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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Grayson Perry

Wendy Jones

Every inch of Grayson's childhood bedroom was covered with pictures of aeroplanes, and every surface with models. Fantasy took over his life, in a world of battles ruled by his teddy bear, Alan Measles. He grew up. And in 2003, an acclaimed ceramic artist, he accepted the Turner Prize as his alter-ego Clare, wearing his best dress, with a bow in his hair. 
 
Now he tells his own story, his voice beautifully caught by his friend, the writer Wendy Jones. Early childhood in Chelmsford, Essex is a rural Eden that ends abruptly with the arrival of his stepfather, leading to constant swerving between his parents' houses, and between boys' and women's clothes. But as Grayson enters art college and discovers the world of London squats and New Romanticism, he starts to find himself. At last he steps out as a potter and transvestite.

Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Girl

Sadie Jones

HOW DID THE GOOD LIFE GO SO WRONG? 
 
Amy Connell and Lan Honey are having the best childhood. When their families make the leap from city living to a farm in the West Country they have untold freedom. The adults are far too busy to keep an eye on them, and Amy and Lan would never tell them about climbing on the high barn roof, or what happened with the axe that time, any more than their parents would tell them the things they get up to. Adult things, like betrayal, that threaten to bring the whole fragile idyll tumbling down... 
 
'Funny and moving' Elizabeth Day 
 
'A fabulous thing: vivid and funny, sometimes heart-rendingly sad' Guardian 
 
'I couldn't put it down' Esther Freud

Amy and Lan

Suzanne O'Sullivan

'I loved it. She is in my view the best science writer around - a true descendant of Oliver Sacks' Sathnam Sanghera, author of The Boy with the Topknot 
 
 
The brain is the most complex structure in the universe. 
 
In Brainstorm the Wellcome Prize-winning author of It’s All in Your Head uncovers the most eye-opening symptoms medicine has to offer. 
 
‘Powerfully life-affirming... Brainstorm is testament to O'Sullivan's unshowy clarity of thought and her continued marvelling at the mysteries of the brain’ Guardian 
 
 
Brainstorm examines the stories of people whose symptoms are so strange even their doctor struggles to know how to solve them. A man who sees cartoon characters running across the room; a teenager who one day arrives home with inexplicably torn clothes; a girl whose world turns all Alice in Wonderland; another who transforms into a ragdoll whenever she even thinks about moving. 
 
 
The brain is the most complex structure in the universe, and neurologists must puzzle out life-changing diagnoses from the tiniest of clues – it’s the ultimate in medical detective work. In this riveting book, one of the UK’s leading neurologists takes you with her as she follows the trail of her patients’ symptoms: feelings of déjà vu lead us to a damaged hippocampus; spitting and fidgeting to the right temporal lobe; fear of movement to a brain tumour; a missed heart beat to the limbic system. 
 
 
It’s a journey that will open your eyes to the unfathomable intricacies of the brain, and the infinite variety of human capacity and experience.

Brainstorm

Detective Stories From the World of Neurology

Nichola Raihani

'A phenomenally important book' Lewis Dartnell, author of Origins 
 
Why do we live in families? 
Why do we help complete strangers? 
Why do we compare ourselves to others? 
Why do we cooperate? 
 
The science of cooperation tells us not only how we got here, but also where we might end up. In The Social Instinct Nichola Raihani introduces us to other species who, like us, live and work together. From the pied babblers of the Kalahari to the cleaner fish of the Great Barrier Reef, they happen to be some of the most fascinating and extraordinarily successful species on this planet. What do we have in common with these animals, and what can we learn from them? The Social Instinct is an exhilarating, far-reaching and thought-provoking journey through all life on Earth, with profound insights into what makes us human and how our societies work. 
 
'A pleasing juxtaposition of insightful scientific theory with illuminating anecdotes' Richard Dawkins 
 
'Surprising, thoughtful and, best of all, endlessly entertaining' Will Storr, author of The Science of Storytelling 
 
'A superb book about how important cooperation is' Alice Roberts, author of Ancestors

The Social Instinct

What Nature Can Teach Us About Working Together

How Cooperation Shaped the World

Rachel Aviv

There are stories that save us, and stories that trap us, and in the midst of an illness it can be very hard to know which is which&hellip; 
 
Strangers to Ourselves shares the experiences of five people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. It asks, do the stories we tell around mental illness affect its course, its outcomes, even our identities? 
 
Drawing on in-depth reporting, written testimonies and formative events in her own childhood, award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv offers a subtle, compassionate, revelatory account of how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress.

Strangers to Ourselves

Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us

Colin Thubron

Edward has lost his short term-memory. He hopes it will return when he sees the cottage in which he lives. He recognizes his overcoat on the hook, his books, the double bed. The mystery however, is Naomi. Edward has no recollection of who she is or why she has left him a love letter. 
 
With Thubron's customary clarity he draws a bleak, amnesiac world in which a young man must face again old griefs and linger 'like a coward, just this side of knowing'. On the other side, the memory of a destructive, obsessive relationship looms.

Distance

Clancy Martin

For better or for worse, for richer or for poorer: love and lies have always been the most intimate of bedfellows. 
 
And Clancy Martin – divorced twice, married three times – is no stranger to either. 
 
With help from Plato, Machiavelli, Raymond Carver and Pinocchio, here he explores the entanglements of love, truthfulness and deceit. First, unrequited, lasting or misguided – love always goes hand in hand with secrets, and it’s time we started being honest about our lying.

Love and Lies

And Why You Can’t Have One Without the Other

Hilary Rose

Steven Rose

Today, genes are called upon to explain almost every aspect of our lives, from social inequalities to health, sexual preference and criminality. Based on Darwin's theory of evolution and natural selection, Evolutionary Psychology with its claim that 'it's all in our genes' has become the most popular scientific theory of the late 20th century. Books such as Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, Edward O.Wilson's Consilience and Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct have become bestsellers and frame the public debate on human life and development: we can see their influence as soon as we open a Sunday newspaper.      In recent years, however, many biologists and social scientists have begun to contest this new biological determinism and shown that Evolutionary Psychology rests on shaky empirical evidence, flawed premises and unexamined political presuppositions. In this provocative and ground-breaking book, Hilary and Steven Rose have gathered together the most eminent and outspoken critics of this fashionable ideology, ranging from Stephen Jay Gould and Patrick Bateson to Mary Midgley, Tim Ingold and Annette Karmiloff-Smith. What emerges is a new perspective on human development which acknowledges the complexity of life by placing at its centre the living organism rather than the gene.

Alas Poor Darwin

Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology

Murray Bail

What are The Pages? 
 
On a family sheep station in the interior of Australia, a brother and sister work the property while their reclusive brother, Wesley Antill, spends years toiling away in one of the sheds, writing a philosophy. 
 
Now he has died. Erica, a philosopher, is sent from Sydney to appraise his work. Accompanying her is Sophie, who needs a distraction from a string of failed relationships. Her field is psychoanalysis. These two women, each with different views of the world, face a situation they have not experienced before, with surprising results.

The Pages

Claire Eastham

'An electric, warm, comforting and funny handbook on panic and how to cope and live alongside it' Laura Dockrill, author of What Have I Done? 
 
Award-winning blogger and author Claire Eastham is an expert on panic. She's not a doctor or an academic, but over a seven-year period, she has experienced 371 panic attacks (and counting), and learnt a thing or two along the way. 
 
 Part memoir, part guide, How I Learned to Live with Panic is an intimate, honest and ultimately uplifting exploration into panic attacks. In practical thematic chapters Claire covers the crisis points where panic can hit and interviews a host of people - scientists, professors, dieticians, psychologists and people who struggle with panic - to anatomise how it can be managed. 
 
 Frank, funny and blazing, Claire's story will speak to all those seeking to reclaim their lives. 
 
'I wish I had this book when I was 18... It's smart, witty, informative and, importantly, it lets you know that if you have panic attacks too...you are not alone' Dr Sophie Mort, author of A Manual For Being Human

How I Learned to Live With Panic

an honest and intimate exploration on how to cope with panic attacks

Marjorie Wallace

The astounding true story behind the major new motion picture starring Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance, with a new epilogue from the author 
 
'A compelling and tragic story' Mail on Sunday 
'Breathtaking' Independent 
'Extraordinary' Oliver Sacks, New York Times Review of Books 
 
When identical twins, June and Jennifer Gibbons were three they began to reject communication with anyone but each other, and so began a childhood bound together in a strange and secret world. As they grew up, love and hate united to push them to the extreme margins of society and, following a five week spree of vandalism and arson, the silent twins were sentenced to a gruelling twelve-year detention in Broadmoor. 
 
Award-winning investigative journalist Marjorie Wallace delves into the twins' silent world, revealing their genius, alienation and the mystic bond by which the extremes of good and evil ended in possession and death.

The Silent Twins

Barbie Latza Nadeau

The killing took place outside a busy coffee bar in Naples in broad daylight. 
 
Pupetta was eighteen years old and six months pregnant when she pulled the gun from her bag. 
 
The victim? 
 
A man known as Big Tony who had ordered the hit on her husband just months earlier... 
 
In this unputdownable exposé of women in the Mafia, investigative journalist Barbie Latza Nadeau tells the stories of the women who have risen to prominence in the Italian mob, beginning with the first documented female boss, the infamous Pupetta Maresca. Through personal interviews and groundbreaking research, Nadeau gives us a jaw-dropping 360-degree view of the dark underbelly of Italian society, taking us deeper into the Mafia and its complex realities than ever before. 
 
'Takes the reader into the little-known role of the women that underpin Italy's most ruthless mob families' Sara Gay Forden, author of House of Gucci 
 
'An unflinching portrait of one the original divas of organised crime' Clare Longrigg, author of Mafia Women 
 
'A must for true-crime fans' Publishers Weekly

The Godmother

Murder, Vengeance, and the Bloody Struggle of Mafia Women

Umberto Eco

Holography, wax museums, the secret meaning of spectator sports, Superman and the intellectual effects of over-tight jeans are just a few of the subjects covered in this collection of witty, entertaining and thought-provoking delights from Umberto Eco, celebrated author of The Name of the Rose.

Faith in Fakes

Naomi Wolf

By following a group of four contemporary girls - including her younger self - as they come of age in the seventies, Wolf shows how our culture tries to shape and confine women's desire. Embarking on a voyage of discovery, she illustrates how flawed and prescribed are the notions of what women want, and how these change through the ages - from Taoist techniques for giving women pleasure, to Victorian repression, and the so-called liberated nineties. 
 
Drawing on scholarly texts, secret diaries, real life and fantasy, she demonstrates that female sexuality is wilder, more demanding and more powerful than our culture dares to accept.

Promiscuities

An Opinionated History of Female Desire

Benji Waterhouse

‘This is honestly my dream book… Fascinating’ FERN BRADY 
 
‘Fearlessly honest, funny and uplifting’ JO BRAND 
 
‘Very funny and deeply sympathetic. Really excellent’ HENRY MARSH 
 
Most of the psychiatric cases in this book are Benji’s patients. Some of them are his family. One of them is him. 
 
Unlocking the doors to the psych ward, NHS psychiatrist Dr Benji Waterhouse provides a fly-on-the-padded-wall account of medicine’s most mysterious and controversial speciality. 
 
Why would anyone in their right mind choose to be a psychiatrist? Are the solutions to people’s messy lives really within medical school textbooks? And how can vulnerable patients receive the care they need when psychiatry lacks staff, hospital beds and any actual cures? 
 
This is an eye-opening medical memoir – from both sides of the doctor’s desk. The perfect read for fans of This Is Going to Hurt, Unnatural Causes and The Prison Doctor.

You Don't Have to Be Mad to Work Here

A Psychiatrist’s Life

Alexandra Heminsley

'A treatise on empathy and grace in extraordinary circumstances' Jojo Moyes 
 
What does it mean to be a woman? To live in a woman's body? 
 
Alexandra Heminsley thought she knew, but then her world turned inside out. Having just resurfaced from fertility issues, childbirth and early parenthood, she was told her then-husband was going to transition. 
 
Some Body to Love is Alex's profoundly open-hearted memoir about losing a partner but gaining a best friend, and together bringing up a baby in a changing world. By baring her own unique scars, Heminsley makes a vital manifesto on the unifying resilience that can be found in modern motherhood. 
 
______________________ 
 
Praise for Some Body to Love: 
'Insightful and wise, generous and kind' David Nicholls 
'A brave, thoughtful and timely book' Naomi Alderman 
'A testament to how family and love can be whatever shape we want them to be' Red 
'It took my breath away' Bryony Gordon 
'A book with a wild, deep, joyous, tender love of people at its heart' Emma Jane Unsworth

Some Body to Love

A Family Story

Margaret Forster

Only one person knows what happened that day… 
 
 
 
Julia was the only person who knew what happened that day. 
 
But she didn’t tell the police. And then it was too late. 
 
Now, years later, her secret looms large. 
 
Is it really too late? And if she does tell, can she bear the consequences?

The Unknown Bridesmaid

Samantha Harvey

**FROM THE AUTHOR OF 2024 BOOKER PRIZE WINNING ORBITAL** 
 
‘Easily one of the truest and best books I’ve read about what it’s like to be alive now, in this country’ Max Porter 
 
Sleep. Sleep. Like money, you only think about it when you have too little. Then you think about it all the time, and the less you have the more you think about it. It becomes the prism through which you see the world and nothing can exist except in relation to it. 
 
Samantha Harvey’s insomnia arrived, seemingly, from nowhere; for a year she has spent her nights chasing sleep that rarely comes. She’s tried everything to appease it. Nothing is helping. 
 
What happens when one of the basic human needs goes unmet? For Samantha Harvey, extreme sleep deprivation resulted in a raw clarity about life itself. Original and profound, The Shapeless Unease is a startlingly insightful exploration of memory, writing and influence, death and grief, and the will to survive.

The Shapeless Unease

A Year of Not Sleeping

Carol Gilligan

Love, like falling rain, can revive an arid life. But how can we find the love that brings true pleasure? How can we avoid the tragic love, with its lessons of sacrifice and loss, so deeply embedded in our culture? 'Pleasure is a sensation. It is written into our bodies; it is an experience of delight, of joy'In this inspiring book, Carol Gilligan sets out to create a radical new map of love. Although old patriarchal structures have been challenged the underlying patterns remain: the channeling of boys into 'masculinity'; the anxiety of girls in adolescence, the silences between men and women, the split between our social and our inner voice. In her work with children, adolescents and couples in crisis, Gilligan came to see how this 'double consciousness' - already present in the violence and betrayal of ancient myths, like that of Oedipus - had developed over thousands of years. Hunting for a counter myth, she discovered the story of Psyche and Cupid, a haunting tale of love and the searching soul, a model of resistance which she uses to frame her quest, showing how joy can be discovered in the heart of pain. The Birth of Pleasure rings with the voices of girls and boys, mothers and fathers, lovers and couples and echoes with telling readings of familiar writers, from Greek tragedy to Anne Frank, from Shakespeare to Proust, from Freud to Toni Morrison. All of us will find something that we recognise - and with luck, this brilliant, compassionate, flame-like book could really change our lives.

The Birth Of Pleasure

A New Map of Love

Steven Rose's The Making of Memory is about just that, in both its senses: the biological processes by which we humans - and other animals - learn and remember, and how researchers can explore these mechanisms. But it is also about much more. 
 
When the first edition of this fascinating book won the Science book Prize in 1993, the judges described it as 'a riveting read...a first-hand account by a practicing scientist working at the forefront of medical research and Rose does not duck the issues which that raises.' 
 
Now ten years on, research has itself moved forward, and Rose has taken the opportunity to fully revise the book. But this is more than mere revision. Where ten years ago he argued the case for research on memory because it is the most extraordinary of human attributes, Rose's own research has now opened the doors to a potential new treatment for Alzheimer's Disease undreamed of a decade ago, and in an entirely new chapter he describes how this potential breakthrough has occurred.

The Making Of Memory

From Molecules to Mind

Horatio Clare

'Deeply moving, darkly funny and hugely powerful' Robert Macfarlane 
 
'A brave, lit-up account of going mad and getting better' Jeanette Winterson 
 
After a lifetime of ups and downs, Horatio Clare was committed to hospital under Section 2 of the Mental Health Act. From hypomania in the Alps, to a complete breakdown and a locked ward in Wakefield, this is a gripping account of how the mind loses touch with reality, how we fall apart and how we may heal. 
 
'One of the most brilliant travel writers of our day takes us now to that most challenging country, severe mental illness; and does so with such wit, warmth and humanity' Reverend Richard Coles

Heavy Light

A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing

A neurologist explores the very real world of psychosomatic illness. 
 
 Pauline first became ill when she was fifteen. What seemed to be a urinary infection became joint pain, then life-threatening appendicitis. After a routine operation Pauline lost all the strength in her legs. Shortly afterwards, convulsions started. But Pauline’s tests are normal: her symptoms seem to have no physical cause whatsoever. 
 
 This may be an extreme case, but Pauline is not alone. As many as a third of people visiting their GP have symptoms that are medically unexplained. In most, an emotional root is suspected which is often the last thing a patient wants to hear and a doctor to say. 
 
 We accept our hearts can flutter with excitement and our brows can sweat with nerves, but on this journey into the very real world of psychosomatic illness, Suzanne O'Sullivan finds the secrets we are all capable of keeping from ourselves. 
 
‘A fascinating glimpse into the human condition... a forceful call for society to be more open about such suffering’ Daily Mail 
 
‘Honest, fascinating and necessary’ The Times

It's All in Your Head

Stories from the Frontline of Psychosomatic Illness

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