Amanda Foreman

Amanda Gorman is the youngest presidential inaugural poet in US history. She is a committed advocate for the environment, racial equality, and gender justice. 
 
In 2017, Urban Word named her the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate. Gorman's performance of her poem "The Hill We Climb" at the 2021 Presidential Inauguration received critical acclaim and international attention. The special edition of her inaugural poem debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and was a Sunday Times Bestseller in the United Kingdom. She is also the author of the children's picture book Change Sings. 
 
After graduating cum laude from Harvard University, she now lives in her hometown of Los Angeles.

Amanda Gorman

Amanda Gummer is a child development expert and play and parenting psychologist who has been helping children and families for over 20 years. Widely considered as THE go to expert on play, toys and child development, Amanda combines her theoretical knowledge (developing the Parent-Centred Parenting model of family life and the Fundamental Model of Child development) with a refreshingly pragmatic approach to family life, that resonates both with parents and professionals. 
 
Amanda is regularly in the media, and continues to take an active role in research, presenting a paper at the International Toy Research Association’s World Congress in Portugal in July 2014. She is often involved in government policy around children’s issues, contributing to the Bailey Report and the Childhood Inquiry. Amanda ran the research consultancy FUNdamentals for 10 years before combining that with the Good Toy Guide, the online play advice website that she set up in 2012, and the Good 
App Guide to create Fundamentally Children.

Amanda Gummer

Amanda Hearty

Amanda Hodgkinson

Amanda Holden

Amanda Holton

Amanda Jenner, a mum of three, is the toilet training expert on ITV's This Morning, the owner of the award winning My Carry Potty (the world's only 100% leak-proof potty for training at home and on the go), and has decades of experience working with parents to overcome toilet training challenges through the Potty Training Academy: www.pottytrainingacademy.co.uk

Amanda Jenner

Amanda Leask is a first-time author. She rescued Miracle the dog from Thailand in 2014 who then repaid the favour by creating a special bond with her six year old son Kyle, who was born with cerebral palsy and autism. Winners of the prestigious Friends for Life Award at Crufts 2015, Amanda lives with her husband Tobias, son Kyle and a menagerie of rescue and sled dogs near Inverness, Scotland.

Amanda Leask

Amanda Li has worked as a children's book editor for many years before becoming a freelance editor and writer. Amanda live in south-west London with her partner and two small girls.

Amanda Li

Amanda Lindhout

Amanda Ljunggren is a Swedish crochet designer. Amanda released her first collection of crocheted clothes together with Vogue 2021. She has since worked with textiles crafts that cross the border between fashion and art. With an an international background in fashion and set design, Amanda is happy to be in front of the camera in expressive clothes from well-known fashion houses and behind the camera with the silver tape (the designer’s best) in full swing.

Amanda Ljunggren

Amanda Mitchison grew up in Scotland. She has travelled widely. Her first job as a journalist was on the Egyptian Gazette in Cairo and she later worked as a radio reporter for the Vatican in Rome. She now lives in Bristol with her husband and two sons.

Amanda Mitchison

Amanda Murphy

Amanda Owen is a shepherdess, mother of nine children, TV star and bestselling author. Born in Huddersfield, Amanda is a first-generation farmer, who escaped the city for the rugged landscapes of Ravenseat, a 2000-acre hill farm in North Yorkshire. The Owen family’s TV series, Our Yorkshire Farm, captivated over 3 million viewers in the UK and aired in over 20 countries around the world. In 2023, Amanda Owen's Farming Lives launched on More4 and in October 2024 Amanda’s latest TV adventure, Our Farm Next Door: Amanda, Clive and Kids became the channel’s highest-rating series of the year and was also repeated on Channel 4. As well as TV, Amanda is a bestselling author, penning five Sunday Times bestselling books and a hugely popular public speaker, with a new theatre show in the pipeline for winter 2025. With over 800,000 followers on social media, Amanda's genuine, down-to-earth approach to life in the countryside continues to inspire and connect with a global audience. Christmas Tales from the Farm is Amanda’s first book for children.

Amanda Owen

AMANDA PETERS is a writer of Mi’kmaq and settler ancestry. A graduate of the Master of Fine Arts Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she has a Certificate in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. She is the winner of the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award for Unpublished Prose and a participant in the 2021 Writers’ Trust Rising Stars program. She lives in the Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia. The Berry Pickers is her first novel.

Amanda Peters

Amanda Ripley

Amanda Vickery is the writer and presenter of BBC2's At Home with the Georgians based on her book Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (2009). Amanda is a Professor of Early Modern History at Queen Mary, University of London. Her first book The Gentleman's Daughter (1998) won the Wolfson, the Whitfield and the Longman-History today prizes. Amanda Vickery is also the editor of Women, Privilege and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present (2001) and Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700-1830 (2006). Among her radio credits are presenting the popular Radio 4 shows A History of Private Life and Voices from the Old Bailey.

Amanda Vickery

Amanda Wakeley OBE is a celebrated British fashion designer known for her 'Clean Glam' aesthetic. With over three decades of experience, she has dressed high-profile women including two Princesses of Wales, Diana and Catherine, as well as many other global icons including Beyoncé and Angelina Jolie. She is also the host of the acclaimed podcast series, StyleDNA, where she explores fashion stories with celebrity guests.

Amanda Wakeley

Amanda Ware

Amanda Whittington

Dr Amantha Imber is an organisational psychologist and the host of the popular business podcast How I Work. With over 3 million downloads, the show features some of the world's most successful people's habits, strategies and rituals. In 2021, she won the Thinkers50 Innovation Award (described by the Financial Times as the 'Oscars for Management Thinking'), which recognises the thinker who has contributed the most to the understanding of innovation globally over the last two years. She has been featured or published in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Entrepreneur and Fast Company.

Amantha Imber

Amartya Sen is Professor of Economics and Professor of Philosophy at Harvard. He was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1998 to 2004, and won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998. His many celebrated books including Development as Freedom (1999), The Argumentative Indian (2005), Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (2007), and The Idea of Justice (2010), have been translated into more than 40 languages. In 2012 he received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama and in 2020 he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade by President Steinmeier.

Amartya Sen

Following her CIA career in the field, AMARYLLIS FOX has covered current events and offered analysis for CNN, National Geographic, al Jazeera, BBC, and other global news outlets. She speaks at events and universities around the world on the topic of peacemaking. Amaryllis leads investigations into the international drug trade for new Netflix original documentary series, The Business of Drugs, and lives in Los Angeles, CA, with her husband and two daughters.

Amaryllis Fox

Ambelin Kwaymullina

Amber Chen is a Singaporean-Chinese author of SFF and contemporary fiction. She spends much of her free time living within Chinese fantasy novels and dramas, and also drinks one too many cups of bubble tea. One of her webnovels, The Cutting Edge, has been adapted for television. You can find her online at ambercwrites.com and on TikTok, Instagram, and X @AmberWrites88.

Amber Chen

Amber Davenport

Amber Griffin

Amber Hatch is recognised as the UK's leading expert on baby-led potty training. She has successfully used the approach with her own two children and runs a monthly support group in Oxford for other families. Her articles on baby-led potty training are regularly featured in the media, including in the Independent and The Times. www.nappyfreebaby.co.uk

Amber Hatch

Amber Husain is the author of Replace Me (2021) and Meat Love (2023). Her essays have been published in Granta, New Left Review, The White Review, The Believer, Bookforum LA Review of Books and New York Times Magazine. She has a PhD in art history from UCL and teaches critical and creative writing.

Amber Husain

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Chris Stringer

'When it comes to human evolution Chris Stringer is as close to the horse's mouth as it gets ... The Origin of Our Species should be the one-stop source on the subject. Read it now' BBC Focus 
 
Do all humans originate from Africa? How did we spread across the globe? Are we separate from Neanderthals, or do some of us actually have their genes? When did humans become 'modern' - are traits such as art, technology, language, ritual and belief unique to us? Has human evolution stopped, or are we still evolving? 
 
Chris Stringer has been involved in much of the crucial research into the origins of humanity, and here he draws on a wealth of evidence - from fossils and archaeology to the mysteries of ancient DNA - to reveal the definitive story of where we came from, how we lived, how we got here and who we are.

The Origin of Our Species

Noam Chomsky

'Occupy is the first major public response to thirty years of class war.' 
 
Since its appearance in Zuccotti Park, New York, in September 2011, the Occupy movement has spread to hundreds of towns and cities across the world. No longer occupying small tent camps, the movement now occupies the global conscience as its messages spread from street protests to op-ed pages to the highest seats of power. From the movement's onset, Noam Chomsky has supported its critique of corporate corruption and encouraged its efforts to increase civic participation, economic equality, democracy and freedom. 
 
Through talks and conversations with movement supporters, Occupy presents Chomsky's latest thinking on the central issues, questions and demands that are driving ordinary people to protest. How did we get to this point? How are the wealthiest 1% influencing the lives of the other 99%? How can we separate money from politics? What would a genuinely democratic election look like? How can we redefine basic concepts like 'growth' to increase equality and quality of life for all?

Occupy

Matthew De Abaitua

Could there be another way of life? Can I survive with less stuff? Should I run for the hills? 
 
These are all good questions that people have asked before, throughout history, and which have inspired people to set up camp. But now camping is part of the drive for self-sufficiency, a reaction against mass tourism, a chance to connect with the land, to experience a community, to leave no trace . . . 
 
From packing to pitching, with hikes into the deep history of the subject and encounters with the great campers and camping movements of the past, this is a witty and philosophical blend of 'how to', history and personal anecdotes - a must for every camper.

The Art of Camping

The History and Practice of Sleeping Under the Stars

Gordon Grice

Consider, if you can, the case of Jacob Fowler, who heard what he thought was the sound of his own skull cracking between the jaws of a grizzly bear - only to discover that it was. 
 
Or the Arizonan jogger who ran a mile back to her car with a rabid fox clamped to her arm before driving to hospital for live-saving inoculations. Or the woman who was attacked by a hyena, dragged from her tent by her face and survived to tell of her ordeal. 
 
The dangers of the animal kingdom are the stuff of legend but the reality of man's vulnerability and of nature's savage power is far more various, improbable and chilling than even the most active imagination would fear. In this unique work of nature writing, you will encounter the most formidable predators on land and sea - as well as the most overlooked, bizarre and inventive hazards that mother nature has to offer. Meet the cougar that can leap 40 feet and clear 8-foot fences with a fully-grown deer in its jaws, the tapeworm that's been known to grow as long as 82 feet in the human gut and the elephant that single-handedly destroyed an oil tanker. 
 
Drawing on an enormous host of true encounters between man and beast, this is the world's most authoritative compendium of animal attacks on human beings. With mordant wit and expert timing, Gordon Grice provides a gripping journey to the dark side of the animal kingdom and a celebration of its humbling, savage glory. 
 
(Originally published in hardback as The Book of Deadly Animals.)

Deadly Animals

Savage Encounters Between Man and Beast

Guy Kawasaki

Enchantment 
 
n: 1) To charm, delight, enrapture 
 
How do companies such as Apple create such enchanting products? And how do some people always seem to enchant others? 
 
According to bestselling business guru Guy Kawasaki, anyone can learn the art of enchantment. It transforms situations and relationships, turns cynics into believers and changes hearts and minds. 
 
The book explains all the tactics you need to enchant. Kawasaki's lessons are drawn from his tenure at Apple, as well as his decades of experience as an entrepreneur. Few people in the world are more qualified to teach you how to enchant.

Enchantment

How to Charm, Influence and Persuade

Molly Weir

'Poverty is a very exacting teacher and I had been taught well' 
 
The post-war urban jungle of the Glasgow tenements was the setting for Molly Weir's childhood. From sharing a pull-out bed in her mother's tiny kitchen to running in terror from the fever van, it was an upbringing that was cemented in hardship. Hunger, cold and sickness was an everyday reality and complaining was not an option. 
 
Despite the crippling poverty, there was a vivacity to the tenements that kept spirits high. Whether Molly was brushing the hair of her wizened neighbour Mrs MacKay, running to Jimmy's chip shop for a ha'penny of crimps or dancing at the annual fair, there wasn't a moment to spare for self-pity. Molly never let it get her down as she and the other urchins knew how to make do with nothing. 
 
And at the centre of her world was her fearsome but loving Grannie, whose tough, independent spirit taught Molly to rise above her pitiful surroundings and achieve her dreams.

Shoes Were For Sunday

Virginia Nicholson

We tend to see the Second World War as a man's war, featuring Spitfire crews and brave deeds on the Normandy beaches. But in conditions of "Total War" millions of women - in the Services and on the Home Front - demonstrated that they were cleverer, more broad-minded and altogether more complex than anyone had ever guessed. 
 
In Millions Like Us Virginia Nicholson tells the story of the women's war, through a host of individual women's experiences. She tells how they loved, suffered, laughed, grieved and dared; how they re-made their world in peacetime. And how they would never be the same again ...

Millions Like Us

Women's Lives in the Second World War

John Kasarda

Greg Lindsay

'Throw out your old atlas. The new version is here' Walter Kirn, author of Up in the Air 
 
From Dubai to Amsterdam, Memphis to South Korea, a new phenomenon is reshaping the way we live and transforming the way we do business: the aerotropolis. 
 
A combination of giant airport, planned city and business hub, the aerotropolis will be at the heart of the next phase of globalization. Drawing on a decade's worth of cutting-edge research, John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay offer a visionary look at how the metropolis of the future will bring us together - and how to make the most of this opportunity.

Aerotropolis

The Way We'll Live Next

Siddhartha Deb

Siddhartha Deb grew up in a remote town in the northeastern hills of India and made his way to the United States via a fellowship at Columbia. Six years after leaving home, he returned as an undercover reporter for The Guardian, working at a call center in Delhi in 2004, a time when globalization was fast proceeding and Thomas L. Friedman declared the world flat. Deb's experience interviewing the call-center staff led him to undertake this book and travel throughout the subcontinent. 
 
The Beautiful and the Damned examines India's many contradictions through various individual and extraordinary perspectives. With lyrical and commanding prose, Deb introduces the reader to an unforgettable group of Indians, including a Gatsby-like mogul in Delhi whose hobby is producing big-budget gangster films that no one sees; a wiry, dusty farmer named Gopeti whose village is plagued by suicides and was the epicenter of a riot; and a sad-eyed waitress named Esther who has set aside her dual degrees in biochemistry and botany to serve Coca-Cola to arms dealers at an upscale hotel called Shangri La. 
 
Like no other writer, Deb humanizes the post-globalization experience--its advantages, failures, and absurdities. India is a country where you take a nap and someone has stolen your job, where you buy a BMW but still have to idle for cows crossing your path. Available for the first time with the controversial and previously unpublished first chapter, The Beautiful and the Damned is as important and incisive today as it was when it was first published.

The Beautiful and the Damned

Life in the New India

The Economist Publications (PUK Rights)

The Penguin Economist Special reports delve into the most pressing economic issues of the day: from national and global economies, to the impact of trade, industry and jobs. Written to be read on a long commute or in your lunch hour - be better informed in under an hour. 
 
When students graduate from university they are employed in equal numbers. Move up the ladder a few rungs and the number of women in high powered positions has fallen dramatically. 
 
Women make up just 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs and still generally get paid less than their male counterparts. 
 
Barbara Becks ask why this is and what can be done about it. She covers: 
 
Closing the gap 
 
Female labour markets: The cashier and the carpenter 
 
A world of bluestockings 
 
Work and family: Baby blues 
 
Top jobs: Too many suits 
 
Women in China: The sky's the limit 
 
Looking ahead: Here's to the next half-century

The Economist: Women and Work

Closing the Gap

Molly McCloskey

When Molly McCloskey was a young girl, her brother Mike - fourteen years her senior - started showing signs of paranoid schizophrenia. By the time Molly was old enough to begin to know him, he was frequently delusional, heavily medicated, living in hospitals or care homes or on the road. 
 
When Molly reached the age Mike was when he became ill, she found herself suffering from deep anxiety and drinking heavily. She knew that schizophrenia runs in families, and at times the anxiety was so bad as to make her wonder about her own sanity. As the years passed, years when Molly - having moved from the US to Ireland - hardly ever saw or heard from her brother, she became deeply curious about his life and about what might have been. Through reading an astonishing archive of letters preserved by her mother and grandmother, and interviewing old friends of Mike's, she began to piece together a picture of his life, before and after the illness struck - the story of how a gifted and well-liked student and athlete was overtaken by a terrible illness that rendered him unrecognizable. 
 
Now, in Circles around the Sun, she tells that story - which is also the story of her own demons and of how a seemingly perfect family slowly fell apart and, in the end, regrouped. It is a work of extraordinary intensity and drama from a wonderfully gifted writer.

Circles around the Sun

In Search of a Lost Brother

Will Self

'Most food writing and restaurant criticism is concerned with the ideal, with how by cooking this, or dining there, you can somehow ingurgitate a new - or at any rate improved - social, aesthetic and even spiritual persona. I aimed to turn this proposition on its head, and instead of commenting on where and what people would ideally like to eat I would consider where and what they actually did: the ready meals, buffet snacks and - most importantly - fast food that millions of Britons chomp upon in the go-round of their often hurried and dyspeptic lives.' 
 
In this selection from his hilarious New Statesman Real Meals column, Will Self reviews the chains where most of us go to eat (KFC, Greggs, Yo! Sushi, Pizza Express and their like), delves into the ubiquitous Thai meal and chicken tikka masala, and experiences hotel breakfasts, frozen tv dinners and airline food on our behalf. These are restaurant reviews of the kind you've never read before.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker

A Selection of Real Meals

Anna Minton

In Ground Control Anna Minton reveals the untested - and unwanted - urban planning that is changing not only our cities, but the nature of public space, of citizenship and of trust. 
 
Britain's streets have been transformed by the construction of new property - but it's owned by private corporations, designed for profit and watched over by CCTV. Have these gleaming business districts, mega malls and gated developments led to 'regeneration', or have they intensified social divisions and made us more fearful of each other? 
 
Now with a new chapter on the 2012 London Olympic legacy and Britain's housing collapse, Anna Minton's acclaimed and passionate polemic shows us the face of Britain today. 
 
'They sold our streets and nobody noticed ... timely and powerful ... revelatory' Observer 
 
'A sustained, informed, articulate, timely work of rage ... Anna Minton has put her finger on one of the most profound and disturbing shifts in modern British cities' Evening Standard 
 
'A damning study of how Britain is curbing freedoms ... Minton is a brilliant journalist ... a vital book' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Eye-opening, unsettling ... A wonderful, timely analysis that reveals another, more sinister side to "gentrification"' Financial Times

Ground Control

Fear and happiness in the twenty-first-century city

John Stubbs

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CAVALIERS BEFORE, DURING AND AFTER THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR 
 
'Dashing and daring, colourful, subtle and provocative . . . stuffed almost to bursting-point with character and incident. Feasting on poems, diaries, plays, masques, letters and biographies, Reprobates introduces us to . . . a flamboyant parade of chancers, dreamers, turncoats, heroes, idiots and hedonists who grab the reader's shoulders and force a drink on us as if in some dim-lit, tallow-smoked tavern of the 1630s' Independent

Reprobates

The Cavaliers of the English Civil War

John Gray

SUNDAY TIMES, NEW STATESMAN and TLS BOOKS OF THE YEAR 
 
At the heart of all human experience lies our obsession with death. For many years we turned to religion for answers, but with the twentieth century came ideas from evolution and politics to suggest that our lives - and afterlives - were in our own hands. Such ideas went on to have both trivial and terrible effects: from a sweeping craze of séances to the mass-murders of the Stalinist terror. 
 
Gray raises vital questions about the 'truths' science can offer, the technology we are still exploiting for immortality - and exactly what it means to be human.

The Immortalization Commission

The Strange Quest to Cheat Death

Lizzie Collingham

In World War Two, 19 million people died in the conflicts across the globe. Yet in those same years, more than 20 million died from starvation and malnutrition. In The Taste of War Lizzie Collingham shows how food - and its lack - was central to the war's causes and continuation. She explores how starvation was often a deliberate governmental policy, and reveals how the necessity of feeding whole countries lead to Pearl Harbour, Germany's invasion of Russia, and the Holocaust itself.

The Taste of War

World War Two and the Battle for Food

Elif Shafak

Penguin Specials are designed to fill a gap. Written to be read over a long commute or a short journey, they are original and exclusively in digital form. This is Elif Shafak's examination of national identity. 
 
"You know, I never understand. How come their children are so quiet and well disciplined?" 
"Yeah," said the distressed father, his voice suddenly softer. "Blond children never cry, do they?" 
 
As Elif Shafak stands in line at the airport, she overhears a Turkish father expressing to a friend his bewilderment at the cultural differences he's experienced since immigrating to northern Europe. Is it true, she wonders, that the citizens of these countries are genuinely happier? Why do people leave their homes for other countries? And what lessons can we all learn, for the creation of truly harmonious societies, from the experiences of immigrants? 
 
In the light of the recent backlash against multiculturalism and the influx of millions of Muslims into Europe from the east, this powerful and personal essay uses the lived experience of immigrants to examine this most hotly debated subject.

The Happiness of Blond People

A Personal Meditation on the Dangers of Identity

Scott Atran

Scott Atran has spent years talking to terrorists - from Gaza and Afghanistan, to Indonesia and Europe. Here he argues persuasively that to understand religious violence we need to consider terrorists' close relationships, with family and friends, as much as the causes they espouse. He delivers a fascinating journey into the mindsets of radicalised people in the twenty-first century, and deep insights into the history of all religions.

Talking to the Enemy

Violent Extremism, Sacred Values, and What it Means to Be Human

Nicholas Ostler

In the twenty-first century, can we really take the dominance of English for granted? 
In their time, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Sanskrit and Persian have each been world languages, sweeping the globe for centuries at a time. And yet they have all been displaced, just as Nicholas Ostler predicts English will be. What forces drive these linguistic currents? What characteristics do lingua francas share? And most importantly, how do they lose their power? 
In this revelatory and exhilarating tour de force, Ostler explores the rise of a linguistic diversity that we could never before have imagined.

The Last Lingua Franca

The Rise and Fall of World Languages

'Mattress Falls Off Truck Into Kidderminster Road'... 'Man Stole Tortoise To Pay For Booze'... 'Aquatic Centre Roof Sag Explained'... 
Every week Britain's local newspapers bring their investigative skills to stories of vital historical importance. While global conflicts rage, the local paper looks closer to home to the events that really matter. 
These can be as diverse as animal news ('Smug Swans Attack Dalmatian'), human peril ('Man Found Nailed To Bench'), domestic crisis ('Oven Removed From Home'), or disaster avoided ('No Flood Warnings for North Somerset'). 
Whitstable Mum in Custard Shortage is the first book to collect and celebrate these triumphs of British journalism - from surreal billboard headlines to the full text of the classic articles. If you like QI and The News Quiz, you'll love this book. 
And the next time there's a seismic global news event, just remember: somewhere a local reporter is crafting 500 words on the 'Youth Found In Phone Box With Fork', while their fellow hack is collecting 'Tributes As Popular Lichfield Cat Dies'...

Whitstable Mum In Custard Shortage

...And Other World Exclusives From Britain's Finest Local Newspapers

Albert Jack

This is a book for everyone who has ever wondered why pubs should be called The Cross Keys, The Dew Drop Inn or The Hope and Anchor. You'll be glad to know that there are very good - strange and memorable - reasons behind them all. 
 
After much research about (and in) pubs, Albert Jack brings together the stories behind pub names to reveal how they offer fascinating and subversive insights on our history, customs, attitudes and jokes in just the same way that nursery rhymes do. The Royal Oak, for instance, commemorates the tree that hid Charles II from Cromwell's forces after his defeat at Worcester; The Bag of Nails is a corruption of the Bacchanals, the crazed followers of Bacchus, the god of wine and drunkenness; The Cat and the Fiddle a mangling of Catherine La Fidele and a guarded gesture of support for Henry VIII's first, Catholic, wife Catherine of Aragon; plus many, many more. 
 
Here too are even more facts about everything from ghosts to drinking songs to the rules of cribbage and shove ha'penny, showing that, ultimately, the story of pub history is really the story of our own popular history.

The Old Dog and Duck

The Secret Meanings of Pub Names

Wensley Clarkson

This is the compelling and disturbing true story of Vanessa George and the evil abuse she doled out upon th children of more than 300 families. 
 
As a nursery worker, wife and mother, she was a figure to place trust in. Yet her adulterous relationship and sick love triangle with Colin Blanchard and Angela Allen drew her into a dark world of violence and sexual abuse. To compete for Blanchard's attention she would do everything in her power to impress him, even if this meant committing unspeakable acts of sexual violence on children as young as two years old. 
 
What could have driven a mother to betray not only her daughters and loving husband but the very families who entrusted her with their children? How could a seemingly caring women become engaged in a sordid and vile love triangle with a man and woman she had never met? Were there events in her own childhood that pushed her to commit these acts? 
 
True crime expert Wensley Clarkson pieces together the events surrounding the case as well as new investigative research to compile a fascinating yet disturbing account of a case which shocked a nation. 
 
We may never know the full extent of Vanessa George's cruelty, but the horror of her story will remain as a chilling memory for generations.

Vanessa

A Portrait of Evil

Angie Beasley

Life didn't hold much promise for ordinary little Angie. 
 
With few jobs around, bland food and cold weather, the best that Angie could hope for was a job at the local Findus factory. 
 
Her family didn't have it easy. Her baby brother was a cot death and the tragedy caused her mother to turn to the Jehovah's Witness faith. Their poverty, now combined with an austere belief system, meant no Christmas, no birthdays and little joy. 
 
But aged 16, Angie decided that she was destined for bigger things. After seeing a TV advertisement she entered a beauty pageant. And won. She went on to take 25 titles, including Miss Leeds, and her home town title Miss Cleethorpes, giving her the opportunity to model while travelling the world. 
 
Just as Angie felt that life couldn't get any better, she got engaged to a man who trapped her in a terrifying cycle of domestic violence. When she eventually escaped him, she had lost all of her money and self-esteem. She was on the bottom rung of the ladder yet again. But Angie picked herself up, turned her talents to event management and grafted her way to becoming Director of Miss England. 
 
Evoking the magical, lost world of the 1970s beauty pageant, Angie's story is a real life fairytale with heart and humour.

The Frog Princess

Noel 'Razor' Smith

As a gun-wielding bank robber, Noel 'Razor' Smith was top of the criminal tree, enjoying the excitement and benefits of a dangerous and adrenalin-filled career. But he'd also spent the greater part of his adult life in prison, an environment where respect and basic survival were guaranteed only to those prepared to use the most brutal violence. In his new book, Smith takes the story on from his highly acclaimed memoir A Few Kind Words and a Loaded Gun, and describes how he came to realize that the game wasn't worth the candle. In his mid-forties he applied to enter Grendon, then the only prison in Britain offering intense therapeutic treatment to hardened criminals. He went from a brutal high-security prison, HMP Whitemoor, to an institution where he was encouraged to investigate just why his life had been given over to violence and crime. Smith paints an unforgettable portrait of the hardened and severely damaged inmates of Grendon, many of them guilty of famous crimes, and their attempts to turn round their lives. And in particular his own arduous five-year journey to re-enter society as a straight citizen.

A Rusty Gun

Catherine Hakim

Why do some people seem to lead charmed lives? They are attractive, but also lively, friendly and charismatic. People want to be around them. Doors open for them. The answer, this book shows, is in the power of erotic capital - the overlooked human asset that is at the heart of how we work, interact, make money, succeed and conduct our relationships. 
 
Catherine Hakim's groundbreaking book reveals how erotic capital is just as influential in life as how rich, clever, educated or well-connected we are. Drawing on hard evidence, she illustrates how this potent force develops from an early age, with attractive children assumed to be intelligent, competent and good. She examines how women and men learn to exploit it throughout their lives, how it differs across cultures and how it affects all spheres of activity, from dating and mating to politics, business, film, music , the arts and sport. She also explores why erotic capital is growing in importance in today's highly sexualised culture and yet, ironically, as a 'feminine' virtue, remains sidelined. 
 
Honey Money is a call for us to recognize the economic and social value of erotic capital, and truly acknowledge beauty and pleasure. This will not only change the role of women in society, getting them a better deal in both public and private life - it could also revolutionize our power structures, big business, the sex industry, government, marriage, education and almost everything we do.

Honey Money

The Power of Erotic Capital

Colin Elford

Colin Elford spends his days alone - alone but for the deer, the squirrels, the rabbits, the birds, and the many other creatures inhabiting the woods. 
 
From the crisp cold of January, through the promise of spring and the heat of summer, and then into damp autumn and the chill winds of winter, we accompany the forest-ranger as he goes about his work - stalking in the early morning darkness, putting an injured fallow buck out of its misery, watching stoats kill a hare, observing owls, and simply being a part of the outdoors. 
 
A Year in the Woods is an enthralling journey deep into the heart of the English countryside.

A Year in the Woods

The Diary of a Forest Ranger

Carolyn Jessop

At the age of 18, Carolyn Jessop was forced to marry a 50-year-old stranger and religious cult member. She became one of six wives and bore him eight children in 15 years. When the cult started preaching death and destruction, she knew she and her children had to escape. 
 
Carolyn Jessop's extraordinary story as part of the fundamentalist Mormon church in the US was chronicled in her international bestseller Escape. Three years on, Carolyn has written Triumph, an inspirational guide which will help anyone overcome adversity and hardship to achieve their dreams. With the right tools, we can all face our fears and redefine our relationships with those who have hurt us.

Triumph

Life After The Cult: A Survivor's Lessons

Toni Maguire

Jackie was an unwanted child. So unwanted that her mother regularly left Jackie at her uncle's house. Which was when the nightmare started. For when his wife went out, her uncle's friends came round. He had a Special Room. In it Jackie was tied up and molested, beaten, burnt by cigarettes and urinated on. Sometimes other children were brought along. Jackie got to know the Special Room intimately. 
 
Jackie could never bring herself to tell her mother. She ended up in a home for disturbed children. She ran away, and a life of homelessness, drugs, prostitution and psychiatric wards followed. 
 
Eventually, Jackie sought help. But could she turn her life around? Would her evil uncle and his Special Room haunt her forever? 
 
Can't Anyone Help Me? is the inspirational story of struggle and survival against all odds as one young woman attempts to put her torturous past behind her and make a future for herself.

Can't Anyone Help Me?

Jared Diamond

From groundbreaking writer and thinker Jared Diamond comes the epic, visionary book, now in a revised edition with a new afterword, on the mysterious collapse of past civilizations - and what this means for our future. Why do some societies flourish, while others founder? What happened to the people who made the forlorn long-abandoned statues of Easter Island or to the architects of the crumbling Maya pyramids? Will we go the same way, our skyscrapers one day standing derelict and overgrown like the temples at Angkor Wat? 
 
Bringing together new evidence from a startling range of sources and piecing together the myriad influences, from climate to culture, that make societies self-destruct, Collapse also shows how unlike our ancestors we can benefit from our knowledge of the past and learn to be survivors.

Collapse

How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive

Clay Shirky

In the past, we filled our free time with the tools at our disposal. Television became a kind of universal part-time job, and sitcoms and soap operas sponged up our cognitive surplus: the collective surfeit of time, intellect and energy at our disposal. 
 
Today, tech has finally caught up with human potential. New tools don't just let us consume, but to create and to share. Clay Shirky's groundbreaking book reveals what is now happening with this previously untapped talent and goodwill. From lolcats to tools for tracking voter fraud and ethnic violence, he shows how we're using our cognitive surplus for the better, and what it means for the future.

Cognitive Surplus

Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

Pigs in Planes

Pilgrim Series

Pirate Pete and Princess Polly

Pirate School

Pizza and Taco

Piñata Smashlings

In this historical fiction series, Jean Plaidy traces the private lives and political machinations of the Plantagenet family, from Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine to Edward IV and the Wars of the Roses.

Plantagenet Saga

Plated Prisoner

Play Pals

Played by the Piper

Plumberry School of Comfort Food

Plumdog

Pocket Cats

Pocket Money Puffins

Pocket Wisdom

Pop Legends

Porterhouse is a Cambridge college held fast by the steel cobwebs of tradition. Observe the Masters' attempts to curve these traditions with hilarious and catastropic consequences.

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