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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'This is a rich, lively, profound book' ROWAN WILLIAMS 
 
A personal reckoning with grief, doubt, faith and poetry set to one of the most celebrated musical works of the twentieth century, from the award-winning poet and librettist. 
 
The story goes like this: on a freezing winter night in 1941, a new piece of chamber music was performed to a crowd of prisoners of war on a three-stringed cello, clarinet, violin and pub piano with sticky keys. It was the premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du Temps. 
 
Listeners since then have been captivated by the ecstatic music and mythology of Messiaen’s masterpiece. Michael Symmons Roberts’ own lifelong fascination with the Quartet– having chanced upon it in a record shop in his late teens and fallen in love with its title - leads him on a quest to understand its enigmatic power. His fascination – at times frustration – with Messiaen’s vision opens into an exploration of grief, of personal faith and doubt, of the end of time and what may lie beyond it. Interwoven with poetry and wit, this book is an expansive evocation of music, loss, hope and time, seen through the lens of the Quartet's technicolour, apocalyptic vision. 
 
Quartet for the End of Time is a moving, intimate and unforgettable book, attentive to ways of listening – in our noisy world – to birdsong, music, poems and radio silence, and to the call and response that we may find. 
 
'A properly engrossing exploration of music, place, religion and what it is to be human' SARAH TARLOW, author of The Archaeology of Loss

Quartet for the End of Time

On Music, Grief and Birdsong

Paul Farley

From Dylan Thomas’s eighteen straight whiskies to Sylvia Plath’s desperate suicide in the gas oven of her Primrose Hill kitchen; from Chatterton’s Pre-Raphaelite demise to Keats’ death warrant in a smudge of arterial blood, the deaths of poets have often cast a backward shadow on their work. 
 
The post-Romantic lore of the dissolute drunken poet has fatally skewed the image of poets in our culture. Novelists can be stable, savvy, politically adept and in control, but poets should be melancholic, doomed and self-destructive. Is this just an illusion , or is there some essential truth behind it? What is the price of poetry? 
 
In this book, two contemporary poets embark on a series of journeys to the death places of poets of the past, in part as pilgrims, but also as investigators, interrogating the myth.

Deaths of the Poets

Michael Hutchinson

The hilarious true story of an amateur boating adventure. 
 
Yacht racing. A world of privilege and money. Beautiful women, bronzed men, and Simon le Bon explaining that he used to be in a band. 
 
It's not like that for everyone. Somewhere much, much further down the ladder it all looks very different. As a teenager, Michael Hutchinson raced tiny plywood dinghies on Belfast Lough, amid shoals of sewage-eating jellyfish. For him, sailing became the kind of obsession that often as not ends with a psychiatric intervention. Turning pro was his only dream. 
 
Then, at the age of eighteen, driven to despair by his own unremitting mediocrity, he gave up. But he never stopped dreaming about it - what was he missing out on? How good or bad had he really been? Had it really been a wasted youth? At last, fifteen years later, he went back. 
 
Missing the Boat is the story of his comeback season, on the South Coast of England, in Ireland, and in the glamorous resorts of the Mediterranean. It's about the yachts, the people, the regattas, and just what it was like to dive back into a world that had become entirely alien. 
 
Michael Hutchinson won the Best First Book at the British Sports Book Awards.

Missing the Boat

Chasing a Childhood Sailing Dream

Danielle Allen

'Unbearably moving' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 
 
The story of a young man's coming of age, a tender tribute to a life lost, and a devastating analysis of a broken system. 
 
Aged 15 and living in LA, Michael Allen was arrested for a botched carjacking. He was tried as an adult and sentenced to thirteen years behind bars. After growing up in prison Michael was then released aged 26, only to be murdered three years later. 
 
 
In this deeply personal yet clear-eyed memoir, Danielle Allen reconstructs her cousin's life to try and understand how this tragedy came to pass. We get to know Michael himself through the eyes of a devoted relative, moving from his first steps to his first love through to the day of his arrest, his coming of age in prison, and his attempts to make up for lost time after his release. We learn what it's like to grow up in a city carved up by invisible gang borders; and we learn how a generation has been lost. 
 
 
With honesty and insight, Cuz circles around its subject, exposing it from all angles to reveal the shocking reality of a broken system. The result is a devastatingly powerful yet reasoned tribute to a life lost too soon. 
 
'The book pleads with us to find the moral imagination to break the American pattern of racial abuse. Allen's ambitious, breathtaking book challenges the moral composition of the world it inhabits by telling all who listen: I loved my cousin and he loved me, and I know he'd be alive if you loved him, too' Kiese Laymon

Michael Booth

'The next Bill Bryson.’ New York Times 
 
Having been dragged against his will to live in Denmark, Michael Booth discovered one of the great secrets of travel literature - Andersen's A Poet's Bazaar - a fascinating travelogue through a Europe on the cusp of revolution, by an author who invented children's literature. He discovered, too, his chance to escape Denmark. 
 
In 1840 Andersen was also desperate to flee, writing as he sailed: 'It is just as well I am leaving, my soul is unwell!' In Germany he was enraptured both by steam travel and the fiery Franz Liszt. In sultry Naples this latent bisexual wrestled with his erotic demons before travelling to Athens (little more than a village), seeing the dervishes dance in Istanbul, and sailing home up the Danube. Booth follows him every step of the way, reflecting on Andersen's life, work and pathological self-obsession, encountering his own cast of characters, from an accommodating Hamburg prostitute to a bemused Danish Ambassador to the first ever female dervish, who whisks him off to meet her guru.

Just As Well I'm Leaving

To the Orient With Hans Christian Andersen

**Shortlisted for the 2017 André Simon Food and Drink Book Awards** 
**Shortlisted for the 2018 Fortnum &amp; Mason Food Book Award** 
 
'The next Bill Bryson.’ New York Times 
 
Food and travel writer Michael Booth and his family embark on an epic journey the length of Japan to explore its dazzling food culture. They find a country much altered since their previous visit ten years earlier (which resulted in the award-winning international bestseller Sushi and Beyond). 
 
Over the last decade the country’s restaurants have won a record number of Michelin stars and its cuisine was awarded United Nations heritage status. The world’s top chefs now flock to learn more about the extraordinary dedication of Japan’s food artisans, while the country’s fast foods – ramen, sushi and yakitori – have conquered the world. As well as the plaudits, Japan is also facing enormous challenges. Ironically, as Booth discovers, the future of Japan’s culinary heritage is under threat. 
 
Often venturing far off the beaten track, the author and his family discover intriguing future food trends and meet a fascinating cast of food heroes, from a couple lavishing love on rotten fish, to a chef who literally sacrificed a limb in pursuit of the ultimate bowl of ramen, and a farmer who has dedicated his life to growing the finest rice in the world… in the shadow of Fukushima.

The Meaning of Rice

A Culinary Tour of Japan

And Other Tales from the Belly of Japan

Michael Wolff

From the author of the Sunday Times Number One Bestseller Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House 
 
Rupert Murdoch is one of the greatest deal-makers alive. His companies possess extraordinary political and cultural power. Whether it is the Sun and the rise of Thatcher, BSkyB and the transformation of football, or Fox News and the war on terror, we have been living in the age of Murdoch since the late seventies. But who is he? What drives him? 
 
With unprecedented access to Murdoch and his inner circle, Michael Wolff chronicles the astonishing growth of the mogul’s giant media kingdom. Drawing upon hundreds of hours of interviews he offers us a portrait of a Machiavellian titan; overbearing, but loving, father; love-struck husband; and a cynical and brilliant newsman. The resulting book is unrivalled in its intimacy and candour and tells a tale of business that is both the story of a man’s life, and the story of our times.

The Man Who Owns the News

Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch

Michael Holroyd

Henry Irving - a merchant's clerk who became the saviour of British theatre - and Ellen Terry, who made her first theatre appearance as soon as she could walk, were the king and queen of the Victorian stage. Creatively interdependent, they founded a power-house of arts at the Lyceum Theatre, with Bram Stoker as business manager, where they recast Shakespeare's plays on an epic scale and took the company on lucrative and exhilarating international tours. 
 
In his masterly new biography, award-winning writer Michael Holroyd explores their public and private lives, showing how their artistic legacy and their brilliant but troubled children came to influence the modern world.

A Strange Eventful History

The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their Remarkable Families

Deborah Baker

Winner of the Kekoo Naoroji Award for Mountain Literature 2019 
 
An engrossing story of passion and exploration that traces the end of empire and the stirring of a new world order. 
 
John Auden was a pioneering geologist of the Himalayas. Michael Spender was the first to draw a detailed map of the North Face of Mount Everest. While their younger brothers – W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender – achieved literary fame, they vied for a place on an expedition that would finally conquer Everest. To this rivalry was added another: their shared love for a painter named Nancy Sharp. Her choice would determine each man’s wartime loyalties. 
 
From Calcutta to pre-war London to Everest itself, The Last Englishmen tracks a generation obsessed with a romantic ideal. With a cast including writers, artists, political rogues and spies, this is narrative history at its most engaging and illuminating. 
 
'Wholly original... It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that there is something Tolstoyan to Baker's vast project... Remarkable' Neel Mukherjee 
 
 ‘An exuberant, scene-changing, shapeshifting group biography’ Spectator

The Last Englishmen

Love, War and the End of Empire

Selina Hastings

'Hastings is one of our greatest living biographers' Simon Heffer, Daily Telegraph 
 
Sybille Bedford's life contained all the grand feeling and seismic events of the twentieth century: war and peace, love and trauma, friendship and death. Her father died when she was just fourteen and her mother, a great socialite and litterateur, fell victim to a debilitating morphine addiction. A bon viveur, she roamed from country to country in search of fresh experience, with ear and eye attuned to her surroundings, typewriter at the ready. 
 
Full of intense friendships (Aldous Huxley, Martha Gellhorn and Elizabeth Jane Howard among them), a fierce commitment to the craft of writing, as well as an insatiable appetite for love and sex, Sybille Bedford blazed her own path in her life and her art. 
 
'Selina Hastings' wonderful, gossipy biography is a gem, revealing not just the shy writer, but also the colourful, turbulent 20th-century literary world in which she lived' Sunday Times, Books of the Year 
 
'A wonderful biography' Sara Wheeler, Spectator 
 
'An extraordinary story' The Times 
 
'A richly entertaining biography' Daily Mail, Books of the Year

Sybille Bedford

An Appetite for Life

Ruth Scurr

'Glorious... Scurr is one of the most gifted non-fiction writers alive' Simon Schama, Financial Times 
 
A revelatory portrait of Napoleon written for our own time, exploring his love of nature and the gardens that gave his revolutionary life its light and shade. 
 
Napoleon's gardens range from his childhood olive groves in Corsica, to Josephine's menageries in Paris, to the walled garden of Hougoumont at the battle of Waterloo, and ultimately to St Helena, where he could sit and scan the sea in his final months. 
 
In this innovative biography, Ruth Scurr follows the dramatic trajectory of Napoleon's life through the land he cultivated and that offered him retreat from the manifold frustrations of war and politics. Seen through the eyes of those who knew him in the shade of his gardens, Napoleon emerges a giant figure made human - both as the Emperor hunting for glory and the man in an old straw hat, leaning on his spade. 
 
'Immensely satisfying and captivating... Charming and intelligent' Andrew Roberts, TLS 
 
'Grippingly original' The Times 
 
'A delight to read' Daily Telegraph 
 
* A Book of the Year in The Times, Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, Sunday Telegraph and History Today * 
 
Winner of a Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award 2022

Napoleon

A Life in Gardens and Shadows

Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould's writing remains the modern standard by which popular science writing is judged. Throughout his work Gould has developed a distinctive and personal form of essay to treat great scientific issues in the context of biography. With I Have Landed, Gould once again applied biographical perspectives to the illumination of key scientific concepts and their history. Ranging from the discovery of the new scourge of syphilis by Fracastero in the sixteenth century and Isabelle Duncan's nineteenth-century attempt at reconciling scripture and palaeontology to Freud's weird speculations about human phylogeny and recent creationist attacks on the study of evolution. As always, the essays brilliantly illuminate and elucidate the puzzles and paradoxes great and small that have fuelled the enterprise of science and opened our eyes to a world of unexpected wonders.

I Have Landed

Splashes and Reflections in Natural History

A Book of Secrets is a masterfully atmospheric treasure-trove of hidden lives, uncelebrated achievements and family mysteries. 
 
Acclaimed biographer Michael Holroyd peers into dusty corners to bring a company of unknown women into the light; Alice Keppel was the mistress of both the second Lord Grimthorpe and the Prince of Wales; Eve Fairfax was Lord Grimthorpe's abandoned fiancée and sometime muse of Auguste Rodin; and the novelist Violet Trefusis was the lover of Vita Sackville-West. 
 
Taking the reader on a journey of discovery from Ravello to Paris, from Kirkstall Grange in Yorkshire to Vita Sackville-West's home at Knole, A Book of Secrets lucidly gives voice to fragile human connections.

A Book of Secrets

Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers

Martin Amis

Fuelled by innumerable cigarettes, Martin Amis provides dazzling portraits of contemporaries and mentors alike: Larkin and Rushdie; Greene and Pritchett; Ballard and Burgess and Nicholson Baker; John Updike - warts and all. Vigorously zipping across to Washington, he exposes the double-think of nuke-speak; in New Orleans the Republican Convention gets a going over. And then there's sport: he visits the world of darts and its disastrous attempt to clean itself up; dirty tricks in the world of chess; and some brisk but vicious poker with Al Alvarez and David Mamet. 
 
Sex without Madonna, expulsion from school, a Stones gig that should have been gagged, on set with Robocop or on court with Gabriela Sabatini, this is Martin Amis at his electric best.

Visiting Mrs Nabokov And Other Excursions

Nicholas Hytner

The Sunday Times Bestseller 
 
This is the inside story of twelve years at the helm of Britain’s greatest theatre. 
 
It is a story of lunatic failures and spectacular successes such as The History Boys, War Horse and One Man, Two Guvnors; of opening the doors of the National Theatre to a broader audience than ever before, and changing the public’s perception of what theatre is for. It is about probing Shakespeare from every angle and reinventing the classics. About fostering new talent and directing some of the most celebrated actors of our times. Its cast includes the likes of Alan Bennett, Maggie Smith, Mike Leigh, Daniel Day-Lewis, Michael Gambon and Helen Mirren. 
 
Intimate, candid and insightful, Balancing Acts is a passionate exploration of the art and alchemy of making theatre.

Balancing Acts

Behind the Scenes at the National Theatre

Dennis Potter

Dennis Potter was born and brought up in the Forest of Dean- a 'strange and beautiful place', as he described it in the last interview before his death, 'rather ugly villages in beautiful landscape, a heart- shaped place between two rivers, somehow slightly cut off from the rest of England... with a people as warm as anywhere else, but they seemed warmer to me.' It was a childhood which informed all his television work, from his first documentary to such classic dramas as The Singing Detective. 
 
The Changing Forest, first published in 1962, is Potter's deeply personal study of that small area- its people, traditions, ceremonies and institutions- at a time of profound cultural and social change in the late 1950s and early '60s. With extraordinary precision and feeling he describes the fabric of a world whose old ways are yielding to the new: habits altering; expectations growing; work, leisure, language itself changing under the impact of the new television, of commercial jingles and the early Elvis. And, with powerful sympathy and wit, he asks whether the gains of modernity have, for the individuals and society he so marvellously evokes, been worth the loss. 
 
Part autobiography of one of this century's greatest writers, part elegy for a vanishing way of life, part testament to the abiding humanity that underlies all Potter's work, this exquisite, passionate and brillinat book is a classic of its kind.

Changing Forest

Emma Tennant

Based on fact, but told with the imagination of a novelist, STRANGERS is the story of the author's family, the Tennants. Margot Asquith and Pamela Tennant (nee Wyndham), warring sisters-in-law; Pamela's children, her 'jewels' - Clare the wilful beauty, Stephen Tennant the outrageous aesthete, David the nightclub king, and the steady, sensible Christopher who becomes head of the family when the eldest brother Bim dies on the Somme - these are some of the characters brought to sudden and not always respectable life in this funny, touching and sometimes shocking novel. Their antics, dreams and grief are witnessed by the maid Louisa, and played out chiefly at Glen, the castle in the border of Scotland, where the young narrator pulls from long-sealed cupboards the stories of her family's past. But as the secrets emerge the myth woven around the glamorous figures of the past is both enhanced and dispelled. Haunting and compelling, STRANGERS presents a family and its young detective in a startling light.

Strangers

Rich Cohen

Once upon a time, back in the 20s and 30s, in Brooklyn, there lived a breed of men who exist now only in legend and in the memories of a few old men. Their names were Louis Lepke, Abe Reles, Bugsy Segel, Dutch Shultz, Meyer Lansky, and they were Jewish gangsters: Jews with Guns; tough, fearles Jews who roamed the streets in a time when a Jewish boy could fashion a future that was murderous and daring and wide open. Rich Cohen's father grew up in that world; his family owned the diner where the gangsters known as Murder Incorporated hung out. In TOUGH JEWS he tells their stories and brilliantly evokes their world - a world of street corners and bars and nightclubs; a world where murder was better than cowerdice; where killings were planned and executed with precision and finesse; a world of feuds, wars, schemes, where living into middle age was akind of victory; a world in which for a brief moment, Jews were among the most important criminals in America.

Tough Jews

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

Christopher Isherwood

Don Bachardy

Christopher Isherwood was a celebrated English writer when he met the Californian teenager Don Bachardy on a Santa Monica beach in 1952. They spent their first night together on Valentine’s Day 1953. Defying the conventions, the two men began living as an openly gay couple in an otherwise closeted Hollywood. The Animals provides a loving testimony of an extraordinary relationship that lasted until Chris’s death in 1986 – and survived affairs (on both sides) and a thirty-year-age-gap. 
 
In romantic letters to one another, the couple created the private world of the Animals. Chris was Dobbin, a stubborn old workhorse; Don was the playful young white cat, Kitty. But Don needed to carve out his own identity – some of their longest sequences of letters were exchanged during his trips to London and New York, to pursue his career as an artist and to widen his emotional and sexual horizons. 
 
Amidst the intimate domestic dramas, we learn of Isherwood’s continuing literary success –the royalty cheques from Cabaret, the acclaim for his pioneering novel A Single Man – and the bohemian whirl of Californian film suppers and beach life. Don, whose portraits of London theatreland were making his name, attends the world premiere of The Innocents with Truman Capote and afterwards dines with Deborah Kerr and the rest of the cast, spends weekends with Tennessee Williams, Cecil Beton, or the Earl and Countess of Harewood, and tours Egypt and Greece with a new love interest. But whatever happens in the outside world, Dobbin and Kitty always return to their ‘Basket’ and to each other. Candid, gossipy, exceptionally affectionate, The Animals is a unique interplay between two creative spirits, confident in their mutual devotion.

The Animals

Love Letters between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy

Hester Grant

The enthralling story of an eighteenth-century family and their extraordinary achievements. 
 
Four brothers, three sisters. Brought up in a Northumberland rectory and in the close of Durham Cathedral, the Sharps would achieve exalted positions at the heart of British society. In 1781, the celebrated painter Johan Zoffany put the final brush strokes on the luminous portrait that immortalised the siblings’ rise, and their remarkable unity and passion for life. 
 
Ambitious, free-thinking and courageous, the Sharps were pioneers in the major movements that defined the eighteenth century – from political reform and philanthropy to medicine and industry. John, an eminent priest, established a model welfare state at Bamburgh Castle and commissioned the world’s first lifeboat; William became surgeon to George III; while James was a visionary inventor, canal promoter and engineer. Most famously of all, Granville, the youngest son, battled tirelessly as Britain’s first great campaigner for the abolition of the slave trade. Despite the social strictures of their day, Elizabeth, Judith and Frances claimed significant independence, and played key roles in hosting the Sharps’ famous musical parties on barges on the Thames. 
 
In this vivid, moving biography, Hester Grant charts the siblings’ shared journey to prominence, and explores the values and enduring bonds that inspired their success. The Good Sharps brings to life not just these men and women who realised that the future could be different, but also the new world they created.

The Good Sharps

The Eighteenth-Century Family that Changed Britain

The Brothers and Sisters Who Remade Their World

Robert K Massie

A gripping chronicle of the personal and political rivalries from the birth of Queen Victoria to the unification of Germany during the decades leading up to WW1 from Pulitzer Prize winner Robert K. Massie 
 
2018 marks the centenary of the end of the First World War. How did it all begin? 
 
With the biographer's rare genius for expressing the essence of extraordinary lives, Massie brings to life a crowd of glittering figures: the young, ambitious Winston Churchill; the ruthless, sycophantic Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow; Britain's greatest twentieth-century Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey; and Jacky Fisher, the eccentric admiral who revolutionised the British Navy and brought forth the battleship, H.M.S. Dreadnought. Their story, and the story of the era, filled with misunderstanding and tensions, missed opportunities, and events leading to unintended conclusions, unfolds like a Greek tragedy in this powerful narrative. Intimately human and dramatic, Dreadnought is history at its most riveting. 
 
‘History at its best, a fantastic mix of anecdote, observation and intelligent thinking’ Dan Snow, Daily Express

Dreadnought

Britain,Germany and the Coming of the Great War

Sabrina Imbler

Join science journalist Sabrina Imbler on an astonishing journey which will completely redefine the way you think about nature and the ocean 
 
'An astonishing debut' GUARDIAN 
'Reveals just as much about our fascinating, mysterious world as it does about our fascinating, mysterious selves' NEW YORK TIMES 
 
In My Life in Sea Creatures we encounter: the mother octopus, starving herself while watching over her eggs; the yeti crab, thriving in crushing pressure and oppressive darkness; the cuttlefish, able to change its appearance in a fraction of a second; and many other creatures lurking in the depths of the ocean. 
 
Imbler's work weaves the wonders of marine biology with their own identity as a queer, non-binary mixed-race writer. They implicitly connect endangered sea life to marginalised human communities and shatter our preconceptions about the sea and what it means to survive. 
 
'A miraculous, transcendental book' ED YONG 
'Profound, surprising and thrillingly strange. I love it' SY MONTGOMERY 
'Astounding' PHILIP HOARE 
'A revelation' ISABELLA TREE 
 
***LA TIMES BOOK PRIZE WINNER***

My Life in Sea Creatures

A young queer science writer’s reflections on identity and the ocean

Alan Root

Alan Root is one of the great wildlife pioneers. His unmatched experience of East African wildlife and his appetite for risk have made him a world-class naturalist and film-maker. 
 
Ivory, Apes &amp; Peacocks tells the story of his life’s work, from his arrival in Kenya as a young boy to the making of his game-changing films. From a hot-air balloon Alan was the first to track the wildebeest migration; then he flew it over Kilimanjaro. He filmed inside a termite mound and dived with hippos and crocodiles. 
 
In this extraordinary memoir we look at Africa’s wonders through the eyes of a visionary, live through hair-raising adventure and personal sorrow, and also bear witness to a natural world now largely lost from view.

Ivory, Apes & Peacocks

Animals, adventure and discovery in the wild places of Africa

Jill Ker Conway

Conway opens with her assessment of her life, passions, possibilities and the making of her decision to leave Canada and return to the United States to become Smith's first woman president. Settling into her new environment, she is at once struck by the beauty of the Connecticut Valley and the Olmstead-designed Smith campus - but also by the College's financial problems and a quarrelsome and complaining faculty engaged in disputes and trivial lawsuits. The jolt of energy she gets from being in the presence of several thousand young women enables her to take on the various Smith constituencies: the self-appointed custodians of the great western male tradition of humanistic learning, the puzzled liberals, the younger male feminists, the 'lady scholars doing intellectual petitpoint', and the young committed feminists of all stripes. We see her harnessing the negative energies in more positive directions, redefining and redesigning parts of the institution, strategising, positioning herself and building a political base, introducing feminist scholarship into the curriculum, creating a programme for older students and a funded research centre, adding fields of study and athletic programmes, developing strong career counselling, changing investment strategy, increasing the endowment - and, in general, mobilising the institution to share the urgency she felt for shaping the kind of women's institution that would attract the students of the '90s and beyond. Through it all we see her continuing to cope with her husband John's ill health and learning to protect and sustain her inner self in the quiet solitude of gardening at their country home - a North American variant of the solitude of her native Australian plains. As the end of the Smith decade approaches she reviews what she has learned and decides that she has had her education and that it is time to 'graduate'.

A Woman's Education

Chuck Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk's world has been, well, different from yours and mine. 
 
The pieces that comprise Non-Fiction prove just how different, in ways both highly entertaining and deeply unsettling. Encounters with alternative culture heroes Marilyn Manson and Juliette Lewis; the peculiar wages of fame attendant on the big budget film production of the movie Fight Club; life as an assembly-line drive train installer by day, hospice volunteer driver by night; the really peculiar lives of submariners; the really violent world of college wrestlers; the underground world of anabolic steroid gobblers; the harrowing circumstances of his father's murder and the trial of his killer - each essay or vignette offers a unique facet of existence as lived in and/or observed by one of America's most flagrantly daring and original literary talents.

Non-Fiction

Sara Wheeler

Conservationist, scholar, soldier, white hunter and fabled lover - Denys Finch Hatton was an aristocrat of leonine nonchalance. After a dazzling career at Eton and Oxford, he sailed in 1910 for British East Africa - still then the land of the pioneer. Sara Wheeler reveals the truth behind his love affairs with the glamorous aviatrix Beryl Markham, and - famously - with Karen Blixen, a romance immortalised in her memoir Out of Africa. 
 
'No one who ever met him', his Times obituary concluded, 'whether man or woman, old or young, white or black, failed to come under his spell'.

Too Close To The Sun

The Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton

Sarah Bakewell

This gripping nineteenth-century adventure stars Jorgen Jorgenson, who ran away to sea at fourteen and began a brilliant career by sailing to establish the first colony in Tasmania. Twists of fortune then found him captaining a warship for Napoleon before joining a British trading voyage to Iceland, where he staged an outrageous coup and ruled the country for two months. 
 
Much lay ahead, from imprisonment in the hulks to patronage by Joseph Banks and travels in Europe as a British spy. But Jorgenson was dogged by his own excesses, and ended up transported as a convict to the very colony he helped to found. Here he reinvented himself again as an explorer, and, despite his sympathy for the people, was caught up in the terrible Aboriginal clearances. Using unpublished sources and letters, Sarah Bakewell tells his astonishing tale with dazzling verve.

The English Dane

From King of Iceland to Tasmanian Convict

Robert M Sapolsky

Discover this remarkable account of twenty-one years in remote Kenya with a troop of Savannah baboons from the New York Times bestselling author of Behave. 
 
'One of the best scientist-writers of our time' Oliver Sacks 
 
Brooklyn-born Robert Sapolsky grew up wishing he could live in the primate diorama in the Museum of Natural History. At school he wrote fan letters to primatologists and even taught himself Swahili, all with the hope of one day joining his primate brethren in Africa. But when, at the age of twenty-one, Sapolky's dream finally comes true he discovers that the African bush bears little resemblance to the tranquillity of a museum. 
 
This is the story of the next twenty-one years as Sapolsky slowly infiltrates and befriends a troop of Savannah baboons. Alone in the middle of the Serengeti with no electricity, running water or telephone, and surviving countless scams, culinary atrocities and a surreal kidnapping, Sapolsky becomes ever more enamoured with his adopted baboon troop - unique and compelling characters in their own right - and he returns to them summer after summer, until tragedy finally prevails. 
 
 'A Primate's Memoir is the closest the baboon is likely to come - and it's plenty close enough - to having its own Iliad' New York Times Review of Books 
 
Exhilarating, hilarious and poignant, A Primate's Memoir is a uniquely honest window into the coming-of-age of one of our greatest scientific minds.

A Primate's Memoir

Love, Death and Baboons

Hugh Warwick

‘Glorious… Political, passionate, perceptive’ Robert Macfarlane 
 
An eye-opening exploration of the lines that cut through our countryside, from hedges to railways, and a passionate manifesto for reconnecting wildlife. 
 
Our landscape has been transformed by a vast network of lines, from hedges and walls to railways and power cables. In Linescapes, Hugh Warwick unravels the far-reaching ecological consequences of these changes. As our lives and our land were fenced in and threaded together, wildlife habitats were cut into ever smaller – and increasingly unviable – fragments. 
 
 Yet as Warwick travels across this linescape, he shows that we can help our flora and fauna to flourish once again. With his fresh and bracing perspective on Britain’s countryside, he proposes a challenge and gives ground for hope, for our lines can and do contain a real potential for wildness and for wildlife.

Showing results for: ‘Michael Symmons Roberts’

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