Tom Fletcher

Tom Fletcher is one of the UK's most popular children's authors. 
 
Tom's books have been translated into 42 languages and to date he has sold over 7 million copies of his books in the UK alone, and 10 million globally. 
 
The Christmasaurus was the biggest debut children's novel of 2016 and was shortlisted for a British Book Award. Since then, Tom has published several more chart-topping children's novels, including The Christmasaurus and the Naughty List, The Creakers and the instant number-one bestseller The Danger Gang. 
 
For younger readers, Tom writes the incredibly successful Who's in Your Book? picture-book series and is one half of the author duo behind the Dinosaur that Pooped picture-book series with bandmate Dougie Poynter. 
 
For older readers, Tom co-authors the Eve of Man series with his wife, Giovanna Fletcher. 
 
As well as his career as an author, Tom is also a founding member of the Brit Award-winning band McFly, which has sold over 10 million records worldwide.

Andy Day is one of the best-known stars of preschool television. Andy is the star of multiple children's programmes, most notably his Andy's Adventures, which span from dinosaurs, safari, aquatic, and global, and he is excited to be currently filming brand new adventures, which are going to be dinoriffic! Alongside this he is also the star of 'Andy and the Band' which features Andy's real-life pop band Andy and the Odd Socks, who have played hundreds of live shows, and released over three albums. Andy won a BAFTA for his performance in ‘As You Like It at Shakespeare's Globe’. Andy is also the author of the bestselling Dino Dad young fiction series, illustrated by Steven Lenton, and his first picture book, Dylan the Dino Boy Saves Christmas, illustrated by Alex Patrick, will be published in October 2025. Instagram: @andyday81 | X: @AndyDayTV

Andy Day

Andre Hue

Andy Webb worked as a reporter for BBC Television for more than 15 years, appearing daily as a front-of-camera reporter, first on BBC News then as a reporter and presenter on primetime shows including the BBC’sWatchdog, before embarking on a career as an award-winning director of documentary films. It was his journalism over a 15-year period which first revealed the truth behind the infamous BBC Panorama interview with Princess Diana and so exposed the greatest scandal in the history of the BBC. Since breaking the story in 2020, Andy Webb has been invited to write on the story for a range of leading publications, including the Times, Sunday Times, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and Sunday Telegraph, and has also been interviewed many times on television, radio and podcasts both in the UK and overseas. Andy is married, with four children, and lives in West London.

Andy Webb

ANDY HALL grew up in the shadow of Denali. He is the former editor and publisher of Alaska magazine. He lives in Chugiak, Alaska.

Andy Hall

Andy Watt, a graduate of Warwickshire School of Art has spent the last two decades illustrating columns, articles, and editorial pieces for The Guardian, The Times and The Independent. His work has featured in many other magazines in the U.K and USA. He has illustrated several books, worked on advertising campaigns, and created character designs animated on television. 
 
Andy has an irrational fear of restaurants, but has twice eaten in Jamie Oliver's restaurant ‘Fifteen' in Cornwall which he describes as 'very nice’. Thank you Jamie, please don't take offence at my silly drawing.

Andy Watt

Andy Lane

Andy Weir built a two-decade career as a software engineer until the success of his first published novel, The Martian, allowed him to live out his dream of writing full-time. He is a lifelong space nerd and a devoted hobbyist of such subjects as relativistic physics, orbital mechanics, and the history of manned spaceflight. He also mixes a mean cocktail. He lives in California.

Andy Weir

Andy King is a Lecturer in History at the University of Southampton. Among his many historical interests are the studies of castles, military culture and Anglo-Scottish relations in the late medieval period.

Andy King

Andy Cave

Andy Bull

BBC Books

Ivo Andric was born in 1892 in Travnik, Bosnia of Croat parents and grew up alongside Orthodox Christians, Moslems and Roman Catholics in Višegrad, the town on the banks of the Drina where his book is set. Until 1941 he served as a Yugoslav diplomat, then, placed under house arrest in Belgrade by the occupying Germans, Andric turned to writing. In 1961 he was awarded the Noble prize for literature. He died in 1975.

Ivo Andric

LJ Andrews is a USA Today bestselling author of fantasy romance. She mystically brings to life worlds of dark Nordic and Viking myths bound by conflicts that bring together impassioned heroes and heroines. In her non-author moments, she is courageously corralling her four children to the myriad of life activities that involves, along with spending time with her favorite hero, her husband. Add two high maintenance dogs and a sassy conure to the mix and that sums it up. She thrives spending time in the Rocky Mountains where she lives in Utah.

LJ Andrews

Andre Sólo is a researcher, and co-founder and editor-in-chief for Highly Sensitive Refuge. He has co-authored a number of scientific papers and his writing has appeared in Psychology Today, The Huffington Post and Quiet Revolution. He has been interviewed by The Telegraph, Vogue and the BBC. Andre is based in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Andre Sólo

Andrew Fox

Andre Gide

Andy Riley

Andy Sloan

Andy Neill

From the day he was found in a carrier bag on the steps of Guy's Hospital in London, Andy McNab has led an extraordinary life. 
 
As a teenage delinquent, Andy McNab kicked against society. As a young soldier he waged war against the IRA in the streets and fields of South Armagh. As a member of 22 SAS he was at the centre of covert operations for nine years – on five continents. During the Gulf War he commanded Bravo Two Zero, a patrol that, in the words of his commanding officer, 'will remain in regimental history for ever'. Awarded both the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) and Military Medal (MM) during his military career, McNab was the British Army's most highly decorated serving soldier when he finally left the SAS. 
 
Since then Andy McNab has become one of the world’s best-selling writers, drawing on his insider knowledge and experience. As well as several non-fiction bestsellers including Bravo Two Zero, the biggest selling British work of military history, he is the author of the best-selling Nick Stone and Tom Buckingham thrillers. He has also written a number of books for children. 
 
Besides his writing work, he lectures to security and intelligence agencies in both the USA and UK, works in the film industry advising Hollywood on everything from covert procedure to training civilian actors to act like soldiers. He continues to be a spokesperson and fundraiser for both military and literacy charities.

Andy McNab

Andy Hixon lives in Sheffield. He works with clay, photography, digital media and animation.

Andy Hixon

Andy Goram

André Gide

Andy Clark is a Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex, and at Macquarie University, Australia. He is the author of six books including Supersizing the Mind, Natural-Born Cyborgs and Surfing Uncertainty. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy, and is an occasional Academic Consultant for Google, UK.

Andy Clark

Veronica Park (VP) Anderson (she/they) is a neurodivergent, queer, feminist millennial writer with a resume that Victor Frankenstein would disown for being “a bit much.” V’s previous job titles include: award-winning community theater actor, professional lecturer on cruise ships, indie film producer, literary agent, and creative project manager; however, “writer” is the title that always fits. 
 
V plays competitive flat track roller derby as “Scarlet Five” #55 and prefers the pivot role, aka “surprise jamming.” Born in Alaska and raised in Oregon, she currently lives with her partner in Upstate NY and has two cats named Skeletor and Bo-Catan.

V.P. Anderson

Mark Andrew

Peter Andre

Andrei Bely

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Stephen Anderton

Christopher Lloyd (Christo) was one of the greatest English gardeners of the twentieth century, perhaps the finest plantsman of them all. His creation is the garden at Great Dixter in East Sussex, and it is a tribute to his vision and achievement that, after his death in 2006, the Heritage Lottery Fund made a grant of £4 million to help preserve it for the nation. This enjoyable and revealing book - the first biography of Christo - is also the story of Dixter from 1910 to 2006, a unique unbroken history of one English house and one English garden spanning a century. 
 
It was Christo's father, Nathaniel, who bought the medieval manor at Dixter and called in the fashionable Edwardian architect, Lutyens, to rebuild the house and lay out the garden. And it was his mother, Daisy, who made the first wild garden in the meadows there. Christo was born at Dixter in 1921. Apart from boarding school, war service and a period at horticultural college, he spent his whole life there, constantly re-planting and enriching the garden, while turning out landmark books and exhaustive journalism. Opinionated, argumentative and gloriously eccentric, he changed the face of English gardening through his passions for meadow gardening, dazzling colours and thorough husbandry. 
 
As the baby of a family of six - five boys and a girl - Christo was stifled by his adoring mother. Music-loving and sports-hating, he knew the Latin names of plants before he was eight. This fascinating book reveals what made Christo tick by examining his relationships with his generous but scheming mother, his like-minded friends (such as gardeners Anna Pavord and Beth Chatto) and his colleagues (including his head gardener, Fergus Garrett, a plantsman in Christo's own mould).

Christopher Lloyd

His Life at Great Dixter

Andrew Wheatcroft

In 1683, two empires - the Ottoman, based in Constantinople, and the Habsburg dynasty in Vienna - came face to face in the culmination of a 250-year power struggle: the Great Siege of Vienna. 
 
Within the city walls the choice of resistance over surrender to the largest army ever assembled by the Turks created an all-or-nothing scenario: every last survivor would be enslaved or ruthlessly slaughtered. The Turks had set their sights on taking Vienna, the city they had long called 'The Golden Apple' since their first siege of the city in 1529. Both sides remained resolute, sustained by hatred of their age-old enemy, certain that their victory would be won by the grace of God. 
 
Eastern invaders had always threatened the West: Huns, Mongols, Goths, Visigoths, Vandals and many others. The Western fears of the East were vivid and powerful and, in their new eyes, the Turks always appeared the sole aggressors. Andrew Wheatcroft's extraordinary book shows that this belief is a grievous oversimplification: during the 400 year struggle for domination, the West took the offensive just as often as the East. 
 
As modern Turkey seeks to re-orient its relationship with Europe, a new generation of politicians is exploiting the residual fears and tensions between East and West to hamper this change. The Enemy at the Gate provides a timely and masterful account of this most complex and epic of conflicts.

The Enemy at the Gate

Habsburgs, Ottomans and the Battle for Europe

Kate Chisholm

Dr Johnson is often thought of as a strident, overbearing conversationalist, a man who famously asserted that 'Women have all the liberty they should wish to have'. But in this revealing book Kate Chisholm argues it is time to consider how Johnson lived his life, not just what he said. She proposes that the heart of the man, the truth of his character, can more clearly be seen via his many - close, generous, equal - relationships with women. 
 
At one end of the spectrum were Johnson's mother Sarah; his 'painted poppet' wife Tetty; and the women, like the prostitute Poll Carmichael and the blind poetess Anna Williams, he took in when they had nowhere else to go. At the other end were Mary Wollstonecraft, who refers to Johnson in Vindication of the Rights of Woman; Hester Thrale, renowned wit and Johnson's 'dear mistress'; Elizabeth Carter, whose translation of Epictetus was an instant bestseller; and many more besides. 
 
By looking again at this controversial figure through the eyes of this extraordinary cast of female characters, we can discover the essential and unexpected Johnson.

Wits and Wives

Dr Johnson in the Company of Women

Nigel Saul

The world of medieval chivalry is at once glamorous and violent, alluring yet alien. Our popular views of the period are largely inherited from the nineteenth-century romantics, for whom chivalry evoked images of knights in shining armour, competing for the attention of fair ladies - with pennons and streamers fluttering from castle battlements. 
 
But what is the reality? Were the rituals and romance of chivalry designed to provide an escape from the brutal facts of almost continuous warfare? Or did they instead help regulate the conduct of war and moderate its violent excesses? 
 
Nigel Saul charts the introduction of chivalry by the Normans, the rise of the knightly class as a social elite, the fusion of chivalry with kingship in the fourteenth century and the influence of chivalry on literature, religion and architecture. He shows us a world of kings and barons, castles and cathedrals - a world shaped by Richard the Lionheart and the Crusades, by Magna Carta and the rule of law, by battles like Bannockburn and Crecy, by the Black Death and by tournaments, round tables and the cult of Arthurianism.

For Honour and Fame

Chivalry in England, 1066-1500

Tom Pocock

Alan Moorehead was lionised as a literary man of action: the most famous war correspondent of the Second World War; the award-winning and best-selling author of books that vividly combin adventure and hisotry; the star travel-writer of the New Yorker; and a pioneer advocate of wildlife conservation. Drawing on Moorehead's diaries and correspondence, as well as interviews with his family and friends, Tom Pocock tells the story of a thrilling, but ultimately tragic, life.

Alan Moorehead

Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Bell, artist, sister of Virginia Woolf, wife of Clive Bell and lover of Duncan Grant, is one of the most fascinating and modern figures of the Bloomsbury set, but unlike most of them she rarely put pen to writing paper. When she did, she was witty and illuminating about their early lives. The eldest of the Stephen family, she grew up with Virginia in Victorian gloom at Hyde Park Gate and later blossomed in bohemian style in Bloomsbury. From the twenties to the forties she lived and painted at Charleston Farmhouse like a heroine of the sixties and seventies, at the centre of a colourful world of family, friends, artists and intellectuals. Sketches in Pen and Ink is a unique collection of largely unpublished memoirs - most of them written to be read at meetings of the Memoir club, in which Vanessa writes with wit and charm about herself, her childhood, her remarkable family and friends, her moving relationship with Roger Fry, and her art. Her daughter, Angelica Garnett, has written a vivid and personal introduction which adds considerably to our understanding of this extraordinary woman and artist.

Sketches In Pen And Ink

A Bloomsbury Notebook

Norman Davies

Collected here for the first time are some of the numerous essays and lectures by Norman Davies, author of the bestselling and critically acclaimed Europe, The Isles and Rising '44. Spanning more than fifteen years of his remarkable career, this highly accessible collection addresses many of the issues that continue to dominate the political and cultural climate of Europe today. 
 
From the classical origins of the idea of Europe to the division between East and West during the Cold War; from the Jewish and Islamic strands in European history to the expansion of Europe to other continents; from the misunderstood Allied victory in 1945 to Britain's place in Europe; from reflections on the use and abuse of history to personal recollections on learning languages - this companion volume to the bestselling Europe looks at European history from a variety of unusual and entertaining angles in an equally stimulating and accessible way.

Europe East and West

Richard Aldous

‘Engaging and highly entertaining’ Sunday Times 
 
 The dramatic confrontation between the two 'mighty opposites' of the Victorian age, brilliantly recreated by a talented young historian. 
 
 Gladstone and Disraeli were the fiercest political rivals of the modern age. Their intense hatred was ideological and deeply personal. Victorian Britain ruled the oceans and vast territories 'on which the sun never set'. The vitriolic duel between Gladstone and Disraeli was nothing less than a battle to lead the richest and most powerful nation on earth. 
 
 To Disraeli, his antagonist was an 'unprincipled maniac' characterised by an 'extraordinary mixture of envy, vindictiveness, hypocrisy and superstition'. For Gladstone, his rival was 'The Grand Corrupter' whose destruction he plotted 'day and night, week by week, month by month'. Victorians were electrified by the confrontation. No wonder that when Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass appeared in 1871, so many readers recognised the great adversaries as the warring lion and unicorn 'fighting for the crown'. 
 
 Richard Aldous gives us the first modern telling of this dramatic story of an intense and momentous rivalry. His vivid narrative style - at turns powerful, witty, stirring and theatrical - breathes new life into a familiar, half-remembered tale that is pivotal in Britain's island history. The Lion and the Unicorn is a brilliant rethinking of the Gladstone and Disraeli story for a new generation. 
 
Richard Aldous confirms a perennial truth: in politics, everything is personal.

The Lion and the Unicorn

Gladstone vs Disraeli

Jane Fletcher Geniesse

Fluent in at least seven languages and a writer of ravishing prose accounts of her journeys, Freya Stark was one of the great travel writers of the twentieth century. In 1934 her first book, Valley of the Assassins, was hailed as a classic and T. E. Lawrence pronounced Stark 'a gallant creature, a remarkable person'. 
 
It marked the start of a dazzling career as a writer; explorer and official diplomat which led Stark to explore ancient trading routes in the Yemeni desert, Crusaders' castles in Syria, uncharted regions of Arabia and Alexander the Great's path through Turkey, often travelling alone through dangerous and uncomfortable territories -once having to be airlifted to safety by the RAF. 
 
During the Second World War she worked for the Foreign Office in Baghdad and Cairo and made an ill-fated tour of America for the Ministry of Information. She married late -and unwisely -but continued to travel and write well into old age, going to the Himalayas aged 89, and lived to be 100, leaving a legacy of over thirty volumes of travel writings, autobiography and letters. 
 
Her life reads like an adventure story, imbued with the captivating spirit of the East. Jane Geniesse's ebullient yet touching account of Stark's life uncovers the complexity and charm surrounding someone who was both hugely feted and yet repeatedly disappointed in her private life -a romantic, a complete original and an inspiration to those who followed.

Freya Stark

Passionate Nomad

R M Ogilvie

To undestand the success of the Romans you must understand their piety. Dionysius of Halicarnassus. For over a thousand years, Roman religion satisfied the spiritual needs of a wide range of peoples throughout the empire, because is offered an intelligent and dignified interpretation of how the world functions. It was a firm, yet tolerant, religion whose adherents committed very few crimes in its name and who were healthily free of neuroses. In this short, perceptive study of Roman religious life between 80 BC and AD 69, Professor Ogilvie shows how intimately involved were the Roman gods with human activities. Drawing widely on original material (all of it quoted in translation), he tells us how the Romans prayed, what happened at a sacrifice, what sort of gods they believed in, and how seriously they took their religion - a religion in which actions, , not dogma, was paramount.

The Romans And Their Gods

Martin Gilbert

When Hitler announced that the result of the war in Europe would be 'the complete annihilation of the Jews', he did so in 1942, not only in public, but before an enormous crowd in Berlin. The Allies heard, but, astonishingly, they did not listen. 
 
In 1944, Allied reconnaissance pilots, searching out industrial targets in the area, repeatedly photographed Auschwitz. The pictures, apparently overlooked by the Allies, were routinely filed in government archives and not examined until 1979. 
 
First-hand reports on the horrors of the death camps came to the West by 1944 in the person of two escaped Auschwitz prisoners. Their testimonies, and those of subsequent escapees, were either ignored or dismissed. 
 
Despite the fact that, the same year, Churchill himself had ordered feasibility studies for air strikes on Auschwitz, the RAF not only did nothing, but eventually passed the buck to the Americans, who also did nothing. This book explains the reasons why.

Auschwitz And The Allies

Isaiah Berlin

Isaiah Berlin's celebrated radio lectures on six formative anti-liberal thinkers were delivered on the BBC's Third Programme in 1952. They are published here for the first time, fifty years on. Freedom and its Betrayal is one of Isaiah Berlin's earliest and most convincing expositions of his views on human freedom and the history of ideas, views which later found expression in such famous works as 'Two Concepts of Liberty', and were at the heart of his lifelong work on the Enlightenment and its critics. 
 
In his lucid examinations of sometimes difficult ideas Berlin demonstrates that a balanced understanding and a resilient defence of human liberty depend on learning both from the errors of freedom's alleged defenders and from the dark insights of its avowed antagonists. This book throws light on the early development of Berlin's ideas, and supplements his already published writings with fuller treatments of Helvétius, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel and Saint-Simon, with the ultra-conservative traditionalist Maistre bringing up the rear. 
 
Freedom and its Betrayal shows Berlin at his liveliest and most torrentially spontaneous, testifying to his talents as a teacher of rare brilliance and impact. Listeners tuned in expectantly each week to the broadcasts and found themselves mesmerised by Berlin's astonishingly fluent extempore style. A leading historian of ideas, who was then a schoolboy, records that the lectures 'excited me so much that I sat, for every talk, on the floor beside the wireless, taking notes'. This excitement is at last recreated here for all to share.

Freedom And Its Betrayal

Georgina Ferry

Few scientists have thought more deeply about their calling and its impact on humanity than Max Perutz (1914-2002). Born in Vienna, Jewish by descent, lapsed Catholic by religion, Max came to Cambridge in 1936, to join the lab of the legendary Communist thinker J.D. Bernal. In 1940 he was interned and deported to Canada as an enemy alien, only to be brought back and set to work on a bizarre top secret war project. 
 
Seven years later he founded the small research group in which Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the structure of DNA. Max Perutz himself explored the protein haemoglobin and his work, which won him a shared Nobel Prize in 1962, launched a new era of medicine, heralding today's astonishing advances in the genetic basis of disease. 
 
Max Perutz's story, wonderfully told by Georgina Ferry, brims with life; it has the zest of an adventure novel and is full of extraordinary characters. Max was demanding, passionate and driven but also humorous, compassionate and loving. Georgina Ferry's absorbing biography is a marvellous tribute to a great scientist.

Max Perutz And The Secret Of Life

Norma Clarke

If Aphra Benn is widely regarded as the first important woman writer in English, who was the second? In literary history, the eighteenth century belongs to men: Pope and Swift, Richardson and Fielding. Asked to name a woman, even the specialist stumbles. Jane Austen? She didn't publish until 1811. Aphra Benn herself? She died in 1869. 
 
The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters tells the remarkable but little-known story of women writers in the eighteenth century - of poets, critics, dramatists and scholars celebrated in their own time but all but forgotten by the beginning of the new century. 
 
Eliza Haywood, Catherine Cockburn, Elizabeth Elstob, Delarivier Manley, Elizabeth Rowe, Jane Barker, Elizabeth Thomas, Anna Seward... In a book which ranges from country house to Grub Street, Norma Clarke recovers these and other writers, establishes the reasons for their eclipse and discovers that a room of one's own in the eighteenth century was as likely to be a prison cell as a boudoir.

The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters

Although Isaiah Berlin liked to say that he left philosophy for the history of ideas after the Second World War, there is a decided continuity between his more purely philosophical writings, most of which are collected in this volume, and the more historical work for which he is better known. 
 
Included here are Berlin's early arguments against logical positivism and later essays which more evidently reflect his life-long interest in political theory, intellectual history and the philosophy of history. 
 
In two related pieces he gives his view on the philosopher's task, to uncover the various models - the concepts and categories - that we bring to our experience, and that help to form it. In his own words 'The goal of philosophy is always the same, to assist men to understand themselves and thus operate in the open, and not wildly, in the dark.'

Concepts and Categories

Philosophical Essays

E J M Bowlby

In this third and final volume John Bowlby completes the trilogy Attachment and Loss, his much acclaimed work on the importance of the parental relationship to mental health. Here he examines the ways in which young children respond to a temporary or permanent loss of a mother-figure and the expression of anxiety, grief and mourning which accompany such loss. The theories presented differ in many ways from those advanced by Freud and elaborated by his followers, so much so that the frame of reference now offered for understanding personality development and psychopathology amounts to a new paradigm. 
 
Attachment and Loss is a deeply important series of works that continue to influence the landscape of psychoanalysis and psychology, and Loss its revelatory closing chapter.

Loss - Sadness and Depression

Attachment and Loss Volume 3

Literary Exors Of Q D Leavis

Fiction and the Reading Public provoked fierce controvers when first published in 1932, and it has since come to be recognised as a classic in its field. In her fascinating study, Q D Leavis investigates what has happened to the public taste in the last three centuries and what effect this has had on both the life of the nation and the equality of living for the individual. A brilliant piece of literary exegesis and an illuminating anthropological commentary - DAILY MAIL An illuminating study. . . it offers a rich store of interest, not only in its vigorous scrutiny of the novel and the influences which have shaped it, but also in its study of changing attitudes and tempos of life amont the general public who read novels. . . An achievement of distinguished quality and high value. New Republic. She has performed a noble office by inquiring into the case of the bestseller. The result is no less entertaining than instructive -SATURDAY REVIEW.

Fiction And The Reading Public

Ian Gilmour

Britain in the eighteenth century was deeply divided; riots over politics, food and religion were endemic. Despite the relative liberty of English institutions; the penal code was the harshest in Europe - stealing a hankerchief was a capital offence. In this brilliant history of the hidden side of the eighteenth century, Ian Gilmour argues that violence usually stemmed from the incompetence or arrogance of the ruling class. He tells the story of the great rebellions - of Scotland in 1715 and 1745, of Ireland in 1798 - and the famous episodes of Wilkes and Gordon. But he also paints a vivid picture of the vicious discipline of the army, skulduggery at elections, the class violence of industrial struggles, the ritual violence of duelling and the swingeing punishment of poachers.

Riots, Rising And Revolution

Governance and Violence in Eighteenth Century England

Robin Blake

Far more than a fine horse portraitist, George Stubbs was a painter and a printmaker of the highest importance, on a par with his great contemporaries, Hogarth, Reynolds and Gainsborough. An artist-scientist who emulated Leonardo da Vinci, Stubbs tirelessly explored the natural world, and new ways of representing it. 
 
Born the son of a Liverpool tradesman, Stubbs was self-taught and at first struggled in obscurity as a northern provincial painter. Robin Blake's book uncovers Stubbs's origins and some of the secrets of his youth: sympathy with the Jacobite rebels and Catholicism; and a previously undocumented wife and family in York. 
 
A 'niece', Mary, became his mistress and lifelong companion, working alongside him as he dissected the carcasses of horses. In 1776 he published these investigations as The Anatomy of the Horse, which was his breakthrough, leading to commissions from the most powerful men in Georgian Britain. By tracing the network of patronage and friendship through which George Stubbs operated, Robin Blake reveals the remarkable succession of animals, people and ideas which inspired him. 
 
Stubbs emerges as a man of huge energy and complex sensibility whose artistry was informed by science, politics, literature, classical art and - above all - nature itself.

George Stubbs And The Wide Creation

Animals, People and Places in the Life of George Stubbs 1724-1806

Ross King

In 1508, Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The thirty-three-year-old Michelangelo had very little experience of the physically and technically taxing art of fresco; and, at twelve thousand square feet, the ceiling represented one of the largest such projects ever attempted. 
 
Nevertheless, for the next four years he and a hand-picked team of assistants laboured over the vast ceiling, making thousands of drawings and spending back-breaking hours on a scaffold fifty feet above the floor. The result was one of the greatest masterpieces of all time. This fascinating book tells the story of those four extraordinary years and paints a magnificent picture of day-to-day life on the Sistine scaffolding - and outside, in the upheaval of early sixteenth-century Rome.

Michelangelo And The Pope's Ceiling

Evan S Connell

Never has master storyteller Evan Connell been more enthralling than in these incandescent pages - tales of real-life adventure ranging from the archaeology of Olduvai gorge to the exploration of the Antarctic; from Viking voyages to an Ice Age xylophone. Never has reality so far surpassed mere fiction or fantasy than in this magnificent volume.

The White Lantern And Other Pursuits

Margarete Buber-Neumann

This book is a unique account by a survivor of both the Soviet and Nazi concentration camps: its author, Margarete Buber-Neumann, was a loyal member of the German Communist party. From 1935 she and her second husband, Heinz Neumann, were political refugees in Moscow. In April 1937 Neumann was arrested by the secret police, and executed by the end of the year. She herself was arrested in 1938. 
 
In Under Two Dictators Buber-Neumann describes the two years of suffering she endured in the Soviet prisons and in the huge Central-Asian concentration and slave labour camp of Karaganda; her extradition to the Gestapo in 1940 at the time of the Stalin-Hitler Friendship Pact; and her five years of suffering in the Nazi concentration and death camp for women, Ravensbrück. Her story displays extraordinary powers of observation and of memory as she describes her own fate, as well as those of hundreds of fellow prisoners. She explores the behaviour of the guards, supervisors, police and secret police and compares and contrasts Stalin and Hitler's methods of dictatorship and terror. 
 
First published in Swedish, German and English and subsequently translated and published in a further nine languages, Under Two Dictators is harrowing in its depiction of life under the rule of two of the most brutal regimes the western world has ever seen but also an inspiring story of survival, of ideology and of strength and a clarion call for the protection of democracy.

Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler

With an introduction by Nikolaus Wachsmann

Isabelle Tombs

Robert Tombs

From Blenheim and Waterloo to 'Up Yours, Delors' and 'Hop Off You Frogs', the cross-Channel relationship has been one of rivalry, misapprehension and suspicion. But it has also been a relationship of envy, admiration and affection. 
 
In the nearly two centuries since the final defeat of Napoleon, France and Britain have spent much of that time as allies - an alliance that has been almost as uneasy, as competitive and as ambivalent as the generations of warfare. Their rivalry both on peace and war, for good and ill, has shaped the modern world, from North America to India in the eighteenth century, in Africa, the Middle East and South East Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it is still shaping Europe today. 
 
This magisterial book, by turns provocative and delightful, always fascinating, tells the rich and complex story of the relationship over three centuries, from the beginning of the great struggle for mastery during the reign of Louis XIV to the second Iraq War and the latest enlargement of the EU. It tells of wars and battles, ententes and alliances, but also of food, fashion, sport, literature, sex and music. Its cast ranges from William and Mary to Tony Blair, from Voltaire to Eric Cantona; its sources from ambassadorial dispatches to police reports, from works of philosophy to tabloid newspapers, from guidebooks to cartoons and films. 
 
It's a book which brings both British humour and Gallic panache to the story of these two countries, in sickness and in health, for richer for poorer, in victory and in defeat, in dominance and in decline.

That Sweet Enemy

The British and the French from the Sun King to the Present

Sir Harold Evans

Crawford Gillan

Essential English is an indispensable guide to the use of words as tools of communication. It is written primarily for journalists, yet its lessons are of immense value to all who face the problem of giving information, whether to the general public or within business, professional or social organisations. 
 
FULLY REVISED AND UPDATED BY CRAWFORD GILLAN 
 
RECOMMENDED BY THE SOCIETY OF EDITORS

Essential English for Journalists, Editors and Writers

J.C. Drummond

Anne Wilbraham

Medieval gardens; cookshops; spices; ale, beer, wine and spirits; the food of peasants, labourers, townspeople, the wealthy, the poor and the country gentleman; fish, meat and game; the feeding of infants, children; dairy products; vitamins, proteins, fat and fibre; the adulteration of food; the four bottle man; bread; poaching; tea, coffee and chocolate; food in schools and institutions; sugar and sweetmeats; root crops; the agricultural revolution; the importance of 'white meats', the vegetarian diet; menus and recipes. . . 
 
The Englishman's Food was first published in 1939, fully revised in 1957 and now appears with a new updating introduction. A ground-breaking book, it is a fascinating and authoritative survey of food production, consumption, fashions and follies over a period of five hundred years. 
 
Reprinted with a new introduction by food editor Tom Jaine.

The Englishman's Food

Five Centuries of English Diet

Stacy Schiff

A fascinating account of the life of one of the century's great eccentrics - the brilliant Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Born in 1900 of impoverished aristocracy, he swiftly developed a mania for aviation, despite his chaotic mind and total technological incompetence. He flew reconnaissance missions in the War and wrote some strange and wonderful books, including the classic children's story THE LITTLE PRINCE, between theatrically executed airplane crashed. He died in the air in 1944, and his brief life instantly acquired mythical status. 'Every facet of Saint-Exupery's short and dramatic life is covered in this fascinating biography. This is Stacy Schiff's first book, but she writes with all the skill, assurance and mastery of an old literary hand. If there was such a thing as a prize for a first biography, I would nominate this book. ' Frank McLynn, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH.

Saint-Exupery

A Biography

Richard Hoggart

'This is his most powerful book since THE USES OF LITERACY and. . . deserves to be equally widely read. ' SUNDAY TIMES Richard Hoggart is one of Britain's most distinguished cultural critics. In this clear-eyed and controversial book he sets himself to take the temperature of the nation at the end of the 20th century - to test its blood for health and heartiness, sample its imagination for largeness amd magnanimity, conduct examinations of its intelligence, judgement and moral sense. As always, he makes us see how responsible we all are for the way we live now. 'Compelling, very important' NEW STATESMAN and SOCIETY

The Way We Live Now

Dilemmas in Contemporary Culture

Adolf Hitler

Mein Kampf was first published in two volumes in 1925-6 and sold between eight and nine million copies during Hitler's lifetime, as well as being widely translated. It is the most notorious political tract of the twentieth century, a mixture of unreliable autobiography and half-baked political philosophy, which brought tragedy to Germany and the world. 
 
Mein Kampf is an evil book, but the Manheim translation remains necessary reading for those who seek to understand the Holocaust, for students of totalitarian psychology and for all who care to safeguard democracy. 
 
This edition contains an introduction by D.C.Watt, who served as Professor of International History at the University of London from 1981 to 1993, which analyses Hitler's background, gives the origins and history of the book, and ends with a critical assessment both of Hitler's incoherent ideas and his ruthless understanding of political power. 
 
All profits from the sale of this book are donated to an anti-discrimination charity.

Mein Kampf

John Prebble

This is the story of ordinary men and women involved in the Rebellion, who were described on the gaol registers and regimental rosters of the time as 'Common Men'. There is little in this book about Bonnie Prince Charlie and other principals of the last Jacobite Rising of 1745. Culloden recalls them by name and action, presenting the battle as it was for them, describing their life as fugitives in the glens or as prisoners in the gaols and hulks, their transportation to the Virginias or their deaths on the gallows at Kennington Common. The book begins in the rain at five o'clock on the morning of Wednesday, 16 April 1746, when the Royal Army marched out of Nairn to fight the clans on Culloden Moor. It is not a partisan book, its feeling is for the 'Common Men' on both sides - John Grant charging with Clan Chatten and seeing the white gaiters of the British infantry suddenly as the east wind lifted the cannon smoke, and Private Andrew Taylor in a red coat waiting for Clan Chatten to reach him, likening them to 'a troop of hungry wolves'. Culloden reminds us, too, that many of the men who harried the glens as ruthlessly as the Nazis in Occupied Europe were in fact Scots themselves. It recalls the fact that many men in Prince Charles' army had been forced to join him. It shows that a British foot-soldier's wish for a sup of brandy on a cold morning before battle is as much a reality as a Prince's pretensions to a throne. The detail for the story told in Culloden has come from regimental Order Books and manuals, from contemporary newspapers and magazines, from the letters and memoirs of soldiers and officers, eye-witness accounts of atrocity and persecution, and the personal stories of the victims themselves. Culloden is the story not of a Prince, but of a people.

Culloden

Norman Longmate

Although nearly 90% of the population of Great Britain remained civilians throughout the war, or for a large part of it, their story has so far largely gone untold. In contrast with the thousands of books on military operations, barely any have concerned themselves with the individual's experience. The problems of the ordinary family are barely ever mentioned - food rationing, clothes rationing, the black-out and air raids get little space, and everyday shortages almost none at all. 
 
This book is an attempt to redress the balance; to tell the civilian's story largely through their own recollections and in their own words.

How We Lived Then

History of Everyday Life During the Second World War, A

Lucy and Tom

Who's in Your Book?

Ebb and Flo

Meg and Mog

Ink and Iron

Tuck and Tina

Topsy and Tim

And Other Lies

Sarah and Duck

Pizza and Taco

Emma and James

Chaos and Flame

The Lost and Found

Jack and Millie

Charlie and Lola

Anders Knutas

George and Flora

Lizzie and Lucky

From the bestselling novel I'm Travelling Alone, two dynamic characters are born. 
Police investigators Holger Munch and Mia Krüger work together to solve the most complex crimes in Oslo, catching serial killers before they strike again but their personal lives are not simple either. As people, they could not be more different but as they battle their own demons their unlikely pairing make Munch and Krüger the best kind of classic detective duo.

Munch and Krüger

Faith, Hope and Glory

Gods and Warriors

Wizards and Robots

Noughts and Crosses

Malorie Blackman's ground-breaking, award winning series charts the lives and loves of generations as it takes on race and equality with breathtaking drama and heart wrenching sadness. Set in an alternate reality, where the inferior Noughts live as second class citizens in a world run by Crosses, the four books explore the violent politics of a unstable world, and the ordinary lives caught up in in its terror. Beginning with Noughts and Crosses - and the romance of Seph and Callum - and ending with Double Cross, it is a gripping sequence, and an important, relevant story for our time.

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