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Jay Rayner

I have been a restaurant critic for over a decade, written reviews of well over 700 establishments, and if there is one thing I have learnt it is that people like reviews of bad restaurants. No, scratch that. They adore them, feast upon them like starving vultures who have spotted fly-blown carrion out in the bush. 
 
They claim otherwise, of course. Readers like to present themselves as private arbiters of taste; as people interested in the good stuff. I'm sure they are. I'm sure they really do care whether the steak was served au point as requested or whether the soufflé had achieved a certain ineffable lightness. And yet, when I compare dinner to bodily fluids, the room to an S &amp; M chamber in Neasden (only without the glamour or class), and the bill to an act of grand larceny, why, then the baying crowd is truly happy. 
 
Don't believe me? Then why, presented with the chance to buy this ebook filled with accounts of twenty restaurants - their chefs, their owners, their poor benighted front of house staff - getting a complete stiffing courtesy of the sort of vitriolic bloody-curdling review which would make the victims call for their mummies, did you seize it with both hands?

My Dining Hell

Twenty Ways To Have a Lousy Night Out

Richard Burton

Disguised as a Persian dervish, Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890) set out to become the first Christian to penetrate the Muslim shrines of Medina and Mecca - a reckless stunt that would have resulted in his being executed if discovered. Endlessly observant, amused, boastful and engaging, Burton here describes his time in Cairo (including a memorable drinking contest with a ferocious Albanian mercenary captain), his crossing of the Red Sea in a crazily overloaded pilgrim boat and his arrival in the fabled Nejd. 
 
Great Journeys allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries &ndash; but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own. Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things: Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent and implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and flowers new to science. Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which so much was still to be discovered.

To the Holy Shrines

Carley Fortune

Good things always happen at the lake. After all, it's where Alice took that photo, the image that changed her life. Alice loves her career as a photographer, but sometimes she just needs to be in that magical place, back by the lake at Barry’s Bay. Charlie was only nineteen when Alice unknowingly took his picture. Now, Alice is faced with the man who helped make her career. Summer with Charlie is a balm for Alice’s soul. But one night, when she looks up and sees his piercing blue gaze on her, things start to feel different. 
 
But will the truth of their past drive a wedge between them, or bring them closer together?

One Golden Summer

John Lewis-Stempel

The Charente: roofs of red terracotta tiles, bleached-white walls, windows shuttered against the blaring sun. The baker does his rounds in his battered little white van with a hundred warm baguettes in the back, while a cat picks its way past a Romanesque church, the sound of bells skipping across miles of rolling, glorious countryside. 
 
For many years a farmer in England, John Lewis-Stempel yearned once again to live in a landscape where turtle doves purr and nightingales sing, as they did almost everywhere in his childhood. He wanted to be self-sufficient, to make his own wine and learn the secrets of truffle farming. And so, buying an old honey-coloured limestone house with bright blue shutters, the Lewis-Stempels began their new life as peasant farmers. 
 
Over that first year, Lewis-Stempel fell in love with the French countryside, from the wild boar that trot past the kitchen window to the glow-worms and citronella candles that flicker in the evening garden. Although it began as a practical enterprise, it quickly became an affair of the heart: of learning to bite the end off the morning baguette; taking two hours for lunch; in short, living the good life - or as the French say, La Vie.

La Vie

A year in rural France

Iain Sinclair

Echoing his journey in London Orbital over a decade ago, Iain Sinclair narrates his second circular walk around the capital. Shortly after rush-hour and accompanied by a rambling companion, Sinclair begins walking along London's Overground network, or, 'Ginger Line'. With characteristic playfulness, detours into folk history, withering assessments of the political classes and a joyful allegiance to the ordinary oddball, Sinclair guides us on a tour of London's trendiest new transport network - and shows the shifting, changing city from new and surprising angles.

London Overground

A Day's Walk Around the Ginger Line

Saroo Brierley

Aged just five, Saroo Brierley was separated from his family in India when he boarded a train that took him 1500km from his hometown. After weeks surviving alone on the streets of Calcutta, he was eventually adopted by an Australian couple. 
 
As an adult, Saroo couldn't help but think about the family he'd lost. Years later, he swapped the map of India on his wall for Google Earth, scouring it for landmarks he knew from his childhood. One day, he saw something he recognised, and he set off on a journey to find his mother...

Lion

A Long Way Home

Robin Halstead

Jason Hazeley

Alex Morris

Joel Morris

Leave the hordes behind, pack some sandwiches and head off for a grand day out. Whether it's the National Fruit Collection or the pub where time stood still, Britain is stuffed full of surprising and idiosyncratic local attractions. 
 
The authors of Bollocks to Alton Towers, the bestselling celebration of the plucky underdogs of tourism, have ventured even farther off the beaten track and into the corners that corporate branding forgot, to bring you more unique, glorious and uncomonly British days out. Here you'll discover: 
 
The garden centre with a replica of Del Boy's living room 
 
The joys of a Melton Mowbray pork pie pilgramage 
 
The rude charms of the Boscastle Witchcraft Museum 
 
The Clowns' Gallery that paints a smile on Hackney's face 
 
This book is a reminder of all the odd things that make the British what we are. A hidden, eccentric and joyous world of teas, fans, trains, shoes and puppets is waiting for you out there - far from the sodding crowd.

More Bollocks to Alton Towers

Katie Kitamura

Can you be a stranger in your own country? 
 
A Japanese-American raised in California, 24-year-old Katie Kitamura returns to Japan to discover the country she left behind. 
 
Travelling across this foreign landscape, she visits middle-class gambling halls, fight stadiums and giant shopping meccas, luxury care homes and cramped apartments housing four generations under a single roof. And she wonders in which version of modern Japan she might have belonged. 
 
Defined by its adventurous youth culture, but with the fastest-ageing population in the world, renowned for its strict social code, but producing the black-comedy violence of the Battle Royale films, the Japan she discovers is an often contradictory land of Godzilla toys and war memorials, of futuristic manga characters and brightly coloured vending machines.

Japanese for Travellers

A Journey Through Modern Japan

Giles Goodhead

Travelling football fanatic Giles Goodhead drags a series of unsuspecting friends and relatives to eight of the world's greatest derby games. From the noisiest (Barcelona) to the scariest (a toss-up between Istanbul and Glasgow) Us vs Them desribes the thrills of gate-crashing grudge matches in cities split by football. Eight unique trips add up to a highly entertaining commentary on football - and tribalism - around the world.

Us v Them

Journeys to the World's Greatest Football Derbies

Ben Fogle

Welcomed with open arms, derided as a pig-ignorant tourist and occasionally mocked mercilessly for his trouble, Ben Fogle visited the last flag-flying outposts of the British Empire. 
 
With caution, dignity and a spare pair of pants thrown to the wind, he set out to discover just exactly who would choose to live on islands as remote as these and - more importantly - tried to figure out exactly why. Landing himself on islands so isolated, wind-swept, barren and just damned peculiar that they might have Robinson Crusoe thinking twice, Fogle: 
 
- Almost becomes lunch on the appropriately named Carcass Island 
 
- Gets deported from Pitcairn for being both a spy and a smuggler 
 
- Uncovers the story of the tyrant who became St Helena's most unwilling and least popular guest 
 
- And witnesses a shark attack from a respectable distance. 
 
Why he went, what he did when he got there and how exactly he got back in one piece makes for an eye-opening but affectionate look into life in these unique, peculiar places.

The Teatime Islands

Adventures in Britain's Faraway Outposts

Fredrik Sjöberg

Stories just begin. We rarely know where and almost never why. It doesn't matter. Nothing is certain any longer. I just want to shut my eyes, point at random and say, as a sort of experiment, that once, when I was sixteen years old, I spent a whole night singing romantic songs in the top of a pine tree. That's where it may have started. 
 
In this follow-up to The Fly Trap, Sjöberg continues to explore the pleasures and trials of those who spend their time tracing the smallest details of the natural world. In these two tales, he calls on his childhood memories and experience as a hoverfly collector, and follows the trail of long forgotten entomologists before him who left their native Sweden for the United States. From Stockholm to the Grand Canyon, Sjöberg contemplates the richness of life and the strange paths it leads us on.

The Art of Flight

Jeremy Clarkson

In November 2016 we woke up to the news that the forthright presenter of a popular television programme had become the most powerful man on the planet. His name, sadly, was not Jeremy Clarkson, but we might not have been any more surprised if it had been. 
 
 Because the world seems to have taken a decidedly odd turn since Jeremy last reflected on the state of things between the covers of a book. But who better than JC to help us navigate our way through the mess? 
 
 And while he's being trying to make sense of it all he's discovered one or two things along the way, including 
 
- The disabling effects of being vegan 
- How Blackpool might be improved by drilling a hole through it 
- The problem with meditation 
- A perfect location for rebuilding Palmyra 
- Why Tom Cruise can worship lizards if he wants to 
 
 It's all been a bit unsettling. 
 
 But don't worry. If You'd Just Let Me Finish is Clarkson at his best. He may be as bemused, exasperated, amused and surprised as the rest of us, but in a world gone crazy, thank God someone has still got his head screwed on ...

If You’d Just Let Me Finish

Ekow Eshun

'Where are you from?'  'No, where are you really from?'  These questions, which he has been asked since boyhood, drive Ekow Eshun to travel through Ghana in search of his roots, and lead him on an exploration of history and belonging, from slavery in Africa and the West to the present day and what it means to be black.  In search of answers, Ekow unearths yet more questions, some shocking contradictions and some long-forgotten truths about his family past...

Black Gold of the Sun

Searching for Home in England and Africa

Mark Twain

One of the great derisive monuments to the imbecilities of the tourist experience, Mark Twain's (1835-1910) account of his tour with a group of fellow Americans around the sights of Europe is both hilarious and touching, Twain's exasperation and dismay at the phoney and exploitative being matched by his excitement and pleasure in the genuinely beautiful. 
 
Great Journeys allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries &ndash; but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own. Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things: Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent and implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and flowers new to science. Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which so much was still to be discovered.

Can-Cans, Cats and Cities of Ash

Gerald Durrell

'In the gloom it came along the branches towards me, its round, hypnotic eyes blazing, its spoon-like ears turning to and fro independently like radar dishes . . . it was Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky come to life . . . one of the most incredible creatures I had ever been privileged to meet.' 
 
The fourth largest island in the world, Madagascar is home to woodlice the size of golf balls, moths the size of Regency fans and the Aye-Aye, a type of lemur held by local superstion to be an omen of death. But when Gerald Durrell visited the island, the destruction of the forests meant that the Aye-Aye and many other creatures were in danger of extinction. 
Told with his unique sense of humour and inimitable charm, Gerald Durrell's The Aye Aye and I is the final adventure from one of Britain's best loved conservationists.

The Aye-Aye and I

On the trail of the American Beats, Iain Sinclair makes a delirious and perhaps ill-fated expedition in the footsteps of Malcolm Lowry, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Charles Olson and Gary Snyder. It is a journey in search of literary ghosts behind mirages of volcanoes and the Old West. In which rumours vie with false memories and unreliable reports to steer our guide from one strange adventure into another. It is an odyssey in which the beginning offers no clues as to where it may end.

American Smoke

Journeys to the End of the Light

Mary Wortley Montagu

Travelling through the wartorn Balkans with her husband on what proved to be a wholly useless diplomatic mission to Constantinople, Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) left a vivid, informative, clever account of her adventures in the mysterious, sophisticated culture of Ottoman palaces, bathing places and courts which - even as her husband's career was falling apart - she could not have enjoyed more. 
 
Great Journeys allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries &ndash; but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own. Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things: Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent and implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and flowers new to science. Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which so much was still to be discovered.

Life on the Golden Horn

Annie Hawes

During the course of Annie Hawes' new book, local culinary superstar, Ciccio, gradually takes over as Annie's constant companion. How irresistible is a man who first demonstrates his affection and esteem by inviting her into his vineyard to help himmix up cow manure, which she spends the afternoon slapping onto an old pizza oven to improve its insulation, before driving her at terrifying speed to a Herbie Hancock concert? But even with Ciccio's help, the everyday life of Ligurian folk never seems to lose its surreal edge for Annie. How long does she have to stay at Diano San Pietro before it all becomes normal run-of-the-mill stuff and ceases to amaze her? Will she ever manage to go native?

Ripe for the Picking

George Mikes

A complete guide to the British Way of Life. If you're British, you'll love it. If you're not, you'll recognise it. 
_______ 
 
Born in Hungary, George Mikes spent more than forty years in the Britain observing behaviours and misbehaviours of local and foreign Brits. 
 <ul><li>Queuing: &quot;An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.&quot;</li><li>How to plan a town: &quot;Street names should be painted clearly and distinctly on large boards. Then hide these boards carefully.&quot;</li><li>Sex: &quot;Continental people have sex lives: the English have hot water bottles.&quot;</li></ul> 
With essential chapters such as &quot;How to Avoid Travelling&quot;, &quot;In Praise of Television&quot;, &quot;On Not Complaining&quot; and &quot;How to Panic Quietly&quot;, they&rsquo;ll get to know Britain like never before with this fun and informative gift! 
_______ 
 
WHAT READERS ARE SAYING: 
 
'Got me in tears of laughter' 
 
'Hilarious and informative essays about the British way of life' 
 
'So many people have tried to describe the English mentality . . . This book is as near as you can get!' 
 
'Laugh-out-loud hilarious, witty and insightful

How to be a Brit

The hilariously accurate, witty and indispensable manual for everyone longing to attain True Britishness

Alan Booth

One sunny spring morning in the 1970s, an unlikely Englishman set out on a pilgrimage that would take him across the entire length of Japan. Travelling only along small back roads, Alan Booth travelled on foot from Soya, the country's northernmost tip, to Sata in the extreme south, traversing three islands and some 2,000 miles of rural Japan. His mission: 'to come to grips with the business of living here,' after having spent most of his adult life in Tokyo. 
 
The Roads to Sata is a wry, witty, inimitable account of that prodigious trek, vividly revealing the reality of life in off-the-tourist-track Japan. Journeying alongside Booth, we encounter the wide variety of people who inhabit the Japanese countryside - from fishermen and soldiers, to bar hostesses and school teachers, to hermits, drunks and the homeless. We glimpse vast stretches of coastline and rambling townscapes, mountains and motorways; watch baseball games and sunrises; sample trout and Kilamanjaro beer, hear folklore, poems and smutty jokes. Throughout, we enjoy the wit and insight of a uniquely perceptive guide, and more importantly, discover a new face of an often-misunderstood nation.

The Roads to Sata

A 2000-mile walk through Japan

Tim Flannery

Throwim Way Leg is a book of wonder and excitement, struggle and sadness, a love letter to Papua New Guinea and Irian Jaya. 'In New Guinea Pidgin,' Tim Flannery explains, 'throwim way leg means to go on a journey. It describes the action of thrusting out your leg to take the first step of what can be a long march...' Here he invites us to share in his breathtaking adventures, as he meets skilled hunters and befriends a shaman, climbs mountains never before scaled by Europeans, discovers new species and, deep in the jungle, stumbles across the giant bones of extinct marsupials. He also writes movingly about the fate of indigenous people when their intricate cultures collide with mining companies and the high-tech modern world.

Throwim Way Leg

An Adventure

Griff Rhys Jones

In the summer of 2002, two profoundly amateur sailors, Griff and Bob, set off in an elderly yacht for Russia, because, on the map, it looked easier than sailing to Cornwall. They took Baines with them, as he knew how to mend the engine. And this is their story. 
 
Over four long months of applied bickering in a vessel no bigger than a London taxi, they visited most of the geographically interesting restaurants on the Baltic seaboard. They sailed, over, and, even at one point, onto the mysterious heart of the Nordic world. They pushed themselves to the very limits of human endurance, before finally agreeing to wash their sleeping bags on a cool cycle at number six. 
 
To the Baltic with Bob is the full account of their stirring journey through the longest heat wave the frozen north has ever suffered; of three men in search of the answer to a troubling question: can you really outmanoeuvre a mid-life crisis by running away to sea?

To the Baltic with Bob

An Epic Misadventure

Daniel Bergner

In this moving and unforgettable narrative journalist Daniel Bergner travels into the heart of Sierra Leone, a country torn apart by war. This is the story of the people he encounters in a realm of fire and jungle as they rebuild their lives: Lamin, who lost his hands to save his daughter; Komba, child soldier and sometime cannibal; Neall Ellis, the mercenary pilot with a conscience; Valentine Strasser the embittered ex-dictator; and the Western outsiders trying to save a land of startling beauty and brutality. 
 
Shocking, often heartbreaking yet ultimately hopeful, Soldiers of Light is a story of survival and a haunting work of literary reportage.

Soldiers of Light

Redmond O'Hanlon

In 1986, Redmond O'Hanlon decided to undertake a four-month trip through Venezuala, up the Orinoco River and across the Amazon Basin. The trip involved the risk of contracting dysentery, rabies and river blindness, encountering jaguars, vipers, anacondas, 640-volt electric eels, and giant catfish known to bite off human feet. He struggled to find a willing travelling companion. 
 
In Trouble Again is the gripping, hilarious and unpredictable account of that trip, as one intrepid ornithologist and his unsuspecting Oxford chum stumble from one catastrophe to the next.

In Trouble Again

A Journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon

James Attlee

For many of us the moon, and the chill light it casts, are things we either ignore or take for granted. It wouldn't enter our heads therefore to set off around the world in search of moonlight. But, as James Attlee's eccentric quest proves, we couldn't be more wrong. 
 
From Normandy to Naples, Wales to Arizona, Las Vegas to Japan, Attlee explores moonlight's many moods and meanings. Taking in the ancient and modern, art and literature, science and music, Nocturne travels far and deep to provide a portrait of an enigmatic light increasingly endangered in our over-illuminated world.

Nocturne

A Journey in Search of Moonlight

Paul Theroux

After eleven years living as an American in London, Paul Theroux set out to travel clockwise round the coast and find out what Britain and the British are really like. It was 1982, the summer of the Falklands War and the royal baby, and the ideal time, he found, to surprise the British into talking about themselves. The result is vivid and absolutely riveting reading. 
 
'A sharp and funny descriptive writer. One of his golden talents, perhaps because he is American and therefore classless in British eyes, is the ability to chat up and get on with all sorts ...' The Times.

The Kingdom by the Sea

A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain

Volume 4 in the bestselling World According to Clarkson series 
 
Jeremy Clarkson had a dream. A world where the nonsensical made sense, the idiotic was abolished and the sheer bloody brilliant was embraced. In How Hard Can It Be? our hero embarks on a quest to set the world to rights. Again. 
 
En-route he discovers how rhubarb will become the new crack, that a comb over will end anyone's quest for global domination and what unites a Filipino chambermaid in Abergavenny with Prince Andrew. 
 
For anyone who's ever woken up and thought the time has come to stop the nonsense and celebrate the sensational, read on. Because seriously, how hard can it be? 
 
Jeremy Clarkson began his writing career on the Rotherham Advertiser. He now writes for the Sun and the Sunday Times and is the tallest person working in British television.

How Hard Can It Be?

The World According to Clarkson Volume 4

Redmond O'Hanlon describes his extraordinary three-week trip on an Orkney trawler as it journeys far into the north Atlantic in search of its catch. Young skipper Jason Schofield has a 2 million pound overdraft on his boat, the Norlantean, which is why he has to go out in a Category One Force 12 hurricane when the rest of the Scottish fleet has run for shelter. O'Hanlon may not be much help when it comes to seamanship - in the words of one of the crew, he doesn't know his arse from his tit - but he is able to wax lyrical on the amazing deep-sea fish to be found north of the Wyville Thomson Ridge: greater argentine, flying squid, blue ling, the truly disgusting hagfish and many other exotics. 
Combining humour with erudition, O'Hanlon has written a vivid and compulsively readable account of a journey that for sheer terror beats all his previous adventures.

Trawler

A Journey Through the North Atlantic

Alice Correia

A landmark anthology on British art history, bringing together overlooked and marginalized perspectives from 'the critical decade' 
 
What is Black art? This vital anthology gives voice to a generation of artists of African, Asian and Caribbean heritage who worked within and against British art institutions in the 1980s, including Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Eddie Chambers and Rasheed Araeen. It brings together artists' statements, interviews, exhibition catalogue essays and reviews, most of which have been unavailable for many years and resonate profoundly today. Together they interrogate the term 'Black art' itself, and revive a forgotten dialogue from a time when men and women who had been marginalized made themselves heard within the art world and beyond.

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