Pan Macmillan: 2057 books

Between the death of Queen Victoria and the turn of the Millennium, Britain has been utterly transformed by an extraordinary century of war and peace. A History of 20th Century Britain collects together for the first time Andrew Marr's two bestselling volumes A History of Modern Britain and...

Lorraine Mariner has long been one of the less well-guarded secrets in UK poetry, and her many admirers will be delighted by the appearance of her first full-length collection. Sometimes reading like an unholy alliance of Dorothy Parker, Stevie Smith and Frank O’Hara – but more often like nothing...

From a council house in Kent to her first home in the Hollywood hills, from being told she was too big to model to becoming an inspiration for curvy girls everywhere, Kelly's life has taken many unexpected turns. As a child she just wanted to be an actress - she never imagined she'd also become a...

Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and her friends across the country offer poems in praise of the magic of reading. In Off the Shelf: A Celebration of Bookshops in Verse, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy has commissioned a selection of the UK's most loved and lauded poets to each write a poem in celebration...

Bantu Holomisa is one of South Africa’s most respected and popular political figures. Born in the Transkei in 1955, he attended an elite school for the sons of chiefs and headmen. While other men his age were joining Umkhonto weSizwe, Holomisa enrolled in the Transkeian Defence Force and rose rapidly...

'It's pretty stupid comparing us to the Beatles. There were four of them. There's only three of us.' — Paul Hester Crowded House promised to become the most successful band ever to have come out of Australasia. When 'Don't Dream It's Over' and 'Something So Strong' exploded in the US charts,...

Glamorized, mythologized and demonized – the women of the 1920s prefigured the 1960s in their determination to reinvent the way they lived. Flappers is in part a biography of that restless generation: starting with its first fashionable acts of rebellion just before the Great War, and continuing...

The extraordinary story of Christine Townend and an Indian animal shelter Christine Townend is an extraordinary person, who has dedicated her life to helping the most vulnerable creatures in our society – the animals that we rely on for food, labour or just companionship. In the 1970s...

Better Than God sees Porter working with a lyric engine tuned to perfection, and a mind that shows every sign of speeding up: Porter can make a song of what another writer might take an essay to cover. Whether working in the forms of epigram or narrative, or writing of memory, mortality, Renaissance...

Satirist, philosopher, elegist, aphorist, cultural historian – Peter Porter is perhaps too singular a talent to be described as ‘representative’ of the age: an Australian whose easy familiarity with the breadth of European culture puts most Europeans to shame, he has long held the reputation...

Misadventure won the inaugural Picador Poetry Prize, and is Richard Meier’s first collection. Misadventure is a book about what we learn, and what we refuse to learn: although Meier’s poems are often deceptively quiet in their address, the reader will soon discover a poet capable of illuminating...

John Stammers's collection is witty, touching and clever - with brilliant images where love scenes are laced with irony and the details of contemporary life. He writes about irrelevant vampires living out their days on the sea front at Eastbourne; about flowers with 'fine pointed petals like scalpels' and is absolutely brilliant on music. His writing is vivid and assured.

John Stammers has a poetic mind original enough to read the most mundane and familiar events as great portents and wonders, and an eye clear enough to uncover the surreal when it’s right under our noses. Stammers’ third collection is a vast map of an imaginative space that coincides with the known...

Walls Come Tumbling Down charts the pivotal period between 1976 and 1992 that saw politics and pop music come together for the first time in Britain's musical history; musicians and their fans suddenly became instigators of social change, and 'the political persuasion of musicians was as important...