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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Raymond Williams

A collection of the writings of Raymond Williams, who many considered to be the most significant post-war intellectual in Britain. He wrote on diverse subjects, and his books included "Culture and Society", "The Long Revolution", "The Country and the City", "Towards 2000" and "The Black Mountain".

What I Came To Say

Jilly Cooper

After going to live in the country Jilly Cooper wrote regularly for the Mail on Sunday for several years and this is a selection of her best pieces written at that time. The topics she covers in her inimitable style range from the hunt balls and Henley to love and sex in the ages of AIDS. 
 
She interviews Margaret Thatcher, Neil Kinnock, Lord Hailsham, the cast of Eastenders and the proprietress of a famous brothel in the Nevada desert and writes about her fellow human beings and their foibles provocatively, affectionately and sometimes outrageously. Her portraits of family life in the Cooper household remain the most ruthless and hilarious of all.

Turn Right At The Spotted Dog

Stephen Fry

A hilarious collection of the many articles written by Stephen Fry for magazines, newspapers and radio. It includes selected wireless essays of Donald Trefusis, the ageing professor of philology brought to life in Fry's novel The Liar, and the best of Fry's weekly column for the Daily Telegraph.

Paperweight: Volume 1

Paperweight: Volume 2

Donna Leon

In a city as ancient as Venice, myths and legends passed down from generation to generation record more than just love or murder. They are the storehouse of a city's mores, emblems of its identity. In Venetian Curiosities, acclaimed novelist Donna Leon recounts some of Venice's most intriguing tales: an elephant brought in for Carnival wreaks havoc upon the city before seeking refuge in a church, the city employs prostitutes in an attempt to prevent homosexuality, innocent men are mistakenly condemned to death, a gambler bets the family palazzo. In an introduction and seven essays, Leon offers enchanting details and astute insights into Venetian customs of the past and present.

Venetian Curiosities

David Lines

Continuing the tradition of parodying all things sacred, the author of The XXXX Files and PMT takes up the reigns of satire by rewriting the essential 1970s hippy handbook Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Instead of a seagull for a hero, this updated classic features a bloated, cynical, grungy pigeon, who looks not to the skies for inspiration, but to the London Underground. Cutting corners wherever possible and living the life of a fully fledged MTV-generation feral pigeon, Jonathan's rite of passage is more a celebration of modern-day teenage apathy set against a backdrop of 90s Pop Culture and Victorian underground architecture than a voyage of delicious self-discovery. Matching the original page-for-page in content and layout, Jonathan Livingston Trafalgar Square Pigeon is a modern-day morality tale that will, by its very nature, attract plenty of attention whilst ever so gently ruffling a few feathers along the way.

Jonathan Livingston Trafalgar Square Pigeon

Jilly Cooper's witty thumbnail sketch of office life - part valentine, part poison pen letter - offers a vivid evocation of the world in which many of us spend a large part of our lives. There will be few office workers, whether they are bosses, sekketries or office crones, who do not recognize the Machiavellian politics and the lunacies she describes. The topics covered by this survival guide range from 'The Hierarchy' and 'Office Happenings' to 'Extra-mural Activities' and 'The Firing Squad'. Early in her career the author worked in an office and she has many friends, including a husband, who still do: but it will come as no surprise to readers of this classic volume to learn that since its publication she has been self-employed.

How To Survive From Nine To Five

David Searcy

'A work of genius' Ben Fountain 
 
'A bittersweet book, but also a sharp and profoundly wise one' Herald 
 
'Searcy writes with an urgency that makes his essays matter. Where the shame comes in is not certain, but the wonder is that you begin a year having never heard of an author then, two weeks in, his words are lodged in your consciousness and you are telling everybody you know to read his book' Independent 
 
 
Like dispatches from another world, the twenty-one essays in David Searcy’s debut collection Shame and Wonder are unfamiliar, profound and haunting. 
 
In his late sixties, the Texan author David Searcy became drawn to non-fiction, writing ‘straight-up’, on note pad and manual typewriter, a series of disparate thoughts and interests. These unframed apprehensions, as he called them – of forgotten baseball fields, childhood dreams of space travel, the bedtime stories he’d invent for his young children – evolved into a sequence of extraordinary essays probing the pivots and pathways of his life, and puzzling out what they might mean. 
 
Expansive in scope, but deeply personal in their perspective, the pieces in Shame and Wonder forge beautiful connections that make the everyday seem almost extraterrestrial, creating intricate and glittering constellations of words and ideas. Radiant and strange and suffused with longing, this collection is a work of true grace, wisdom and joy.

Shame and Wonder

Stephen Clarke

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR 
 
Bonjour cher reader, 
 
Ever since European history began, we Brits have been happily engaged in our national pastime - annoying the French. And the past couple of years have shown that this annoying never stops. To give just three examples: 
 
After a mid-Atlantic collision between French and British nuclear submarines, France's Minister of Defence seemed to blame the accident on ... shrimps. 
 
When French political superstar Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested in New York, France's establishment was outraged. It soon emerged that sexual harassment was regarded as a basic human right by the country's male élite. (This theme provided so much excellent material that I decided to include it in the plot of my soon-to-be published novel, The Merde Factor.) 
 
And when David Cameron walked out of a Eurosummit, a French politician accused him of being 'like a man at a wife-swapping party who refuses to bring his own wife.' Yes, a very French image, and it just one of the many anti-Anglais insults that came flying across the Channel. 
 
You will find all this, and much more, in Annoying the French Encore! Because, for the French, the merde never ends. 
 
Yours historically, 
 
Stephen Clarke, Paris, August 2012 
 
 
‘Tremendously entertaining’ Sunday Times 
‘Relentlessly and energetically rude’ Mail on Sunday

Annoying The French Encore!

Tony Benn

Tony Benn was one of the twentieth century's most charismatic politicians. The Benn Diaries, kept for almost seventy years, are a uniquely authoritative, fascinating and readable record of the political life of our times. 
 
This single-volume edition is the selected highlights of the complete diaries from Tony's schooldays in the 1940s until he ceased keeping a record of his day-to-day thoughts in 2009. 
 
The narrative starts with Tony as a schoolboy and takes the reader through his experience as a trainee pilot during the war, his tentative first days as a backbencher in Atlee's post-war government, through his battle to remain in the Commons after the death of his father. From cabinet posts and leadership battles, through election highs ands lows to becoming a retired widower. Tony Benn was a consistently radical voice campaigning for the causes he was passionate about. 
 
This volume is the definitive legacy of the best political diarist of our times.

The Benn Diaries

The Definitive Collection

Nikesh Shukla

Random House presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of The Good Immigrant, read by the authors. 
 
How does it feel to be constantly regarded as a potential threat, strip-searched at every airport? 
 
Or be told that, as an actress, the part you’re most fitted to play is ‘wife of a terrorist’? How does it feel to have words from your native language misused, misappropriated and used aggressively towards you? How does it feel to hear a child of colour say in a classroom that stories can only be about white people? How does it feel to go ‘home’ to India when your home is really London? What is it like to feel you always have to be an ambassador for your race? How does it feel to always tick ‘Other’? 
 
Bringing together 21 exciting black, Asian and minority ethnic voices emerging in Britain today, The Good Immigrant explores why immigrants come to the UK, why they stay and what it means to be ‘other’ in a country that doesn’t seem to want you, doesn’t truly accept you – however many generations you’ve been here – but still needs you for its diversity monitoring forms. 
 
Inspired by discussion around why society appears to deem people of colour as bad immigrants – job stealers, benefit scroungers, undeserving refugees – until, by winning Olympic races or baking good cakes, or being conscientious doctors, they cross over and become good immigrants, editor Nikesh Shukla has compiled a collection of essays that are poignant, challenging, angry, humorous, heartbreaking, polemic, weary and – most importantly – real.

The Good Immigrant

The New Yorker Magazine

The 1950s are enshrined in the popular imagination as the decade of poodle skirts and “I Like Ike.” But this was also a complex time, in which the afterglow of Total Victory firmly gave way to Cold War paranoia. A sense of trepidation grew with the Suez Crisis and the H-bomb tests. At the same time, the fifties marked the cultural emergence of extraordinary new energies, like those of Thelonious Monk, Sylvia Plath and Tennessee Williams. 
 
The New Yorker was there in real time, chronicling the tensions and innovations that lay beneath the era’s placid surface. In this thrilling volume, classic works of reportage, criticism, and fiction are complemented by new contributions from the magazine’s present all-star line-up of writers, including Jonathan Franzen, Malcolm Gladwell, and Jill Lepore. 
 
Here are indelible accounts of the decade’s most exciting players: Truman Capote on Marlon Brando as a pampered young star; Berton Roueché on Jackson Pollock in his first flush of fame. Ernest Hemingway, Emily Post, Bobby Fischer, and Leonard Bernstein are also brought to vivid life in these pages. 
 
Among the audacious young writers who began publishing in the fifties was one who would become a stalwart for the magazine for fifty-five years: John Updike. Also featured here are great early works from Philip Roth and Nadine Gordimer, as well as startling poems by Theodore Roethke and Anne Sexton. 
 
Completing the panoply are insightful and entertaining new pieces by present day New Yorker contributors examining the 1950s through contemporary eyes.

The New Yorker Book of the 50s

Story of a Decade

In this, the fourth volume of Tony Benn’s diaries, the Labour Government continues its fight for survival. Important developments are occurring both at home and internationally. In Britain, Benn as Secretary of State for Energy is directly involved with Windscale and decisions about nuclear power and oil policy. Abroad, the Government is concerned with Carter’s reappraisal of American foreign policy, the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and problems of EEC membership. 
In the Labour party itself, new forces of radicalism and reform are emerging, resulting in changes in Labour’s policies and the ultimate formation of the SDP. 
Labour’s unsuccessful economic policy and the widening rift with the labour movement lead to the Winter of Discontent and a near state of emergency. With Labour voters defecting, the scene is set for the Thatcher years.

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