Profile: 418 books
Movie Lists
397 Ways to Pick a DVD
Language: English
Release Date: May 26, 2011
Action, African greats, alcohol, Robert Aldrich, aliens, Woody Allen, Pedro Almodovar, Robert Altman, animated, anime, apocalypses, Argentina, art, Asia minor, avant garde...
And that's just A for you. A taste of this fabulously quirky and enjoyable book which is both a celebration of movies...
Bred of Heaven: One man's quest to reclaim his Welsh roots
One man's quest to reclaim his Welsh roots
Language: English
Release Date: August 4, 2011
Jasper Rees has always wanted to be Welsh. But despite Welsh grandparents (and a Welsh surname) he is an Englishman: by birth, upbringing and temperament. In this singular, hilarious love letter to a glorious country so often misunderstood, Rees sets out to achieve his goal of becoming a Welshman...
Night Trains
The Rise and Fall of the Sleeper
Language: English
Release Date: February 9, 2017
Night trains have long fascinated us with the possibilities of their private sleeping compartments, gilded dining cars, champagne bars and wealthy travellers. Authors from Agatha Christie to Graham Greene have used night trains to tell tales of romance, intrigue and decadence against a rolling background...
by David Crystal, St Martins Press
Language: English
Release Date: October 13, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: October 13, 2011
In this unique new history of the world's most ubiquitous language, linguistics expert David Crystal draws on words that best illustrate the huge variety of sources, influences and events that have helped to shape our vernacular since the first definitively English word was written down in the fifth...
by Simon Jenkins
Language: English
Release Date: September 8, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: September 8, 2011
Which battle was fought 'For England, Harry and St George'? Who demanded to be painted 'warts and all'? What - and when - was the Battle of the Bulge?In A Short History of England, bestselling author Simon Jenkins answers all these questions - and many more - as he tells the tumultuous story of a...
Turned Out Nice Again
On Living With the Weather
Language: English
Release Date: February 18, 2013
In his trademark style, Richard Mabey weaves together science, art and memoirs (including his own) to show the weather's impact on our culture and national psyche. He rambles through the myths of Golden Summers and our persistent state of denial about the winter; the Impressionists' love affair with...
Empires of the Imagination
Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750-1850
Language: English
Release Date: July 9, 2010
Between the mid-18th and mid-19th centuries, Britain evolved from a substantial international power yet relative artistic backwater into a global superpower and a leading cultural force in Europe. In this original and wide-ranging book, Hoock illuminates the manifold ways in which the culture of power...
Memoirs of a Dervish
Sufis, Mystics and the Sixties
Language: English
Release Date: April 14, 2011
In the summer of 1964, while a military coup was taking place and tanks were rolling through the streets of Algiers, Robert Irwin set off for Algeria in search of Sufi enlightenment. There he entered a world of marvels and ecstasy, converted to Islam and received an initiation as a faqir. He learnt...
The Signalman
A Ghost Story
Language: English
Release Date: September 24, 2015
On the 9th of June 1865, Charles Dickens was travelling aboard the Folkestone to London Boat Train with his mistress and her mother, when it derailed while crossing a viaduct near Staplehurst in Kent. The train plunged down a bank into a dry river bed, killing ten passengers, and badly wounding forty.
Dickens...
Paraphernalia
The Curious Lives of Magical Things
Language: English
Release Date: June 9, 2011
From keys and handkerchiefs to sweets and rubber bands, the curious objects we surround ourselves with, though often seemingly mundane, have a magical quality.
Their surprising power to disturb, soothe, seduce or absorb give these quirky objects histories and meanings we rarely ponder. Yet...
Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?
Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century
Language: English
Release Date: December 9, 2010
Dawkins and Hitchens have convinced many western intellectuals that secularism is the way forward. But most people don't read their books before deciding whether to be religious. Instead, they inherit their faith from their parents, who often innoculate them against the elegant arguments of secularists....
Underground, Overground: A Passenger's History of the Tube
A Passenger's History of the Tube
Language: English
Release Date: May 3, 2012
Why is the Victoria Line so hot? What is an Electrical Multiple Unit? Is it really possible to ride from Kings Cross to Kings Cross on the Circle line? The London Underground is the oldest, most sprawling and illogical metropolitan transport system in the world, the result of a series of botch-jobs...
by Alan Bennett
Language: English
Release Date: May 9, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: May 9, 2014
The Clothes They Stood Up In is Alan Bennett's first story. Like Charles Dickens' novels which were first published in magazines, it originally appeared in the London Review of Books - which the author says 'seems to me (and not just because I occasionally contribute to it) the liveliest, most serious and also the most radical literary periodical we have'.
History Repeating
Why Populists Rise and Governments Fall
Language: English
Release Date: March 15, 2018
Most of the time, politics is boring. In most countries, the Average Joe rules. Extremists of the left and right can gnash their teeth but serious politicians know they desert the centre ground at their peril. It's the iron law of electoral politics.
That is, in normal times.
What about...