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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Leslie Thomas

They came on a distant, secret night, armed and ready to kill. Their ghosts are still with us today. 
 
In June 1942 a party of German saboteurs landed by submarine in the United States of America. They were betrayed and executed within eight weeks of their landing. Their treacherous leader served a prison sentence and then disappeared. 
 
Orders for New York takes this historical fact as its starting point and tells the story of Michael Findlater, a British journalist who is in the USA researching for a book. Invited to meet his ex-wife Madelaine for the first time since their divorce and to see his twelve-year-old daughter, Findlater finds he is in fact being recruited for a well-paid secret mission. 
 
Madelaine's father-in-law, a wealthy and successful newspaper proprietor, wants him to take on theassignment of finding the vanished Nazi saboteur, Peter Karl Hine, and writing his story. Spurred on partly by the huge reward on offer and partly by curiosity, Findlater embarks on his quest and rapidly discovers that there are ruthless parties involved, who will stop at nothing to prevent him. 
 
This is an enthralling and astonishing new novel, from the author of The Magic Army and The Adventures of Goodnight and Loving.

Orders For New York

Michael Pitts

Mark Roberts

The discovery of the remains of 'Boxgrove Man', a 'Missing Link' hominid half a million years old in chalk pits in Sussex made world headlines in May 1994. This was the most sensational archeological find in the UK since Piltdown Man - only this time it was not a hoax. Continuing excavation by site archeologist Mark Roberts has enabled him and his team to build up a picture of this, the first Englishman, and to open up a unique window on life in Britain before the Ice Age. Because these human remains, the artefacts surrounding them and the remains of the local flora and fauna - including elephants and rhinoceroses of an extinct species - are preserved in an unprecedented way, we now discover how our ancestors hunted, ate, manufactured the implements they needed to survive and interacted; these were neither the opportunist scavengers nor the mindless killers that they have previously been supposed to be. Boxgrove, therefore, represents a revolutionary view of the origins of mankind, and changes our understanding of what it means to be human.

A Fairweather Eden

Paul Donovan

All Our Todays is the first book about the BBC's most influential news and current affairs programme, published to celebrate Today's 40th anniversary in October 1997. Paul Donovan tells the programme's story from the early days of Jack de Manio, through the great partnership of Brian Redhead and John Timpson, to the current triumvirate of Jamies Naughtie, John Humphrys and Sue MacGregor. He analyses the reasons for the programme's success, examines its ofter fiery relationship with prominent politicians, and takes the reader behind the scenes in the Today studio. Full of funny and touching anecdotes, this book will be essential reading for Today's five million listeners.

All Our Todays

Momoko Williams

Peter Pagnamenta

Simon Winchester, author of A Crack in the Edge of the World and The Professor and the Madman: 
 
"The essence of this inexpressibly beautiful story will remain with me, I believe, for the rest of my life. This exquisitely crafted account of the loves and lives of Arthur and Masa, Violet and Kiyoshi - such very ordinary names, yet names that conceal extraordinary passions and confusions - is a tone poem to duty and honour, courage and enduring passion, set against the fantastically rich recent histories of Japan and Ireland, England and France. It is a long time since I have read so moving and haunting a book" 
 
This is the true story of an extraordinary love affair. When Captain Arthur Hart-Synnot, a disciplined, conservative officer, met Masa Suzuki, a bright, beautiful Japanese girl, when the British army posted him to Tokyo, he fell for her and within weeks they were living together. Arthur told her she was the 'supreme woman in the world' and they pledged they would love each other for the rest of their lives. But he could not tell the army about her, and they faced almost insuperable barriers of race and class. When he was recalled to London the question was whether Masa had, all the time, just been what expatriates referred to as 'a temporary wife', an exploited Madam Butterfly. 
 
Though separated for years at a time, and by huge distances, they remained devoted to each other. Based on a cache of over 800 letters found in Tokyo, the story is set against the wider history and the wars of the first half of the twentieth century. This is a record of enduring love and great loss, where events beyond Arthur and Masa's control dictate the final tragic outcome.

Falling Blossom

Sue Elliott

Steve Humphries

In association with the flagship BBC2 series. 
 
This is the story of the men and women of a truly remarkable generation. Born into a world still reeling from the earth-shattering events of the Great War, they grew up during the appalling economic depression of the 1930s, witnessed the globe tear itself apart again during the Second World War, and emerged from post-war austerity determined to create a new society for their children. 
 
It is the story of people who raised their families during the immense social upheaval of the Fifties and Sixties, as the world in which they had grown up changed inexorably. It is the story of the people who shaped the way we live now. 
 
Britain's Greatest Generation tells this multi-faceted story through the eye-witness accounts of those who were there, from Japanese prisoner of war Fergus Anckorn to Dame Vera Lynn, from Bletchley Park veteran Jean Valentine to Dad's Army creator Jimmy Perry, and from fighter pilot Tom Neil to the Queen's cousin Margaret Rhodes. Together their testimony creates a vivid, often deeply moving picture of an extraordinary epoch – and the extraordinary people who lived through it.

Britain's Greatest Generation

Vincent Bugliosi

Part Five: "Now is the time for Helter Skelter" - Charles Manson 
 
Manson family member Linda Kasabian becomes a key witness for the case, recalling the night the murders were committed in detail. Charles Manson’s positioning as a Christ like figure for his followers is revealed in its full extent, as his followers treat the violence as a game. 
 
This terrifying new part will delve into the case built around Charles Manson and the kind of man he truly was.

Helter Skelter: Part Five of the Shocking Manson Murders

Ingrid Pitt

At the age of five, Ingrid Pitt found herself in a concentration camp. Ingrid and her mother escaped from the guards while on a forced march and presented themselves to the partisans, unsure if they would kill them. They spent the rest of the war in the forests. Ingrid fell in love for the first time and watched in despair as British bombers flew overhead. She still cannot see the vapour trials of planes without being transported back to her childhood vigil. After the war Ingrid came to London, where she developed a career as a Hammer House of Horror movie star, but, as she proundly says, `I was always the biter, never the bitten!' She also acted in mainstream films, such as WHERE EAGLES DARE. She had a child by her first marriage and a grand passion which lead to her marrying a racing driver. They lived in Argentina for a while and were good friends of President Peron and Isabelits Peron. Ingrid even spent an evening with the embalmed body of Eva Peron. Written with great passion and warmth, this is a rare childhood memoir and the story of Hammer`s most galmorous actress. Above all, this is a story of a survivor.

Life's A Scream

Charles Handy

Elizabeth Handy

Twenty-eight women, ranging from Anita Roddick and Prue Leith to less well-known names, write their own personal stories which are accompanied by Elizabeth Handy's black and white photographs and an introductory essay by Charles Handy.   This generation of women is entering the sixties more healthy, more educated and more energetic than most of their mothers.    The subjects in this book provide the models for what has become, for the first time, a new age for many women.    Released from most of the cares and responsibilities that accompany midlife for women, they are free to reinvent themselves, to give more time to their career or calling, or to luxuriate in the serenity and friendships that few had time for in the past. Some enter new relationships, some start new careers or go back to study, some find that their work is only now reaching its peak. Many have survived traumas and tragedies, but 'the past is just the prologue' as one of them explains.

Reinvented Lives

Women at Sixty: A Celebration

Part Seven: Murder in the Wind 
 
Three female members of the Manson family attempt to testify that they committed the murder without the aid of Charles Manson, prompting Manson himself to speak, martyring himself as the leader of what he calls 'wayward men'. 
 
Manson’s attorney, Ronald Hughes, fails to appear at court. Had he been killed by the Family?

Helter Skelter: Part Seven of the Shocking Manson Murders

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

Colin Wilson

Colin Wilson is the bete-noir of the Oxbridge literary establishment. He never went to university, let alone Oxbridge, yet wrote The Outsider, a brilliant account of the pain of being alive today, when he was just twenty-four. It sold millions of copies around the world, and he was acclaimed as one of the leading intellectuals of the age, finding a huge audience with the anti-establishment, alternative and underground thinkers. Because of his radically new attitudes he was - with John Osborne - dubbed an 'angry young man' in the article that originally coined that phrase. In this way a young man from a working class background suddenly found himself moving in the most colourful literary and artistic circles of the day. In his autobiography he tells stories about, among others, Aldous Huxley, Angus Wilson, John Osborne, Kingsley Amis, Kenneth Tynan, Francis Bacon and Norman Mailer - all observed with a true outsider's eye for absurdity. He is regarded by many as a true literary hero - Julian Cope stopped a recent concert to pay tribute to Wilson who as sitting in the audience and Donovan Leitch dedicates his new autobiography to him - but he also has huge mass market appeal. His insightful, brilliant books on the Occult, the Mysteries and Atlantis and the Sphinx were all huge bestsellers netting millions of copies. In this return to the themes of The Outsider, looked at from the point of his own life story, he again proves himself one of the great intellectuals of our age, never ceasing to wrestle with the great questions of life and death, and writing with an erudition and an easy way with ideas that is rare in English literary life.

Dreaming To Some Purpose

Petronella Wyatt

Petronella Wyatt writes: 'The eccentricities of my father, Lord (Woodrow) Wyatt (1918-1997), are a legend.  I, his only daughter, was required to participate in his astonishing behaviour with all the enthusiasm I could muster.  This resulted in a childhood of a kind unknown to the late 20th-century - a mixture of Edwardian extravagance, Victorian whimsicality and a vivid 18th-century haute sophistication.                 'Father was the last of the old school.  Described by his friend and former political rival Roy Jenkins as 'the ultimate original', he was a politician, writer, race-horse owner, womaniser and bon vivant - a unique product of pre-war English civilisation.  His career ensured him a varied circle of friends.  I grew up with such companions as Harold Macmillan, Margaret Thatcher, Rupert Murdoch, Robin Day, Sir James Goldsmith, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret, the Duke of Devonshire and much of Debrett's Peerage.                                                              'Each chapter of the book will contain personal and historically important anecdotes about the famous that have never before appeared in print and which will generate considerable news coverage.  What I am writing is a waspish social document - irreverent, satirical, dramatic and scandalous, disclosing how the privileged enjoy their privileges

Father Dear Father

Keith Cory-Jones

Equally courageous, equally deadly, the British mercenaries in Bosnia have a story to tell as amazing as 'The One That Got Away', but a story without official blessing. 'War Dogs' follows the fortunes of a gang of eight British mercenaries, a mixed bunch, old and cynical, young and naive, mean and psychotic, two idealists, and the rest just in it for the money. Each of these rogue warriors has his own special skills, strengths and weaknesses, and are all tested in an increasingly terrifying and desperate series of engagements with the enemy. Both sides fight dirty; this is an insider's account of the war in Bosnia that goes far beyond what we read in the newspapers. Not all of them make it back to Britain; one boy with no military experience has told his mother he is working in Eurodisney, and she only finds out the truth when he comes back in a box.

War Dogs

British Mercenaries in Bosnia Tell Their Own Story

Anika Scott

Brought to you by Penguin. 
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'FINDING CLARA is the kind of novel we need now more than ever, [and] achieves what the best historical fiction can . . . pushing us to see ourselves in that past, demanding: Who would you have been then? What would you have done? Unflinching and absorbing, [it] does not let you look away.' Sarah Blake, New York Times bestselling author of THE POSTMISTRESS 
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1946. The ruins of Essen, Germany. A place that can't quite believe the Second World War has been lost. 
 
There's Clara. Once a wartime icon and heiress to the Falkenberg iron works, she now finds herself on the run from the Allied authorities, accused by the zealous Allied occupiers of complicity in her father's war crimes. 
 
There's Jakob. A charming black marketeer, badly wounded in the war but determined to help what's left of his family survive the peace. 
 
There's Willy. A teenage boy diligently guarding a mine full of Wehrmacht supplies, his only friend a canary named Gertrud. Convinced the war isn't over, he refuses to surrender his post. 
 
When Clara returns to her hometown expecting to find her best friend, she finds everything she once knew in ruins. But in war-ravaged Germany, it's not just the buildings that are scarred: everyone is changed, everyone lives in the wreckage of their own past. 
 
To survive, Clara must hide who she is. But to live, she must face up to the truth of what she's done. 
_____________________________________________ 
'What a great debut! It still haunts me, days after finishing it.' Liz Trenow, author of The Poppy Factory and The Silk Weaver 
 
'Anika Scott's finely drawn characters in FINDING CLARA bring to life not only the struggle to rise from the ashes of war, but also the depth of resolve often required to gain redemption. Illuminating and beautifully rendered.' Susan Meissner, author of The Last Year of the War 
 
'Meticulously researched and plotted like a noir thriller, Finding Clara tells a different story of WWII - of characters grappling with their own guilt and driven by the question of what they could have done to change the past.' Jessica Shattuck, author of The Women in the Castle 
 
'A moving story of courage and everyday heroism rising to meet unbearable challenges.' Alex Marwood, author of The Wicked Girls 
_____________________________________________ 
© Anika Scott 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Finding Clara

a page-turning epic set in the aftermath of World War II

Andy Marino

The incredible story of the American who saved more lives than Schindler - great literary, scientific and artistic figures such as André Breton, Heinrich Mann, Marc Chagall and Max Ernst who represented the political and cultural elite of Europe. This is one of the last great untold stories of World War II. 
 
Varian Fry was an outsider, a flawed man who was transformed by the advent of war in Europe, finding his purpose as the saviour of hundreds of people facing death under the Nazis. Marino traces the progress of a seemingly impossible rescue operation, revealing the charismatic personality of Fry, and tells the story of those who helped him. It is a tale full of surreal and heart-stopping episodes: a novelist smuggled out of a concentration camp right under the noses of the guards; and the 'secret' escape route up a mountainside in full view of the entire population of Cerbère. 
 
This is the first time his full, true story has been told, with the benefit of the author's access to archives and the cooperation of those who best knew Varian Fry.

American Pimpernel

The Man Who Saved the Artists on Hitler's Death-List

Part Two: Meet the Killers. 
 
Twenty-four members of a hippie cult known as the Manson family, led by ex-con Charles Manson, are arrested in connection with the murder of a music teacher Gary Hinman, killed on the same night in Hollywood. 
 
Susan Atkins aka Crazy Sadie, is one of the imprisoned. Seemingly high and excited, she tells everyone in gruesome detail how they did it, and how they were going to unleash hell. 
 
She reveals that the Manson family were also involved in the Cielo Drive murders, the horrifying place Sharon Tate Polanski and her friends were bludgeoned to death.

Helter Skelter: Part Two of the Shocking Manson Murders

Part Three: The Investigation - November 18 - December 31, 1969 
 
Investigations into the 'Family' begin in earnest. Follow the detailed forensic account of the investigation; from witness statements to the questioning of the suspects and the examination of the compounds in Chatsworth and the surrounding Death Valley, California. 
 
The quasi-religious devotion of the 'Family' to leader Charles Manson is revealed in the suspects' chilling statements, while a substantial amount of stolen vehicles and fire arms are discovered on the Manson property - a remote ranch in the Death Valley.

Helter Skelter: Part Three of the Shocking Manson Murders

Aeneas Gunn

Newly married, Jeannie Gunn accompanies her husband to 'The Elsey', the huge cattle station in the Northern Territory, several hundred miles from the nearest town. 
 
She is one of the few white women in the area and her presence is at first resented by the stockmen until her warmth and spirit win their affection and respect. This is one of the few autobiographies written by a woman to chronicle the life of the pioneers of the outback. In the style of the bush storyteller, Mrs Gunn conveys with moving simplicity the beauty and cruelty of the land, and the isolation and loneliness, comradeship and kindness of the early settlers.

We Of The Never Never

Chris Terrill

This is the tie-in book to a two part BBC 1 documentary series to be screened at 9.00pm in October and which will end on the bicentenary of the Battle of Trafalgar on 21st October. Chris Terrill is famous for his fly on the wall documentaries which have been watched by millions and received wide critical acclaim. We have had HMS Brilliant and The Cruise (audience reached 11 million). Chris has based himself for the last few months in the very heart of the modern day naval experience. We will see: a Royal Naval Chaplain exorcising a haunted barracks in Portsmouth, a vodka-fuelled Trafalgar Day celebration in the British Embassy in the Moscow in 2004, a Polaris submarine crossing the Atlantic on an exercise in which it will 'pretend' to nuke America, the patrol of the frigate HMS Chatham in the Gulf, suddenly diverted to Sri Lanka after the Tsunami and the Fleet Review, where HMS Chatham in honour of her humanitarian role in Asia, will lead the entire assembly of a hundred warships, British and foreign, down the Solent. Chris is the only film maker to be granted exclusive, behind the scenes access by the Navy this year. During the filming Chris will capture the heart and soul of the sailors aboard, and on shore: there will be plenty of irreverence, practical jokes and laughs, and the human reality of the families left behind for months on end as warships and submarines go on extended tours of duty. This will be the fullest ever account of the Modern Navy in a year when the Trafalgar Day celebrations and the Fleet review will attract an avalanche of publicity.

Shipmates

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!

David Sinclair

Following his bestselling biography of the Pound Sterling, David Sinclair's next book is a fascinating insight into the single event which shaped the face of the modern world. If the Great War of 1914-1918 was a tragedy, then the Treaty of Versailles was a complete travesty. Rather than sealing a guarantee for peace, stability and prosperity for a new and better world, the treaty ensured that the remainder of the twentieth century would see horror, brutality and suffering unparalleled in human history. The treaty was engineered and manipulated by self-interested politicians with individual motivations and contrasting agendas. Hall of Mirrors reflects on how the representatives of America, Britain and France - Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau - deliberately ignored the possibility of finding a progressive international solution. Instead, driven by ego and personal vendetta, these statesmen stimulated a European future of faction, dispute and conflict. Hall of Mirrors is a fascinating story of destruction, delusion and greed, illuminating the personalities and politics involved in making the treaty. It is also a valuable and topical discussion on the political structures which enable individual character and will to dictate the course of history and culture.

Hall Of Mirrors

H W Brands

The discovery of gold in California in 1848 sparked a frenzy that shook the world. People swarmed to the gold fields from as far as China and Australia. They came by ship and overland, braving Tierra del Fuego and the pestilence of Panama, lured by the promise of riches. 
 
At the heart of The Age of Gold is the story of Captain John Fremont, the flamboyant adventurer who "liberated" California from Mexico, only to find himself accused of mutiny. Fremont met his match in young Jessie Benton, a headstrong, fiercely intelligent Senator's daughter. Together, John and Jessie Fremont would play a fateful role in the drama unfolding on the gold fields as they lurched, like so many others, from financial ruin to astonishing riches.

The Age Of Gold

Andrew Hood

Tony Benn

Do we need a Monarchy? Or does it represent everything that is hidebound and stifling about Britain? The headlines tell the story: every British Institution is in crisis As a nation we have lost our way, What we have always been smugly told, is false. Our constitution is NOT the best in the world, nor is our legal system the fairest, nor is our society more open, nor are we freer than other nations. Things taken for granted are now being seriously questioned, as people realize how much of our political and economic life is outside our control. Ever since Tony Benn changed our constitution by renouncing his peerage, he has been developing the case he now outlines. His Commonwealth of Britain Bill (reproduced in the Text) is 'the first attempt to overthrow the monarchy since Cromwell' GUARDIAN. He argues for a radical overhaul of our political system, sweeping away privilege and unaccounted power and substituting for it a written constitution and democratic citizenship. Only by freeing ourselves from our historical shackles - including, but by no means only, the monarchy - can we be truly free.

Common Sense

Hugo Vickers

Harold Nicolson called her 'the greatest Queen since Cleopatra', while Cecil Beaton called her 'a marshmallow made on a welding machine'. Stephen Tennant said: 'She looked everything that she was not: gentle, gullible, tenderness mingled with dispassionate serenity, cool, well-bred, remote. Behind this veil she schemed and vacillated, hard as nails.' Who was she? 
The Queen Mother's story has not yet been properly told. This was partly due to her long life, and the difficulty that always exists when a biography of a living person is attempted, partly because she was a queen - and the real person gets hidden behind the perceived image - and partly because she is hard to pin down. 
From her privileged aristocratic childhood, to the abdication and the problems with Diana - this book questions how she faced her challenges and crises, assess her role, how powerful she was, and how she coped. This is a candid, personal portrait of one of Britain's most loved national treasures. 
Hugo Vickers, an acknowledged expert on the House of Windsor, has spent seventeen years researching this book, and observed the Queen Mother in public and private over a period of forty years.

Elizabeth, The Queen Mother

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

Nick Barratt

London's suburbs may stretch for well over 600 square miles, but in historical accounts of the capital they tend to take something of a back seat. In Greater London, historian Nick Barratt places them firmly centre stage, tracing their journey from hamlets and villages far out in the open countryside to fully fledged urban enclaves, simultaneously demonstrating the crucial role they have played in the creation of today's metropolis. 
 
Starting in the first century AD, he shows how the tiny settlements that grew up in the Thames Valley gradually developed, and how they were shaped by their proximity to the city. He describes the spread of the first suburbs beyond the city walls, and traces the ebb and flow of population as people moved in to find jobs or away to escape London's noise and bustle. He charts the transformation wrought by the coming of the railways, the fight to preserve Hampstead Heath, Epping Forest and other green spaces and the struggle to create a London-wide form of government. He gives an account of wartime destruction and peacetime reconstruction, and then brings the story to the present with a description of the very varied nature of today's suburbs and their inhabitants. In the process, he evokes Tudor Hackney and Georgian Hampton, explains why Victorian Battersea and Finchley were so different from one another, and follows Islington's fall from grace and subsequent recovery. 
 
Magnificently illustrated throughout with contemporary engravings and photographs, this is the essential history for anyone who has ever lived in London.

Greater London

The Story of the Suburbs

Steve Roud

From conkers to marbles, from British Bulldog to tag, not forgetting 'one potato, two potato' and 'eeny, meeny, miny, mo', The Lore of the Playground looks at the games children have enjoyed, the rhymes they have chanted and the rituals and traditions they have observed over the past hundred years and more. 
 
Each generation, it emerges, has had its own favourites - hoops and tops in the 1930s, clapping games more recently. Some pastimes, such as skipping, have proved remarkably resilient, their complicated rules carefully handed down from one class to the next. Many are now the stuff of distant memory. And some traditions have proved to be strongly regional, loved by children in one part of the country, unknown to those elsewhere. All are brilliantly and meticulously recorded by Steve Roud, who has drawn on interviews with hundreds of people aged from 8 to 80 to create a fascinating picture of all our childhoods.

The Lore of the Playground

One hundred years of children's games, rhymes and traditions

Iain Stewart

Man with hammer, rucksack and GSOH offers gritty adventure holidays. Looking for sun, sea, sand and - science. 
 
Scheduled to tie in with a major new BBC series, Hot Rocks explores the Mediterranean - the cradle of western civilisation - and discovers alongside its tranquil, sun-lapped shores, one of the most volatile places on an ever-changing earth. The Mediterranean we know today has been forged in a violent crucible of clashing continents, rising mountains, restless seas and a turbulent climate. Millions of Britons are drawn to the Mediterranean every year and whether they go for the beautiful scenery and relaxing beaches or the culture and architecture or food, none of it would be there were it not for geology. Forward-thinking geologist and television presenter Dr Iain Stewart, uncovers the hidden Mediterranean and brings a fresh and dramatic eye to geology to show just why it is that geology should be restored to its rightful place as the grandfather of sciences. From earthquakes and volcanoes to Roman architecture and cuisine, Iain discovers just how geology has shaped our lives and how we can expect it to affect us in years to come.

Journeys From The Centre Of The Earth

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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