Steve Roud was Local Studies Librarian for the London Borough of Croydon and served as Honorary Librarian of the Folklore Society for over fifteen years. He has been researching British folklore for over thirty years and is the joint author of the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore, plus other books on traditional drama and folk song, and the Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland, which won the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award in 2004. His publications include London Lore (2008) and The Lore of the Playground (2010). He also compiles the Folk Song Index and the Broadside Index, two internationally acclaimed computer databases of traditional folk and popular song. He lives in Sussex.

Steve Roud

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Laurie Lee

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'Magical' Daily Mail 
'I finished it with an ache in my heart and a tear in my eye' Spectator 
 
From the author of Cider With Rosie, Village Christmas is a moving, lyrical portrait of England through the changing years and seasons. 
 
Laurie Lee left his childhood home in the Cotswolds when he was nineteen, but it remained with him throughout his life until, many years later, he returned for good. This collection brings to life the sights, sounds, landscapes and traditions of his home - from centuries-old May Day rituals to his own patch of garden, from carol singing in crunching snow to pub conversations and songs. Here too he writes about the mysteries of love, living in wartime Chelsea, Winston Churchill's wintry funeral and his battle, in old age, to save his beloved Slad Valley from developers. 
 
Told with a warm sense of humour and a powerful sense of history, Village Christmas brings us a picture of a vanished world. 
 
'Brings to life the landscapes and traditions of Lee's home in Gloucestershire, from centuries-old May Day rituals and carol-singing on Christmas Eve, to his battle in old age to save his beloved Slad valley from developers' Guardian 
 
'Simply written, observant and shot through with Lee's characteristic humility ... Against his whitewashed prose are touches of beauty' The Times Literary Supplement

Village Christmas

And Other Notes on the English Year

A landmark collection of poems from the author of Cider with Rosie 
 
Laurie Lee is beloved for his writing on a lost rural world. His evocative poetry springs from his deep connection with nature, as he tracks the seasons changing and the years turning over. Yet Lee's poems also captured war, human relationships and distant places, informed by his own experiences of lives uprooted by change and conflict. Written during the course of his lifetime, the verses brought together in Collected Poems range over Lee playing his fiddle in a Spanish town; ecstatic in springtime of his beloved Slad valley; or digging for faith in the depths of winter. 
 
Gathered in one volume for the first time, and including a generous selection of previously unseen verses from Lee's archives, these timeless, poignant poems show him expressing the essence of life, love and loss.

Collected Poems

'Living in our valley was like broad beans in a pod, so snug and enclosed and protective.' 
 
 Laurie Lee walked out of his childhood village one summer morning to travel the world, but he was always drawn back to his beloved Slad Valley, eventually returning to make it his home. 
 
 In this never-before-published portrait of his Cotswold home, Laurie Lee guides us through its landscapes, and shares memories of his village youth - from his favourite pub, The Woolpack, to winter skating on the pond, the church through the seasons, local legends, learning the violin and playing jazz records in the privy on a wind-up gramophone. 
 
 Filled with wry humour and a love of place, Down in the Valley is a writer's tribute to the landscape that shaped him, and where he found peace.

Down in the Valley

A Writer's Landscape

Ernesto Che Guevara

'All we could see was the dust on the road ahead and ourselves on the bike, devouring kilometers in our flight northward' 
 
'In late 1951, Guevara and Alberto Granado set off on the 500cc Norton they nicknamed La Poderosa ('The Powerful One') with no other agenda than a lust for life and a desire to see it all. The Motorcycle Diaries offer a unique perspective on what led this would-be doctor from relatively affluent Argentina to become one of the 20th century's most important political figures ... genuinely exhilarating' Guardian 
 
'For every comic escapade of the carefree roustabout there is an equally eye-opening moment in the development of the future revolutionary leader. By the end of the journey, a politicized Guevara has emerged to predict his own legendary future' Time

The Motorcycle Diaries

Mário de Andrade

'My life's done a somersault,' wrote acclaimed modernist writer Mário de Andrade. After years of dreaming about Amazonia, he finally embarked on a three-month odyssey up the great river and into the wild heart of his native Brazil with a group of avant-garde luminaries. All abandoned ship but a socialite, her two nieces, and, of course, the author himself. And so begins the humorous account of Andrade's steamboat adventure into one of the most dangerous and breathtakingly beautiful corners of the world. 
 
Rife with shrewd observations and sparkling wit, his sarcastic, down-to-earth diary entries not only offer comedic and awe-inspiring details of life and the landscape but also trace his internal metamorphosis: his travels challenge what he thought he knew about the Amazon, and drastically alter his understanding of his motherland.

The Apprentice Tourist

Anaïs Nin

The brilliant tale of Anais Nin's true love affair with Henry Miller, and her ambiguous, charged relationship with his wife, June. Drawn from the journals of a single momentous year in Paris, Henry and June provides a wildly lyrical account of a woman's sexual awakening and the disillusion of idealized marriage.

Henry and June

Gerald Durrell

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‘Living in Corfu was rather like living in one of the more flamboyant and slapstick comic operas’ 
 
It is 1935 and the Durrells have escaped the leaden summer skies of Bournemouth to arrive ‘like a troupe of medieval tumblers’ on the sun-drenched island of Corfu for a new life. Gerald Durrell’s beloved portrayal of his chaotic family – beatific Mother, Roger the dog, diet-obsessed Margo, book-loving Lawrence and gun-wielding Leslie – as well as his own adventures with a burgeoning menagerie of beasts, birds and insects (including an owl called Ulysses), is a timeless account of an idyllic childhood and an uproarious portrait of the English abroad.

My Family and Other Animals

Stendhal

The Life of Henry Brulard is the autobiography of one of France's greatest writers. In this book, written with such frankness that it remained unpublishable for more than a century after its composition, the author of The Charterhouse of Parma and The Red and the Black tells the story of his unhappy childhood in a stuffy provincial town and uncovers the roots of his rebellious and skeptical temperament. Stendhal conjures up the elusive presence of his beloved mother, who died when he was only seven, while castigating the smug complacency and social climbing of his father, and the cruelty of the aunt whose care blighted his early years. At the same time he recalls the sights, sounds, places, and people of his youth, its pleasures and sorrows, with an almost preternatural clarity and immediacy. A book of brilliant images and burning emotions, The Life of Henry Brulard, like Nabokov's Speak, Memory, is not only a vivid literary memoir but an extraordinary work of the imagination.

The Life of Henry Brulard

Alexander Pushkin

Alexander Pushkin was Russia's first true literary genius. Best known for his poetry, he also wrote sparkling prose that revealed his national culture with elegance and understated humour. Here, his gift for portraying the Russian people is fully revealed. The Tales of Belkin, his first prose masterpiece, presents a series of interlinked stories narrated by a good-hearted Russian squire - among them 'The Shot', in which a duel is revisited after many years, and the grotesque 'The Undertaker'. Elsewhere, works such as the novel-fragment Roslavlev and the Egyptian Nights, the tale of an Italian balladeer seeking an audience in St. Petersberg, demonstrate the wide range of Pushkin's fiction. A Journey to Arzrum, the final piece in this collection, offers an autobiographical account of Pushkin's own experiences in the 1829 war between Russia and Turkey, and remains one of the greatest of all pieces of journalistic adventure writing.

Tales of Belkin and Other Prose Writings

Truman Capote

Now Brando looked at people with assurance, and with what can only be called a pitying expression, as though he dwelt in spheres of enlightenment where they, to his regret, did not. 
 
This mesmerizing profile of an insecure, vulnerable young Marlon Brando, brooding in a Kyoto hotel during a break from filming, is a peerless piece of journalism. 
 
Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

The Duke in His Domain

George Grossmith

Weedon Grossmith

THE DIARY OF A NOBODY began as a serial in Punch and the book which followed in 1892 has never been out of print. The Grossmith brothers not only created an immortal comic character but produced a clever satire of their society. Mr Pooter is an office clerk and upright family man in a dull 1880s suburb. His diary is a wonderful portrait of the class system and the inherent snobbishness of the suburban middle classes. It sends up contemporary crazes for Aestheticism, spiritualism and bicycling, as well as the fashion for publishing diaries by anybody and everybody.

The Diary of a Nobody

Hunter S Thompson

'Hot damn! Let us rumble, keep going and don't slow down . . . let's have a little fun . . .' 
 
In his much-anticipated memoir, Hunter S. Thompson looks back on a long and productive life. It 
is a story of crazed road trips fuelled by bourbon and black acid, of insane judges and giant porcupines, of girls, guns, explosives and, of course, bikes. He also takes on his dissolute youth in Louisville; his adventures in pornography; campaigning for local office in Aspen; and what it's like to accidentally be accused of trying to kill Jack Nicholson.

Kingdom of Fear

Loathsome Secrets of a Star-crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century

Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson skewered the trials of domestic life in 1950s America with wry wit and uncanny precision. In this sequel to Life Among the Savages, her four offspring have now grown into fully-fledged demons. As their house starts to burst at the seams, the Jackson clan somehow manage (without really planning it) to move into a larger home, only to take the chaos - absent furniture, vanishing children, misbehaving refrigerators, an avalanche of books - right along with them.

Raising Demons

Penguin Modern Classics

‘My collection of animals swelled to a point where even Mother occasionally grew alarmed’ 
 
The island of Corfu, where the Durrell family live in agreeable chaos, is paradise for aspiring naturalist Gerald. His battalion of creatures has grown to include eleven puppies, a toad named Dierdre and an unwelcome infestation of scorpions. Yet the human visitors to their sun-drenched villa are even more curious, whether it is an innocent pair of American painters ripe for practical jokes, or a supercilious Count who barely survives an outing on Gerald’s home-made boat, the Bootle-bumtrinket. The third volume in the Corfu Trilogy brings this glorious tale of halcyon days to a close.

The Garden of the Gods

Azar Nafisi

Every Thursday morning in a living room in Iran, over tea and pastries, eight women meet in secret to discuss forbidden works of Western literature. As they lose themselves in the worlds of Lolita, The Great Gatsby and Pride and Prejudice, gradually they come to share their own stories, dreams and hopes with each other, and, for a few hours, taste freedom. Azar Nafisi's bestselling memoir is a moving, passionate testament to the transformative power of books, the magic of words and the search for beauty in life's darkest moments.

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Czeslaw Milosz

After The Second World War, Czeslaw Milosz was exiled for many years from his home country of Poland. In Native Realm, he evokes that homeland and his years away from it; how it nurtured him and how its divisions and destruction shaped a generation. Exploring such diverse memories as a Soviet officer drinking tea with his little finger sticking out, or two Chinese girls passing, laughing, by a New York subway station, Milosz uses these to both 'bring Europe closer to the Europeans' and to capture the formative moments in his life, from his Catholic education to his time in Paris, all with his distinctive honesty, elegance and self-awareness. 
 
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

Native Realm

A Search for Self-Definition

Dorothy Wordsworth

William Wordsworth

A continuous text made up of extracts from Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal and a selection of her brother's poems. Dorothy Wordsworth kept her Journal 'because I shall give William pleasure by it'. In doing so, she never dreamt that she was giving future readers not only the chance to enjoy her fresh and sensitive delight in the beauties that surrounded her at Grasmere but also a rare opportunity to observe 'the progress of a poet's mind'. Colette Clark's skilful and perceptive arrangement of Dorothy's entries alongside William's poems throws a unique light on his creative process, and shows how the interdependence of brother and sister was a vital part in the writing of many of his great poems. By reading these poems in relation to the Journal it is possible to trace the processes by which they were committed to paper and so achieve a fuller understanding of them. A writer in her own right, Dorothy kept her Journal sparse in personal and emotional detail. Yet there is, nevertheless, a deep emotional undercurrent running beneath the surface which only falters when William marries Mary Hutchinson. Never again was Dorothy to achieve the freedom, spontaneity and the limpidly beautiful prose with which she infused and irradiated the Grasmere Journals.

Home at Grasmere

Extracts from the Journal of Dorothy Wordsworth and from the Poems of William Wordsworth

John Healy

John Healy, the son of poor Irish immigrants in London, grows up hardened by violence and soon finds himself overwhelmed by alcoholism. He ends up in the grass arena: the parks and streets of the inner city, where beggars, thieves, prostitutes and killers fight for survival and each day brings the question of where to find the next drink. In his searing autobiography Healy describes with unflinching honesty his experiences of addiction, his escape through learning to play chess in prison, and his ongoing search for peace of mind.

The Grass Arena

An Autobiography

A. J. Liebling

While on a year of study in Paris in 1927, Liebling acquired the friendship and tutelage of Yves Mirande, 'one of the last great gastronomes of France', beginning a joyous apprenticeship in the fine art of eating. Told with gluttonous joie de vivre, Between Meals expounds on the delights and pitfalls of a life dedicated to food, from bad rosé ('a pinkish cross between No-Cal and vinegar') to lobster a l'Américaine ('I have never personally inquired into the mysteries of its fabrication; I am content to love a masterpiece of painting without asking how the artist mixed his colours'), to a memorable stay at a Swiss slimming clinic with a masseur named Sprudli. Witty, grouchy and full of gusto, Between Meals has the exquisite sensuality of a Michelin-starred meal and the delicious, catty wit of the perfect dinner guest. It is a love song to food, wine and Paris. 
 
With an introduction by James Salter.

Between Meals

An Appetite for Paris

Shirley Jackson's 1953 classic about life with her husband and four children in rural Vermont is one of America's most celebrated memoirs of family life. Facing badly behaved imaginary friends, intractable bank managers, an oblivious husband and ever-encroaching domestic chaos, Jackson might want to throw her hands up in despair but somehow manages to turn ordinary family experiences into brilliant adventures. Frequently hilarious, always warm and never sentimental, this is a book for anyone who has ever been in a family.

Life Among the Savages

Edmund Gosse

At birth Edmund Gosse was dedicated to 'the Service of the Lord'. His parents were Plymouth Brethren. After his mother's death Gosse was brought up in stifling isolation by his father, a marine biologist whose faith overcame his reason when confronted by Darwin's theory of evolution. Father and Son is also the record of Gosse's struggle to 'fashion his inner life for himself' - a record of whose full and subversive implications the author was unaware, as Peter Abbs notes in his Introduction. First published anonymously in 1907, Father and Son was immediately acclaimed for its courage in flouting the conventions of Victorian autobiography and is still a moving account of self-discovery.

Father and Son

Antoine Saint-Exupery

In 1926 de Saint-Exupéry began flying for the pioneering airline Latécoère - later known as Aéropostale - opening up the first mail routes across the Sahara and the Andes. WIND, SAND AND STARS is drawn from this experience. Interweaving encounters with nomadic Arabs and other adventures into a richly textured autobiographical narrative which includes the extraordinary story of his crash in the Libyan Desert in 1936, and his miraculous survival. 'Self-discovery comes when a man measures himself against an obstacle,' writes Saint-Exupéry.  This book he explores the transcendent perceptions that arise when life is tested to its limits. Both a gripping tale of adventure and a poetic meditation.

Wind, Sand and Stars

Tim Lott

Tim Lott's parents, Jack and Jean, met at the Empire Snooker Hall, Ealing, in 1951, in a world that to him now seems 'as strange as China'. In this extraordinarily moving exploration of his parents' lives, his mother's inexplicable suicide in her late fifties and his own bouts of depression, Tim Lott conjures up the pebble-dashed home of his childhood and the rapidly changing landscape of postwar suburban England. It is a story of grief, loss and dislocation, yet also of the power of memory and the bonds of family love.

The Scent of Dried Roses

One family and the end of English Suburbia - an elegy

Robert Burton

The Anatomy of Melancholy is the vast and only work by Robert Burton, the seventeenth-century English priest and scholar. It 'opens and cuts up' the condition of melancholy, or depression, as we know it today, and in doing so explores a dizzying range of additional topics, including goblins, beauty, the geography of America, digestion, the passions, alcohol and kissing. Burton believed that reading was a cure for melancholy, and so the book itself - one of the most unique and uncategorizable works of all time - can be seen as a tonic for the very condition it describes.

The Anatomy of Melancholy

‘Another tiger-golden day lay ahead of us. It was as though England had never really existed’ 
 
The Durrell clan’s escapades on their Greek island home resume with the second volume of the Corfu Trilogy. Budding zoologist Gerald continues to explore the natural wonders around him, enjoying a night fishing trip, receiving a donkey as a birthday present and accidentally bringing a bear home for tea. Here too are more stories of the eccentric creatures he calls his family, including Margo’s ill-advised foray into spiritualism and what becomes known as ‘Mother’s Great Romance’. Ending as the Second World War is declared, Birds, Beasts and Relatives is an enchanting return to a magical place.

Birds, Beasts, and Relatives

Ved Mehta

The last volume of Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
During the clamour of a New York dinner party, Mehta is startled to find his father crying on his mother's shoulders. This episode begins a painful and revealing voyage into his father's personal history. In stark prose, Mehta unravels a passionate, clandestine affair that bore quiet yet extraordinary consequences for himself and his family. Red Letters also serves as a brilliant exploration and a recreation of British India: its sights and sounds, its injustices and its secrecy.

The Red Letters

Continents of Exile: 12

Norman Mailer

Advertisements for Myself is a comprehensive collection of the best of Norman Mailer's essays, stories, interviews and journalism from the Forties and Fifties, linked by anarchic and riotous autobiographical commentary. Laying bare the heart of a witty, belligerent and vigorous writer, this manifesto of Mailer's key beliefs contains pieces on his war experiences in the Philippines (the basis for his famous first novel The Naked and the Dead), tributes to fellow novelists William Styron, Saul Bellow, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal and magnificent polemics against pornography, advertising, drugs and politics. Also included is his notorious exposition of the phenomenon of the 'White Negro', the Beat Generation's existentialist hero whose life, like Mailer's, is 'an unchartered journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self'

Advertisements for Myself

Ronald Blythe

This colourful, perceptive portrayal of English country life reverberates with the voices of the village inhabitants, from the reminiscences of survivors of the Great War evoking days gone by, to the concerns of a younger generation of farm-workers and the fascinating and personal recollections of, among others, the local schoolteacher, doctor, blacksmith, saddler, district nurse and magistrate. Providing insights into farming, education, welfare, class, religion and death, Akenfield forms a unique document of a way of life that has, in many ways, disappeared.

Akenfield

A compilation of the subversive, important and entertaining writer of Hunter S. Thompson - renowned American writer of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas 
 
'It would not do to be found in the desert under these circumstances: firing wildly into the cactus from a car full of drugs...' 
 
Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone showcases the evolution of the writer of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hell's Angels, through his work at the magazine that he helped to put on the map. Jann S. Wenner, Hunter Thompson's editor and friend for nearly thirty-five years, has chosen the pieces, including many never collected before. They show how Thompson's Rolling Stone writing, when taken as a whole, forms an extended, allusive autobiography of the writer himself as he pursues his lifelong obsession, the king-hell story of them all: The Death of the American Dream.

Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone

The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

Evelyn Waugh

Nancy Mitford

Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh were two of the twentieth century's most amusing and gifted writers, who matched wits and traded literary advice in more than five hundred letters over twenty-two years. Dissecting their friends, criticizing each other's books and concealing their true feelings beneath a barrage of hilarious and knowing repartee, they found it far easier to conduct a friendship on paper than in person. This correspondence provides a colourful glimpse into the literary and social circles of London and Paris, during the Second World War and for twenty years after.

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