Faber Faber: 1353 books

The Sunday Times Humour Book of the Year. Anyone can be a success, but it takes real and original genius to foul up big time. These are the all-time greats, Gods in the field of failure, surreal artists, who spurn mere drab success ('I'm a winner, Lord Sugar') to explore the vast, magical,...

These were the crimes that were meant to change the world, and sometimes did. The book connects the killing of the Kennedys or the murder that sparked the First World War with less well-known stories, such as the Berlin shooting of an instigator of the Armenian genocide or the attack on an American...

The dramatic and controversial history of the world's leading tournament. Brian Glanville's classic account is a celebration of the great players and matches from Uruguay in 1930 to Germany in 2006 - and a bold attack on all those who have mismanaged the 'beautiful game'.

'An excellent book.' Angus Calder, London Review of Books First published in 1985, based on an acclaimed BBC TV series, Paul Addison's Now The War is Over examines the great changes in British society that followed hard upon what had been the most destructive war ever known: years of recovery...

In mid-career, Michael Frayn took up his old trade of journalism, and wrote a series of occasional articles for the Observer about some of the places in the world that interested him. He wanted to describe 'not the extraordinary but the ordinary, the typical, the everyday', and his accounts became...

Ava danced round her room, Shouting: "Hip hip hooray! It's holiday time! And we're going today!" Ava is excited to be going on holiday to the seaside. But with Squishy McFluff, the mischievous invisible cat coming along things are bound to get very, very silly...

Squishy McFluff has been blow-dried and primped to perfection. He must win the Country Fair prettiest pet competition - and will if Ava has anything to do with it . . . But not everyone can see he's the winner. The Mayor seems to have a particular blindspot . . . That is until Ava and her invisible...

Ava and Squishy are back and this time their adorable chaos hits Christmas preparations for Mum, Dad, baby Roo, the local Christmas fete and much, much more . . . In her letter to Santa, Ava only has one wish. Will she get what her heart desires on Christmas day? Rising star Pip Jones continues...

How are conductors' silent gestures magicked into sound by a group of more than a hundred brilliant but belligerent musicians? The mute choreography of great conductors has fascinated and frustrated musicians and music-lovers for centuries. Orchestras can be inspired to the heights of musical and...

First published in English in 1980, this important early memoir of Gustav Mahler is by Natalie Bauer-Lechner (1858-1921), a viola player and close and devoted friend of Mahler until his marriage to Alma Schindler in 1902. She visited him in Hamburg and frequented his circle in Vienna, also accompanying...

'Thirst for information, faith in commerce and industry, inventiveness and technical daring, energy and tenacity, and a tendency to mix up religion with visible success - all these qualities have to be remembered as one embarks on a conducted tour of some of the exhibits of 1851.'The Great...

'There have been large magazines with tiny circulations and there have been diminutive sheets which have reached thousands of readers. But all 'little magazines' have been small in one or another of these ways, and usually in both... And yet most of them have had arrestingly large-scale ambitions...'...

Private faces in public places Are wiser and nicer Than public faces in private places. W.H. Auden, dedication to Stephen Spender, 1932 Stephen Spender wrote almost a million words of journal entries between his September Journal in 1939 and his death in 1995. In choosing from these...

The Time by the Sea is about Ronald Blythe's life in Aldeburgh during the 1950s. He had originally come to the Suffolk coast as an aspiring young writer, but found himself drawn into Benjamin Britten's circle and began working for the Aldeburgh Festival. Although befriended by Imogen Holst and by...