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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Dan Gretton

A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE WORK OF NON-FICTION 
A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 
 
'Meticulous, clinical and sobering, a shockingly important and incisive book' David Olusoga 
 
Vast and revelatory, Dan Gretton's I You We Them is an unprecedented study of the perpetrators of crimes against humanity: the 'desk killers' who ordered and directed some of the worst atrocities of the modern era. From Albert Speer's complicity in Nazi barbarism to cases of ecocide and the deaths of activists, Gretton shines a light on the figures 'who, by giving orders, use paper or a phone or a computer to kill, instead of a gun.' Over the past twenty years, Gretton has interviewed survivors and perpetrators, and pored over archives and thousands of pages of testimony. His remarkable insight into the psychology of the desk killers is deepened by the intimate journey he travels with his readers.

I You We Them

Revealing the ‘desk killers’, perpetrators of crimes against humanity

Journeys Beyond Evil: The Desk Killer in History and Today

David Loyn

Afghanistan has been a strategic prize for more than 200 years. Foreign invaders have continually fought across its beautiful and inhospitable terrain, in conflicts variously ruthless, misguided and bloody. A century ago, the common sneer about how British soldiers treated Afghan tribesmen was that they would 'butcher' them, then 'bolt'. 
 
Butcher and Bolt recounts this violent history, beginning with the very first British mission - an encounter that ushered in two centuries of conflict littered with misunderstandings and broken promises, in which the British, the Russians and later the Americans repeatedly underestimated the ability of the Afghans and the power of the Frontier tribes. 
 
In a new final chapter that brings the book right up to date, David Loyn draws on the unique access he has had to Afghanistan over the past two decades to address the emerging threat of the Pakistani Taliban and the challenges that face those now fighting on the most dangerous frontier in the world.

Butcher and Bolt

Johanna Skibsrud

A mesmerising tale of love, justice and the connections that transcend the passage of time, from the Giller prize-winning author Johanna Skibsrud. 
 
The year is 1932, and America is roiling with unrest. Angry World War One veterans, embittered by the ruinous poverty inflicted by the Great Depression, join forces and, calling themselves the Bonus Army, march on Washington to demand payment of the wartime bonus promised them for their service during the war. 
 
Arthur and Douglas Sinclair, an impoverished veteran and his son, make the arduous journey from Kansas to join the march. Alden and Sutton Kelly, the rebellious children of a powerful Washington judge, become involved with the veterans’ struggle, causing an irreparable rift in the Kelly family. When the Bonus march explodes in a violent clash between government and veteran forces, Arthur is falsely accused of conspiracy and disappears. The lives of Douglas, Alden, and Sutton are forever changed – linked inextricably by the absence of Arthur Sinclair. 
 
As these three lives unfold, we are taken to unexpected places – from the underground world of a Soviet spy to Hemingway’s Florida and the hard labour camps of Roosevelt’s New Deal Projects in the Keys; from occultist circles in London to occupied Paris and the eventual fall of Berlin; and finally, to the German prison camp where French composer Olivier Messiaen originally wrote and performed his famous Quartet for the End of Time. Taking us on an unforgettable journey through individual experience and memory against the backdrop of seismic historical events, Quartet for the End of Time is both a profound meditation on human nature and an astonishing literary accomplishment from one of the most original voices to have emerged in recent years.

Quartet for the End of Time

Alex Marshall

National Anthems have been sung for hundreds of years, inspired patriots and rebels, armies and athletes. Each one has its own story. And yet most of us know almost nothing about them ... until now. 
 
In Republic or Death!, Alex Marshall takes to the road on an adventure that includes cycling the route French revolutionaries marched as they first sang 'La Marseillaise'; entering a competition for the best singer of 'The Star-Spangled Banner'; and attempting to bribe his way to an audience with the deposed King of Nepal in order to uncover the story behind the only national anthem written on a Casio keyboard. 
 
As he encounters everyone from presidents and anthem composers to the sports fans and revolutionaries from whom these songs evoke such a wide range of emotions, he brings the incredible stories behind the world's anthems to life, as well as revealing what they mean to us today.

Republic or Death!

Travels in Search of National Anthems

Andrea Wulf

One January morning in 1734, cloth merchant Peter Collinson hurried down to the docks at London's Custom House to collect cargo just arrived from John Bartram in the American colonies. But it was not bales of cotton that awaited him, but plants and seeds... 
 
Over the next forty years, Bartram would send hundreds of American species to England, where Collinson was one of a handful of men who would foster a national obsession and change the gardens of Britain forever: Philip Miller, author of the bestselling Gardeners Dictionary; the Swede Carl Linnaeus, whose standardised botanical nomenclature popularised botany; the botanist-adventurer Joseph Banks and his colleague Daniel Solander who both explored the strange flora of Tahiti and Australia on Captain Cook's Endeavour. 
 
This is the story of these men - friends, rivals, enemies, united by a passion for plants. Set against the backdrop of the emerging empire and the uncharted world beyond, The Brother Gardeners tells the story how Britain became a nation of gardeners.

The Brother Gardeners

Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession

Lara Prescott

________________________ 
'Utterly compelling... I absolutely loved it' Sarah Winman 
'Tantalising' Sunday Times 
'Thoroughly enjoyable' Guardian 
________________________ 
No one looks twice at the women in the typing pool. 
 
No one knows that two of them are trading secrets. 
 
The secret is a book, the size of the one in your hands, and within its pages, a love story that could change the world. 
 
But where there is love there is pain. And where there is deception, formidable danger... 
________________________ 
'Mixing Mad Men and John le Carré ... addictive' i paper 
 
'Irresistibly charged' Mail on Sunday

The Secrets We Kept

The sensational Cold War spy thriller

Dylan Jones

One Day: Saturday 13 July 1985, nearly two billion people woke up with one purpose. Nearly a third of humanity knew where they were going to be that day. Watching, listening to, attending: Live Aid. 
One Decade: Britain in the Eighties was different. The culture was different, the politics were different, and our engagement with the world was different. And it was just one day in 1985 that showed how different it was. 
 
In One Day, One Decade Dylan Jones tells the story of the Eighties through that day at Wembley, sweeping backwards to the end of the Seventies, and forward to the start of the Nineties. It draws on his personal reminiscences and perspective of music, media, fashion, politics and all forms of pop culture to frame the decade. 
 
This is a big book but not a exhaustive and dry social history. Live Aid was the decade’s pinch point, when a nation's attitudes and expectations were somehow captured and changed forever. The author suggests that before Live Aid, Britain was one place, and after Live Aid it was another. 
 
Britain in the Eighties was a juxtaposition of militancy and profligacy, a country where industry was being broken down, societies were being demolished, and unemployment became an inevitable lifestyle choice: yet the Eighties was also the apotheosis of pop culture, a decade where entertainment, opinion and subjectivity were more important than ever before. 
 
Dylan Jones was at the heart of the 1980s editing the seminal magazines i-D and The Face. He was one of the Blitz Kids and was both a commentator and one of the style-makers of the time. This is a controversial book, a story told from the inside by one who was at the centre of events.

The Eighties

One Day, One Decade

Ursula Buchan

SHORTLISTED FOR INSPIRATIONAL BOOK OF THE YEAR AT THE 2014 GARDEN MEDIA GUILD AWARDS. 
 
The wonderfully evocative story of how Britain’s World War Two gardeners – with great ingenuity, invincible good humour and extraordinary fortitude – dug for victory on home turf. 
 
A Green and Pleasant Land tells the intriguing and inspiring story of how Britain's wartime government encouraged and cajoled its citizens to grow their own fruit and vegetables. As the Second World War began in earnest and a whole nation listened to wireless broadcasts, dug holes for Anderson shelters, counted their coupons and made do and mended, so too were they instructed to ‘Dig for Victory’. 
 
Ordinary people, as well as gardening experts, rose to the challenge: gardens, scrubland, allotments and even public parks were soon helping to feed a nation deprived of fresh produce. As Ursula Buchan reveals, this practical contribution to the Home Front was tackled with thrifty ingenuity, grumbling humour and extraordinary fortitude. The simple act of turning over soil and tending new plants became important psychologically for a population under constant threat of bombing and even invasion. Gardening reminded people that their country and its more innocent and insular pursuits were worth fighting for. Gardening in wartime Britain was a part of the fight for freedom.

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