Michael Symmons Roberts’s fourth book of poetry, Corpus, was the winner of the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, and the Griffin International Prize. His sixth collection, Drysalter, was the winner of both the Forward Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize in 2013. He collaborated with Paul Farley on Edgelands (Cape/Vintage) and will do so again in The Deaths of the Poets (Cape, 2017). He has also worked many times with the composer James MacMillan. He has published two novels, and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Michael Symmons Roberts

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Michael Palin

With his eightieth birthday looming, it crossed Michael Palin’s mind that now might be the time to hang up his boots, to lounge about at home, to take things easy. Then the opportunity to visit Africa’s most populous nation arose. A few weeks later, he was at Lagos airport, camera crew in tow. 
 
 The journal he kept during his trip offers a fascinatingly kaleidoscopic view of a country where some 500 languages are spoken and which contains within its borders everything from tropical rainforests to grasslands to desert plains. At one moment he is in vibrant but chaotic Lagos, the next in the seemingly deserted streets of Nigeria’s hyper-modern capital, Abuja, the next in the polluted oil fields of the Niger Delta. He is welcomed as an honoured guest by a powerful emir and harangued by a passerby in Benin City. He hears the testimony of a kidnap victim of the terrorist group Boko Haram and experiences the collective spiritual ecstasy of one of Nigeria’s mega churches. And throughout his trip, he experiences at first hand the contradictions of a country that has so much natural wealth and human talent and yet simultaneously grapples with corruption, religious strife and deep inequality. 
 
 Illustrated throughout with colour photographs taken on the trip, and brimming with wry humour and fascinating insights, this is a vivid and varied portrait of a complex country.

In Nigeria

In March 2022, Michael Palin travelled the length of the River Tigris through Iraq to get a sense of what life is like in a region of the world that once formed the cradle of civilisation, but that in recent times has witnessed turmoil and appalling bloodshed. In the journal he kept during his trip he describes the war-ravaged city of Mosul and the children he encounters growing up amid its ruins. He contemplates the graffiti-strewn ruins of Saddam Hussein's former palaces, and he notes the constant presence of armed guards. But there are patches of light amid the dark: boisterous New Year celebrations in Akre, the friendliness of generals and colonels at 'Checkpoint Cheerful', and public poetry readings in Baghdad. People getting on with their lives. 
 
At the same time, Michael charts the course of one of the great rivers of the world, showing how the water that gave life to such ancient settlements as Babylon and Ur is now becoming a scarce and hotly contested resource. And he considers the role that Iraq's other great natural resource - oil - plays in both providing wealth and threatening political stability. 
 
Illustrated throughout with colour photographs taken on the trip, and permeated with his warmth and humour, this is a vivid and varied portrait of a complex country.

Into Iraq

In February 2025, Michael Palin travelled to Venezuela to get a sense of what life is like in one of South America's most culturally rich, vibrant but also troubled nations. In the journal he kept during his trip he gives a vivid account of the towns and cities he visited, the landscapes he travelled through, and the people he met. 
 
Illustrated throughout with colour photographs taken on the trip, and permeated with his warmth and humour, this is a vivid and varied portrait of a complex country.

Michael Palin in Venezuela

Hannah Murray

In 2017, Hannah Murray was a successful actor whose career had taken her to Hollywood and given her the opportunity to act with A list stars and Oscar-winning directors. But as the daily costs of acting grew, from the degradations of auditions to repeating violent scenes over and over, Hannah found herself searching for something to make her feel better. One day, a reiki healer promises her a new kind of treatment, a kind of magic, and all of a sudden Hannah’s life is changed. 
 
Back in London, she becomes increasingly involved with the organisation behind the magic, an organisation whose charismatic leader, promises of secret knowledge, and increasingly complex rituals, are seductive, cult-like – and ultimately destructive, as Hannah finds herself on a week-long course from her friends and family - and her sanity falls apart. Detained in hospital, she struggles to understand the difference between what’s real, and what’s imagined. The result is a propulsive, shockingly honest, and extraordinarily intimate portrayal of a mind taken over the edge. 
 
From the outer edges of fame, through Hollywood film sets and London parties, Hannah’s life has slowly moved from that of a successful starlet to that of a young woman seduced by the magical thinking of an organisation that promises health and happiness beyond her wildest dreams, but her reality becomes far more disturbing than she could ever have imagined. 
 
Shocking, intimate and compulsive, The Make-Believe is an ultimately uplifting and inspiring story of empathy, resilience and the power of belief.

The Make-Believe

A memoir of magic and madness

Robin Givhan

BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025: Washington Post, New Yorker, Elle 
 
'Captivating, emotional and illuminating' Tom Ford 
 
'Thoughtful, intelligent, honest and masterfully crafted' Marc Jacobs 
 
'A thrilling journey into the mind of a genius.' Edward Enninful 
 
'A must-read' Elaine Welteroth, bestselling author of More Than Enough 
 
-- 
 
From Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic Robin Givhan comes a groundbreaking chronicle of the legacy of Virgil Abloh, whose iconic rise to the top of the fashion industry transformed our ideas about the connection between who we are and what we wear 
 
In 2018, shockwaves were sent around the fashion industry when Virgil Abloh was appointed the head of menswear for Louis Vuitton. Despite no formal training in pattern-making or tailoring, Abloh had become the first Black designer to serve as artistic director in the brand’s 164-year history. 
 
Make It Ours tells the story of how that moment came to be and how Abloh came to symbolise and embody the industry’s way forward. Using Abloh’s surprising path to the top of the luxury establishment, Givhan unfolds the larger story of how the cloistered, exclusive fashion world faced a revolution from below in the form of streetwear and designers unafraid to storm the gate, and how a simple t-shirt came to hold as much cultural power as a haute couture gown. 
 
With unparalleled access to Abloh’s family, friends, collaborators, and contemporaries, and featuring a cast of fascinating characters ranging from groundbreaking Black designers like Ozwald Boateng to Abloh’s mercurial but critical employer and mentor Kanye West, Givhan weaves a spellbinding tale of a young man’s rise amidst a cultural moment that would upend a century’s worth of ideas about luxury and taste. This is at once a remarkable biography of a singular creative force and a powerful meditation on fashion and race, taste and exclusivity, genius and luxury.

Make It Ours

Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh

Tim Benson

'A welcome and important addition to this genre—especially given that it contains more than 300 cartoons, most of which have not been utilised in previously published books . . . With great skill Benson has created a highly readable, entertaining, and politically insightful description for each cartoon . . . Buy and read this delightful book.' INTERNATIONAL CHURCHILL SOCIETY 
________________________________________________ 
 
Following an unrivalled political career that spanned a remarkable sixty years and reached both the heights and the depths of political fortune, Sir Winston Churchill undoubtedly became the world's most caricatured politician of all time. From entering Parliament in 1900 through to his retirement in 1964, Winston Churchill in Cartoons will chart Churchill's illustrious and tumultuous political career through the work of leading cartoonists from around the world. 
 
Through these cartoons there developed very contrary views of Churchill; the glorious cigar-chomping wartime leader and the flawed politician. In America he was adored by cartoonists, while in Nazi Germany and in the post-war Soviet Union he was, unsurprisingly, painted as a bumbling buffoon. After his passing in 1965, great contemporary cartoonists including Peter Brookes, Steve Bell, Matt and Gerald Scarfe, continued to use him as a benchmark for the world leaders that followed. 
 
Featuring the work of the some of the greatest cartoonists of all time and providing a new perspective of an iconic figure, Winston Churchill in Cartoons will include the very best and wittiest portrayals of Churchill the glorious wartime leader, controversial politician, and emblematic British statesman.

Churchill: A Life in Cartoons

Robbie Robertson

'Intense, exciting, delirious' THE TIMES 
'Thrilling, beautiful, honest' TELEGRAPH 
'A wild ride' ROLLING STONE 
 
For four decades, Robbie Robertson produced music for Martin Scorsese's films, a relationship that began when Robertson convinced Scorsese to direct The Last Waltz, the iconic film of the Band's farewell performance at the Winterland Ballroom on Thanksgiving 1976. 
 
The closing of the Band's story with that landmark concert thrust Robertson into a new and uncertain world. With his relationship with his bandmates deteriorating and his marriage collapsing, Robertson arrived on Scorsese’s Beverly Hills doorstep only to find his friend in similar straits. Before the night was out, Scorsese had invited him to move in. Both men, already culture-transforming stars before the age of thirty-five, stood at a creative precipice, searching for the beginning of a new phase of life and work. As their friendship deepened into a career-altering collaboration, their shared journey would take them around the world and down the rabbit hole of American culture in the long hangover of the seventies. Buffeted on either side by temptation and paranoia, veering closer to self-destruction than either wanted to admit, together they had devoted themselves to a partnership defined by equal parts admiration and ambition. 
 
With a cast of characters featuring Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Federico Fellini, Sophia Loren, Sam Fuller, Liza Minelli, Tuesday Weld, and many more, Insomnia is an intimate portrait of a remarkable creative friendship between two titans of American arts, one that would explore the outer limits of excess and experience before returning to tell the tale.

Insomnia

Simon Weisz

For the first eighteen years of Simon Weisz’s life his parents were at pains to keep their past concealed from him. All he knew for sure was that they had grown up in Hungary and that they had arrived in Britain after the Second World War. It was only as he reached manhood that they started to confide their carefully guarded secrets to him: that they were Jewish, and that his mother had experienced the appalling horrors of Nazi persecution.In conversations over the following decades, Simon’s mother gradually, often reluctantly, revealed more of her past: from the growing oppression her family had had to endure in the late 1930s, to her deportation first to Auschwitz and then to Ravensbrück, to the brutal death march she withstood from the ruins of Berlin in 1945. As he pieced her testimony together, Simon came to realise how the memories she had fought so hard to suppress continued to haunt her in the form of terrifying flashbacks and moments of extreme frustration and anger. And he started to understand how her concealed trauma had, in turn, shaped his own development and the course of his life.Himmler’s Curtains is both a visceral account of a Holocaust survivor’s experiences, and an impressive study of the impact of suffering on two generations of a family. It also movingly reveals the high psychological price exacted by silence.

Himmler’s Curtains

A Memoir of Loss and Concealment

Sebastian Faulks

'A wise and heartfelt piece of writing' THE TIMES 
 
'Witty' INDEPENDENT 
 
'Wry and reflective . . . a soulful look at a life in words' i PAPER 
 
‘A wonderful portrait of an age, and of a writer’ RORY STEWART, author of Politics on the Edge 
 
‘Utterly fascinating’ DAVID KYNASTON, author of A Northern Wind 
 
'Shot through with the kind of depth and detail that can only come from a masterful writer finally turning his pen to his own life. Fresh, wise and finely-wrought' ALICE WINN, author of In Memoriam 
 
‘As charming and funny in schoolboy episodes as he is thought-provoking in the darker environs of mental health, Sebastian Faulks is always resonant, civilised and sane’ MARK KNOPFLER 
 
***In Fires Which Burned Brightly, Faulks, a reluctant memoirist, offers readers a series of detailed snapshots from a life in progress. They include a post-war rural childhood – ‘cold mutton and wet washing on a rack over the range’ – the booze-sodden heyday of Fleet Street and a career as one of the country’s most acclaimed novelists. 
 
There are not one, but two daring escapes from boarding school; the delirium of a jetlagged American book tour; the writing of Birdsong in his brother’s house in 1992; and memorable trips across the channel to France. Politics, psychiatry and frustrated ventures into the world of entertainment are analysed with patience and rueful humour. 
 
The book is driven by a desire ‘to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’ It ends with a tribute to Faulks’s parents and a sense of how his own generation was shaped by the disruptive power of war and its aftermath.Sharply perceptive and alive with a generous wit, Fires Which Burned Brightly is a work of subtle yet profound intelligence and warmth. 
PRAISE FOR SEBASTIAN FAULKS 
 
'Faulks writes with great emotional authority' SUNDAY TIMES 
 
'A prodigiously talented writer' NEW YORK TIMES 
 
'Faulks is beyond doubt a master' FINANCIAL TIMES 
 
'The most impressive novelist of his generation' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

Fires Which Burned Brightly

A Life in Progress

Charles Handy

Over a span of seven decades, Charles Handy was, variously, a businessman, a writer, a philanthropist and a philosopher. Not even a stroke as he approached the age of 90 dimmed his intellectual curiosity or his immense zest for life. 
 
In this, his final book, written from the vantage point of a contemplative old age and drawing on his articles for The Idler he shares his thoughts on the big questions with which we all grapple: 
 
What things really matter? 
What daily worries should we learn to treat as unimportant? 
How do we become more accepting of ourselves and of those around us? 
How do we discover purpose in our everyday existence? How do we cope with grief and loss? 
 
 
Drawing in part on his own experience, in part on the wisdom of others, he sets out the principles of enjoying a fulfilled and contented life, and gently points the way to the practicalities of achieving it.

The View from Ninety

Reflections on How to Live a Long, Contented Life

Harper Lee

***A gorgeous deluxe special edition of Harper Lee's The Land of Sweet Forever nestled within a slipcase. This edition features high production values, a bespoke book cover design and an exclusive piece of extra content from Harper Lee's nephew, Dr. Edwin Lee Conner, providing a glimpse into life with his aunt and the ways in which her novels intersect with this new book of never-been-seen short stories and collected works.*** 
 The New York Times bestseller from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a posthumous collection of newly discovered writing, offering a fresh perspective on the remarkable literary mind behind To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman. 
 
Featuring an introduction by Casey Cep, Harper Lee's appointed biographer.‘Written with all of Lee's character and descriptive brilliance.' The Times'A new window into one of America's literary icons.' i PaperHarper Lee remains a landmark figure in the American canon – thanks to Scout, Jem, Atticus, and the other indelible characters in her Pulitzer-winning debut, To Kill a Mockingbird; as well as for the darker, late-’50s version of small-town Alabama that emerged in Go Set a Watchman, her only other novel, published in 2015 after its rediscovery.The Land of Sweet Forever combines Lee’s never-before-seen short stories and published nonfiction in a volume offering an unprecedented look at the development of her inimitable voice. Covering territory from the Alabama schoolyards of Lee’s youth to the luncheonettes and movie houses of midcentury Manhattan, The Land of Sweet Forever invites still-vital conversations about politics, equality, travel, love, fiction, art, the American South, and what it means to lead an engaged and creative life.This collection comes with an introduction by Casey Cep, Harper Lee’s appointed biographer, which provides illuminating background for our reading of these stories and connects them both to Lee’s life and to her two novels.Combining Lee's early short fiction and later nonfiction, The Land of Sweet Forever offers an unprecedented look at the development of her inimitable voice.Praise for The Land of Sweet Forever and Harper Lee:'Thrilling ... helps explain how the little girl from South Alabama Avenue turned herself into a bestselling author.' Guardian'Cast[s] a new light on the literary giant.' Sunday Times'Unmistakably Lee' The Telegraph

The Land of Sweet Forever

Andrea Long Chu

This highly anticipated book by the Pulitzer Prize winning critic Andrea Long Chu asks one of the most urgent questions of our time: what is authority when everyone has an opinion on everything? 
 
'A rigorous thinker armed with a killer turn of phrase' 
Observer 
 
'Her writing is razor-sharp, personal, and vociferous in its proclamations, but it’s also fun – it’s got bite' 
New Statesman 
 
'Fun reading' 
Guardian 
 
'A galaxy-brain-level thinker' Torrey Peters 
 
'One of the most charismatic and original thinkers at work today' Brandon Taylor 
 
'Thrilling... Authority reminds us we haven't yet felt all there is to feel' Kaveh Akbar 
'A pure joy to read' Claire Dederer 
Since her canonical 2017 essay ‘On Liking Women’, the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Andrea Long Chu has established herself as one of the most provocative, funny, brilliant and stylish critics at work today. With devastating wit and polemical clarity, she defies the imperative to leave politics out of art, instead modeling how the left might brave the culture wars without throwing in with the cynics and doomsayers.Authority brings together Chu’s critical work across a wide range of media—novels, television, theater, video games—as well as an acclaimed tetralogy of literary essays first published in n+1. As a critic, Chu places The Phantom of the Opera within a centuries-old conflict between music and drama; questions the enduring habit of reading Octavia Butler’s science fiction as a parable of slavery; teases out the ideology behind Hillary Clinton’s (fictional) sex life; and charges fellow critics like Maggie Nelson and Zadie Smith with a complacent humanism. 
 
The unifying theme of the book is authority and taste in literature, art, culture and politics: how do we decide what's good, and how do we convince others that our judgement is correct?

Authority

Essays on Being Right

Quintin Lake

On Friday 17 April 2015, photographer Quintin Lake set off from the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral on a five-year journey that would take him around the entire coastline of mainland Britain. Armed with twenty kilos of hiking and photography gear, he walked 11,000 kilometres in 454 days with one goal in mind: to produce a body of photographic work that gets under the surface of the island nation that we call home. 
 
Carefully curated with over 1,300 photos and interspersed with stories of Quintin’s adventures, this book is an immersive visual experience that showcases Britain as you’ve never seen it before. Discover charming seaside towns such as Staithes in Yorkshire, venture to the desert landscape of Dungeness in Kent and marvel at the beautiful desolation of Scotland’s Knoydart Peninsula. Explore the contrast between industry and nature along the Welsh coast path, where plumes of steam rising from the Port Talbot steelworks are as jaw-dropping as the stunning Worm’s Head on the Gower Peninsula. And follow Quintin as he narrates the monumental challenges of wild camping – from battling with midges and stress fractures, to clambering up cliffs to escape a rising tide. Filled with striking photos that capture the glorious and often surprising world between land and sea, The Perimeter is a celebration of Britain – a small island with a vast coastline.

The Perimeter

A Photographic Journey around the Coast of Britain

Amber Husain

If you are what you eat, what does that make you? Virtuous, cool, immortal? Or deviant, pitiful, ill? Is it useful to make these judgements? Do they help us improve our lives? 
 
In a world where it feels as though the value of your life can be gauged by the goodness in your dinner, it is possible, even easy, to lose the will to live. This became particularly obvious to writer Amber Husain when suddenly, despite almost thirty years of practice, it seemed she had forgotten how to eat. 
 
Medical wisdom tries fix the problem non-eater by teaching them the rules of Good Diet. But what if the problem is precisely the narrowing of life to questions of personal goodness? Suspecting there might be more to her stand-off with food than matters of identity and diet, Husain embarked on an enquiry into the special role of eating in our relationship with the world. 
 
Combining a personal account of modern eating-disorder treatments, from the disturbing to the sublime, with a sprawling collective history of eating in hard times, Tell Me How You Eat unearths the astonishing effect of how we feed ourselves and others, not just on who we are, but on how we perceive our own political power. In doing so, it marks a bold and inspiring confrontation with our very understanding of food.

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