obstinately refuses to come together. 
 
They uncover Murdoch’s famed personal life, the subject of much speculation, in all its intriguing complexity, and her penchant for living beyond the bounds of social acceptability. We also begin to see the 'real life material' that fed into her fiction, despite her claims that her fiction never drew on reality. Above all we see the accumulation of life – intimate, irreverent, fiercely engaged with the world – in this extraordinary collection of letters.

Living on Paper

Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

Andrew Anthony

'Score and few will remember; miss and no one will forget' 
 
Talking to some of the game's most successful players and managers, the question the book seeks to address is simple: can England overcome their fear of the penalty? 
 
The penalty shoot-out is the greatest set piece of sporting drama ever conceived. 
 
Cruel, arbitrary, tortuous and unfair, it has also presented the England football team with a new and infinitely more punishing manner in which to lose. Three times in the past decade the nation has sat on the edge of its collective sofa and watched the seemingly inevitable unfold as Stuart Pearce, Chris Waddle, Gareth Southgate, Paul Ince and David Batty have selected the wrong shots in the lottery of international championship shoot-outs. 
 
Except it's not a lottery. There is an art to scoring penalties, which calls upon a unique combination of physical prowess and psychological strength. In the corridor of truth that leads from the penalty spot to the goal-line, a succession of English footballers have had to confront not only the opposing goalkeeper but the hopes and dreams of fans and fellow countrymen and, of course, themselves. 
 
'A tour de force of narrative journalism' Observer

On Penalties

Ruth Dudley Edwards

They were 'Cudlipp' and 'Mr King' when they met in 1935. At 21, gregarious, extrovert and irreverent Hugh Cudlipp had many years of journalistic experience: at 34, shy, introspective and solemn Cecil Harmsworth King, haunted by the ghost of Uncle Alfred, Lord Northcliffe, the great press magnate, and bitter towards Uncle Harold, Lord Rothermere of the Daily Mail, was fighting his way up in the family business. 
 
Opposites in most respects, they were complementary in talents and had in common a deep concern for the underdog. Cudlipp, the journalistic genius, and King, the formidable intellect, were to become, in Cudlipp's words, 'the Barnum and Bailey' of Fleet Street. Together, on the foundation of the populist Daily Mirror, they created the biggest publishing empire in the world. 
 
Yet their relationship foundered sensationally in 1968, when - as King tried to topple the Prime Minister - Cudlipp toppled King. Through the story of two extraordinary men, Ruth Dudley Edwards gives us a riveting portrait of Fleet Street in its heyday.

Newspapermen

Hugh Cudlipp, Cecil Harmsworth King and the Glory Days of Fleet Street

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

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

David Bellos

Airman, war hero, immigrant, law student, diplomat, novelist and celebrity spouse, Romain Gary had several lives thrust upon him by the history of the twentieth century, but he also aspired to lead many more. He wrote more than two dozen books and a score of short stories under several different names in two languages, English and French, neither of which was his mother tongue. Gary had a gift for narrative that endeared him to ordinary readers, but won him little respect among critics far more intellectual than he could ever be. His varied and entertaining writing career tells a different story about the making of modern literary culture from the one we are accustomed to hearing. 
 
Born Roman Kacew in Vilna (now Lithuania) in 1914 and raised by only his mother after his father left them, Gary rose to become French Consul General in Los Angeles and the only man ever to win the Goncourt Prize twice. 
 
This biography follows the many threads that lead from Gary's wartime adventures and early literary career to his years in Hollywood and his marriage to the actress Jean Seberg. It illuminates his works in all their incarnations, and culminates in the tale of his most brilliant deception: the fabrication of a complex identity for his most successful nom de plume, Émile Ajar. 
 
In his new portrait of Gary, David Bellos brings biographical research together with literary and cultural analysis to make sense of the many lives of Romain Gary - a hero fit for our times, as well as his own.

Romain Gary

A Tall Story

Hephzibah Anderson

For the last year Hephzibah Anderson has flirted, dated, swooned, and sighed. She has been tantalized by intense conversations, lingering looks and clinches in the back of taxis. She has watched dawn break cradled in the arms of a dangerous ex, sipped cocktails against the Manhattan skyline with a dark-eyed companion, and dined al fresco in the English countryside with a man who promises to be more than just a friend. She has talked, embraced, kissed. But she has not had sex. 
 
Turning on its head the maxim that declares romance dead, journalist Hephzibah Anderson has thrown herself headfirst into finding romance in an age obsessed with sex. Chastened: Adventures in Abstinence is the story of her personal quest to stay chaste for a year, fusing a candid and pithy month-by-month account of her personal challenge with an exploration of what sex means in the twenty-first-century western world. In a welcome antidote to the pole-dancing hen night, Anderson elegantly unpicks our attitudes to relationships; and reconnects with the much undervalued values of courtship and intimate friendship in our lives.

Chastened

No More Sex in the City

Sofka Zinovieff

Faringdon House in Oxfordshire was the home of Lord Berners, composer, writer, painter, friend of Stravinsky and Gertrude Stein, a man renowned for his eccentricity – masks, practical jokes, a flock of multi-coloured doves – and his homosexuality. Before the war he made Faringdon an aesthete’s paradise, where exquisite food was served to many of the great minds, beauties and wits of the day. 
 
Since the early thirties his companion there was Robert Heber-Percy, twenty-eight years his junior, wildly physical, unscholarly, a hothead who rode naked through the grounds, loved cocktails and nightclubs, and was known to all as the Mad Boy. If the two men made an unlikely couple, at a time when homosexuality was illegal, the addition to the household in 1942 of a pregnant Jennifer Fry, a high society girl known to be ‘fast’, as Robert’s wife was simply astounding. 
 
After Victoria was born the marriage soon foundered (Jennifer later married Alan Ross). Berners died in 1950, leaving Robert in charge of Faringdon, aided by a ferocious Austrian housekeeper who strove to keep the same culinary standards in a more austere age. This was the world Sofka Zinovieff, Victoria’s daughter, a typical child of the sixties, first encountered at the age of seventeen. Eight years later, to her astonishment, Robert told her he was leaving her Faringdon House. 
 
Her book about Faringdon and its people is marvellously witty and full of insight, bringing to life a vanished world and the almost fantastical people who lived in it.

The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother And Me

Francine Du Plessix Gray

Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), one of the most perplexing personalities of Western culture, has been called 'the freest spirit who ever lived' and 'a frenetic and abominable assemblage of all crimes and obscenities'. Yet scant attention has been given to the two women who were the catalysts of his fate: his loyal, tolerant wife, Renee-Pelagie, and his vindictive mother-in-law, Madame de Montreuil. This groundbreaking account vividly brings to life these two dynamic women and the complex bonds they evolved with the rakish Marquis, as they dedicated themselves to protecting, curbing and, ultimately, confining him.                                                                                                                             Francine du Plessix Gray draws on thousands of pages of correspondence between the magnetic, aristocratic Marquis de Sade and his plain, bourgeois wife, to explore in historical and psychological detail what it was like to live with this maverick adventurer and man of letters in the decades before the French Revolution. She brilliantly recreates the extravagant hedonism and corruption of late-18th-century France, the ensuing Terror, and the oppression of the Napoleonic regime under which de Sade spent his last years.

At Home With The Marquis De Sade

Glyn Maxwell

Britain is reeling from reports of a terrorist bomb on a film set that has killed a hundred people and, possibly, the brightest star in Hollywood, Thomas Bayne. Caught up in the middle of the national mourning is Susan Mantle - a rather hopeless London tour-guide - who is seen crying on a park bench and is taken up by the media as a symbol of the blitz spirit, appearing on the rolling news with the headline 'beautiful but crying'. 
 
She is crying, though, for other reasons: she's just been told by a clairvoyant that she is about to die. Reason and the real world are quickly relinquished as Susan is swept into a media maelstrom, becoming the baffled and increasingly unwilling star of reality TV. Buffeted by the demands of her new public, and her private terrors about her own mortality, Susan starts to lose control of everything.

The Girl Who Was Going To Die

Alice Thomson

The story of the man who strung the telegraph across Australia, and the woman who gave her name to Alice Springs. 
 
In 1855 an impoverished young scientist from Greenwich told his guardian that he was off to chance his luck in Australia - as Government Astronomer and Superintendent of Telegraphs for the small colony of South Australia. With him went his young wife Alice - after whom Alice Springs would be named. For Charles Todd was following a dream - the near impossible task of stringing a telegraph wire across one of the last uncrossed colonial wilderness, and finally connecting Australia with Britain. 
 
In 1997, their great-great-granddaughter Alice followed in their footsteps. Her plan was to track the telegraph and her ancestors, from Adelaide over the thousands of miles of desert, outback, swamp and mountain that Charles Todd had crossed in the 1860s with his 400 men.

The Singing Line

Leslie Garis

Leslie Garis's grandparents, Howard and Lillian Garis, were, from the turn of the century to the 1950s, phenomenally productive (and incredibly popular) authors of books for children. Every American child grew up reading the Uncle Wiggily stories, The Bobbsey Twins and Tom Swift. House of Happy Endings tells how in a large romantic house in Amherst, Massachusetts, Leslie Garis, her two brothers, her parents and grandparents aimed to live a life that mirrored the idyllic world the elder Garises created. But inside the Dell all was not right. 
 
Roger Garis's inability to match his parents' success in his own work as playwright, novelist and magazine writer led him to believe that he was a failure as father, husband and son, and eventually deepened into mental illness characterised by raging mood swings, drug abuse and bouts of debilitating and destructive depression. House of Happy Endings is Leslie Garis's mesmerising, tender and harrowing account of growing up in a wildly imaginative, loving, but fatally wounded family.

The House of Happy Endings

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

Todd Shimoda

Tina Suzuki has just begun her first year of graduate study. Born and raised in San Francisco by her Japanese immigrant mother, Tina knows nothing about the rest of her family, and very little about her cultural heritage. But when her boyfriend's Japanese calligraphy teacher suffers a stroke, loses his ability to communicate, but continues to create magnificent calligraphic art, Tina knows she has stumbled across an ideal research subject. Getting people to cooperate with her research is an entirely different matter. The blank personal history presented by her mother is in fact a tightly wound scroll full of scandalous secrets. Tina's studies lead to revelations about her own family - secrets she would never have expected. Juxtaposed with Tina's story is that of the stricken calligraphy teacher as a young man in Kyoto, and the history of the ancient inkstone he carries with him.

The Fourth Treasure

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

Ruby Tandoh

A joyful, passionate baking book from the Sunday Times top ten bestselling author of Eat Up. 
 
‘Must. Have. Now’ Marie Claire 
 
 
Crumb is about flavour, first and foremost – a celebration of the simple joy of baking. Ruby’s recipes delight in new tastes and combinations, as well as the rediscovery of old favourites, to create food that is exciting without ceremony or pretence. 
 
 
In a delicious blend of practicality and creativity, Ruby encourages novices and seasoned bakers alike to roll up their sleeves and bake – even if they don’t have the proper equipment or know-how. 
 
From Lemon &amp; Marzipan Cupcakes and Rye Caraway Bagels, Rose &amp; Burnt Honey Florentines, Croissants and Custard Doughnuts, to Butternut Squash &amp; Mozzarella Tartlets and Sticky Toffee Pudding, these are recipes that will quickly become some of your best loved. 
 
With writing to be savoured as much as the recipes, tips and techniques to guide you and plenty of ideas for variations, this is a baking book to be inspired by, to read and cherish.

Crumb

The Baking Book

Jane Juska

As a result of what she calls 'the only stroke of genius I've ever had', Jane Juska placed a personal ad in a newspaper, that began: 'Before I turn 67 - next March - I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like.' The response was overwhelming, and it changed Jane's life. She told all in A Round-Heeled Woman, which Lynne Truss called 'the best book about sex I have read', and which shocked some, amused many and became a bestseller. 
 
Five years later, Jane has, like it or not, become a kind of icon for the post-menopause generation. She's a friend and confessor to women of all ages with poignant, tragic or enchanting stories - unaccompanied women, alone for now but searching for sex and romance. And despite her success, Jane herself is still looking for a man to keep her company - not a husband, not even a partner, but the perfect lover, described by Katharine Hepburn as one who 'lives nearby and visits often'. 
 
So the story continues, looking around at her generation, back to her youth, and forward to... whatever grabs her fancy. And like many unaccompanied women, Jane's also in search of a better place to live. Her current tiny apartment doesn't allow for much in the way of romance, let alone the giant toy box she wants to fill for her granddaughter, born on her birthday and now just two, who's brought another kind of love to her life. But as a sporadic earner on a teacher's pension, she can never afford the dream house. 
 
So the search continues, for love, friendship, sex, a roof over her head - it's what keeps this seventy-two year old author young, and will keep readers wonderfully entertained in this funny, deft and touching memoir.

Unaccompanied Women

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