A. J. Liebling, born in Manhattan in 1904, joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1935 and contributed innumerable articles to the magazine throughout his lifetime, on subjects ranging from food to boxing and France to horse racing. As a war correspondent during the Second World War, he reported from France, England and Algeria, and participated in the Normandy landings. In later life he married the writer Jean Stafford, his third wife. He died in 1963.

A. J. Liebling

A. J. Rosen is an author of YA fantasy and is known as @agatharoza on Wattpad.

A. J. Rosen

A. K. Davidson

A. O. Scott has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000. His writing has appeared in many other publications, including the New York Review of Books, Slate, the New Yorker and the Nation. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2010, Scott is currently Distinguished Professor of Film Criticism at Wesleyan University. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York. 
 
@aoscott

A. O. Scott

A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspiring contribution to life writing’ and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.

A. S. Byatt

A. T. Williams won the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2013 for his book A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa. He lives in Warwickshire.

A. T. Williams

A. W. Chase

Dubbed ‘The new queen of spy fiction’ by the Guardian newspaper, and ‘the real thing’ by the Washington Post, A.C. 'Ava' Glass is the CWA Dagger-shortlisted author of Alias Emma (The Chase), The Traitor and The Trap. The Traitor was a 2023 Richard and Judy Bookclub pick. Alias Emma was a Barnes and Noble book of the month. A former crime reporter and communications consultant, for five years Ava worked closely with spies. Her time in that world fascinated her, and the people she met back then inspire every book she writes.

A.C. Glass

A.E. Housman

Arthur Edward Waite was the designer and co-creator of the now famous Rider Waite Tarot deck. 
 
An American-born British poet and scholarly mystic, his strong interest in all esoteric matters - divination, magic, Kabbalism, alchemy and Freemasony - led to him penning a number of books. These include the Key to the Tarot, The Book of Ceremonial Magic and A New Encyclopedia of Freemasony.

A.E. Waite

A.E. Warren is the author of the Tomorrow's Ancestors series, which consists of Subject Twenty-One, The Hidden Base, The Fourth Species and The Final Rising. 
 
After spending eight years working as a lawyer, she began to write in the evenings and early mornings as a form of escapism from life in a very small cubicle with lots of files. She self-published her first novels in her spare time, which were picked up by Del Rey UK which is the science fiction/fantasy imprint of Penguin Random House. 
 
 She is an avid reader, occasional gamer and fair-weather runner. She lives in the UK with her husband, daughter and hopefully, one day, a wise border terrier named Austen.

A.E. Warren

A.G.D. Maran

A.J. Ayer

A K Benedict writes crime and speculative fiction in a room filled with clowns, mannequins and Doctor Who figures. Her first novel, The Beauty of Murder, was nominated for an eDunnit award and is in development for a major 8-part TV series by Company Pictures. Her second, Jonathan Dark or The Evidence of Ghosts, came out in February 2016. She's written Torchwood audio dramas for Big Finish and her short stories have featured in anthologies including Great British Horror and Best British Short Stories. She lives in St Leonards-on-Sea with her dog, Dame Margaret Rutherford.

A.K.Benedict

A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards – including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

A.L. Kennedy

A.M. Ellis is a speculative fiction author and lover of everything steeped in myth and mystery. Her stories often lean into diverse voices, not only in her identity as a Black woman, but in exploring neurodivergence and mental health. A proud introvert and nostalgic gamer, she lives in Maryland, USA, with her husband and three children. Angelica is also the author of Hunt A Killer, a PERFECT SCORE novel, under the pen name A.M. Ellis, which she wrote as an IP for Scholastic in the US.

A.M. Ellis

A.N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is an award-winning biographer and a celebrated novelist, winning prizes for much of his work. He lives in North London.

A.N. Wilson

A.T. Emerald

A.W. Priest

A.B.C. Merriman-Labor was a barrister, writer and munitions worker born in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1877. His published works include A Series of Lectures on the Negro Race and The Story of the African Slave in a Nutshell. He also edited two editions of the Handbook of Sierra Leone. He arrived in the UK in 1904 to study law. In 1907, he organised a centenary commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade in Westminster Abbey. He later embarked on an 'entertainment-lecture' tour called Life and Scenes in Britain, travelling across thousands of miles of West, South West and Central Africa, which he expanded on to create Britons Through Negro Spectacles.

ABC Merriman-Labor

AJ Cronin

AJ Molloy

Aabria Iyengar is an American actress and author.

Aabria Iyengar

Aaliya Jaleel is a freelance illustrator, designer, and visual development artist, currently majoring in Animation at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is also the illustrator of Under My Hijab and Muslim Girls Rise. You can visit her online at www.aaliyamj.com.

Aaliya Jaleel

Aaron Allston

After more than fifteen years of experience as a clinical psychotherapist, Dr Aaron Balick has taken the amazing insights from psychology and psychotherapy out of the consultation room and made them accessible to the wider world. 
 
He has been an ‘agony uncle’ for many years for both CBBC and BBC Radio 1, as well as on television, including BBC Worldwide, BBC 3 and BBC Learning.

Aaron Balick

Aaron Carroll

Aaron Dignan is the founder of The Ready--a global organizational transformation and coaching practice--that helps companies large and small adopt new forms of self-organization and dynamic teaming. Clients include Johnson &amp; Johnson, Microsoft, Lloyds Bank, Citibank, Boeing, Mailchimp, Airbnb, Dropbox, and charity: water. 
 
He is also the founder of Murmur--a SaaS startup that helps teams scale culture through the magic of working agreements. The Murmur platform will allow every team on the planet to define and share their ways of working. 
 
Dignan is the author of Brave New Work (2019) and Game Frame (2011), co-host of the Brave New Work podcast, and a friend to misfit toys.

Aaron Dignan

Aaron Edwards is a senior lecturer in defence and international affairs at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, specialising in terrorism and counter-insurgency. He is the author and editor of several books, including Defending the Realm: The Politics of Britain’s Small Wars Since 1945, and has lectured all over the world on aspects of national and international security. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Aaron Edwards

Aaron Robertson is a writer, an editor, and a translator of Italian literature. His translation of Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon was short-listed for the 2020 PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award, and in 2021 he received a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, n+1, The Point, and Literary Hub, among other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Aaron Robertson

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Jenny Crompton

Application for Employment 
 
I refer to the recent death of the Technical Manager at your company and hereby apply for the replacement of the deceased manager. 
 
Each time I apply for a job, I get a reply that there is no vacancy but in this case I have caught you red-handed and you have no excuse because I even attended the funeral to be sure that he was truly dead and buried before applying. 
 
Attached to my letter is a copy of my CV and his death certificate. 
 
Crap CVs is a hilarious compilation of the worst job applications imaginable, including overly honest cover letters, embarrassing typos, mortifying personal revelations, awkward interview questions, misplaced self-confidence, self-aggrandising gibberish, blatant truth-twisting and, of course, outright lies.

Crap CVs

Spike Milligan

Spike Milligan's letters contain the most revelatory, personal and outrageously amusing material he ever wrote. He was prolific and obsessive, brazen and rude. 
 
Each letter reveals an extra facet of the man, most of which have never been seen before. Eye-watering correspondence with heads of state, the BBC, with fans and friends, with the police, his parents and some altogether unexpected correspondents, this magnificent collection presents the richest, most intimate and most enjoyable portrait of the man since his legendary war memoirs.

Spike Milligan: Man of Letters

W. G. Sebald

When W. G. Sebald travelled to Manchester in 1966, he packed in his bags certain literary favourites which would remain central to him throughout the rest of his life and during the years when he was settled in England. In A Place in the Country, he reflects on six of the figures who shaped him as a person and as a writer, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Jan Peter Tripp. 
 
Fusing biography and essay, and finding, as ever, inspiration in place - as when he journeys to the Ile St. Pierre, the tiny, lonely Swiss island where Jean-Jacques Rousseau found solace and inspiration - Sebald lovingly brings his subjects to life in his distinctive, inimitable voice. 
 
A Place in the Country is a window into the mind of this much loved and much missed writer.

A Place in the Country

Helga Weiss

In 1941, aged 12, Helga Weiss and her parents were interned in the Nazi concentration camp of Terezin. Here she began to document her experiences in a diary. Three years later, they were sent to Auschwitz. Forced to abandon all of her belongings, Helga hid the diary in a wall. Of the fifteen thousand children from Prague sent to Auschwitz, Helga was one of only a hundred who survived. When she finally returned home, she managed to retrieve her diary and completed her account of her experiences. The result is one of the most compelling testimonies written during the Holocaust ever to have been recovered.

Helga's Diary

A Young Girl's Account of Life in a Concentration Camp

David Foster Wallace

Beloved for his brilliantly discerning eye, his verbal elasticity and his uniquely generous imagination, David Foster Wallace was heralded by critics and fans as the voice of a generation. Collected here are fifteen essays published for the first time in book form, including writing never published before in the UK. 
 
From 'Federer Both Flesh and Not', considered by many to be his nonfiction masterpiece; to 'The (As it Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2,' which deftly dissects James Cameron's blockbuster; to 'Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young', an examination of television's effect on a new generation of writers, the writing collected here swoops from erudite literary discussion to open-hearted engagement with the most familiar of our twentieth-century cultural references. 
 
A celebration of Wallace's great loves - for language, for precision, for meaning - and a feast of enjoyment for his fans, Both Flesh and Not is a fitting tribute to this writer who was never concerned with anything less important than what it means to be alive.

Both Flesh And Not

Richard Jefferies

Richard Jefferies was the most imaginative and least conventional of nineteenth-century observers of the natural world. Trekking across the English countryside, he recorded his responses to everything from the texture of an owl's feather and 'noises in the air' to the grinding hardship of rural labour. This superb selection of his essays and articles shows a writer who is brimming with intense feeling, acutely aware of the land and those who work on it, and often ambivalent about the countryside. Who does it belong to? Is it a place, an experience or a way of life? In these passionate and idiosyncratic writings, almost all our current ideas and concerns about rural life can be found. 
 
Richard Jefferies (1848-1887) was the son of a Wiltshire farmer. He never worked the land but made his living from writing, trekking across the countryside with his notebook. He spent much of his life struggling against poverty and tuberculosis, which would eventually kill him at the age of thirty-nine. As well as being in many ways the father of English nature writing, Jefferies also wrote the classic children's book Bevis and the apocalyptic science-fiction novel After London. 
 
Richard Mabey's introduction to his selection of Jefferies' work discusses the author's life, his views on the paradoxes of rural life and his place in the tradition of nature writers.

Landscape with Figures

Selected Prose Writings

Orlando Figes

From Orlando Figes, international bestselling author of A People's Tragedy, Just Send Me Word is the moving true story of two young Russians whose love survived Stalin's Gulag. 
 
Lev and Svetlana, kept apart for fourteen years by the Second World War and the Gulag, stayed true to each other and exchanged thousands of secret letters as Lev battled to survive in Stalin's camps. Using this remarkable cache of smuggled correspondence, Orlando Figes tells the tale of two incredible people who, swept along in the very worst of times, kept their devotion alive. 
 
Orlando Figes was granted exclusive access to the thousands of letters between Lev and Sveta that form the foundation of Just Send Me Word, and he was able to interview the couple in person, then in their nineties. These real-time and largely uncensored letters form the largest cache of Gulag letters ever found. 
 
Reviews: 
 
'One is overcome with admiration for the kindness, bravery and generosity of people in terrible peril ... It is impossible to read without shedding tears' Simon Sebag Montefiore, Financial Times 
 
'This powerful narrative by a distinguished historian will take its place not just in history but in literature' Robert Massie 
 
'Electrifying, passionate, devoted, despairing, exhilarating ... a tale of hope, resilience, grit and love' The Times 
 
 
 
'Moving ... a remarkable discovery' Max Hastings, Sunday Times 
 
'The gulag story lacks individuals for us to sympathise with: a Primo Levi, an Anne Frank or even an Oskar Schindler. Just Send Me Word may well be the book to change that' Oliver Bullough, Independent 
 
'Immensely touching ... [a] heartening gem of a book' Anna Reid, Literary Review 
 
'The remarkable true story of a love affair between two Soviet citizens ... as much a literary challenge as a historical one: the book can be read as a non-fiction novel' Telegraph 
 
'Remarkable ... Figes, selecting and then interpreting this mass of letters, makes them tell two kinds of story. The first is a uniquely detailed narrative of the gulag, of the callous, slatternly universe which consumed millions of lives ... The second is about two people determined not to lose each other' Neal Ascherson, Guardian 
 
'A quiet, moving and memorable account of life in a totalitarian state ... The book often reads like a novel ... captivating' Evening Standard 
 
'Orlando Figes has wrought something beautiful from dark times' Ian Thomson, Observer 
 
'A heart-rending record of extraordinary human endurance' Kirkus Reviews 
 
'[A] remarkable tale of love and devotion during the worst years of the USSR ... [Figes's] fine narrative pacing enhances this moving, memorable story' Publishers Weekly 
 
About the author: 
 
Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of Peasant Russia, Civil War, A People's Tragedy, Natasha's Dance, The Whisperers and Crimea. He lives in Cambridge and London. His books have been translated into over twenty languages.

Just Send Me Word

A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag

Jean-Claude Ellena

Perfume creation is an exclusive and secretive endeavour. What is day to day life like for a perfume-maker? How does the creation of a new scent begin? How do you capture the essence of a smell on the skin? 
 
For one year, Jean-Claude Ellena kept a diary of his life as 'parfumeur exclusif' ('le nez' or 'the nose') for Hermès. Believing that creating a scent is like creating a work of art, and describing himself as a writer using 'olfactory colours', he explains how all of the five senses come into play when creating a perfume: 'the painter learns to see, the pianist learns to listen, I learned to smell.' He also reveals how inspiration can come from a market stall, a landscape, or even the movement of calligraphy, and concludes this charming, perceptive diary with recipes for natural fragrances, each made up of three synthetic ingredients, to create the illusion of smells like freesia, orange blossom, grapefruit, pear, chocolate, cashew and cotton candy. 
 
This is the story behind the creation of scent. The quest to capture what is most elusive. With this diary, Jean-Claude Ellena offer readers a rare insight into the secrets of his business, his art, and his life as one of the world's most important and admired perfumers.

The Diary of a Nose

A Year in the Life of a Parfumeur

William S. Burroughs

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This major collection of William Burroughs' letters gives an unprecedented insight into one of America's most incisive and influential writers, at a time when his work was at its most experimental and his life entered a new era of creativity. 
 
William Burroughs' life was often as extreme as his prose. This second volume of his letters documents the time after the notorious publication of Naked Lunch in 1959, as he drifted away from Kerouac, Ginsberg and the Beats and on towards new horizons in Europe and North Africa, moving from place to place in search of inspiration, or to avoid the law over his drug addiction and openly gay lifestyle. We see Brion Gysin gradually replace Ginsberg as Burroughs' most trusted confidant, as they explore ideas on mind control and language, and there is correspondence with Paul Bowles, Ian Sommerville, Timothy Leary and Norman Mailer, among many others. These letters show the creative surge that led to works such as the Nova Trilogy; Burroughs' brief fascination with Scientology; his desperation to kick his drug habit; his continuing dedication to the cut-up method, but also a gradual return to more narrative forms of writing as, in 1974, he prepared to return to New York. 
 
Darkly funny, sharply perceptive and often shocking, these letters also reveal an open and curious side to Burroughs, in contrast to the familiar view of his isolated, itinerant life at this time. Rub Out the Words adds a new richness to our view of one of the most innovative artists of the twentieth century.

Rub Out the Words

The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1959-1974

Rodney Foster

"Who do you think you are kidding Mr Hitler?" Not Colonel Rodney Foster, a platoon commander of the Kent Home Guard. 
 
Dad's Army, the iconic comedy series is as well-known today as it was forty years ago. But the reality of life in the Home Guard was often very different. Living directly beneath the Battle of Britain on the Kent coast, Colonel Rodney Foster, who illegally kept a diary every day of the War, commanded a company of men in the face of constant aerial bombardment and the ever-present threat of death from above - the Home Guard were the first barrier to Hitler's crack parachutists. Writing from the village hall, abandoned barns, churches and makeshift officers' messes, he records with a unique wit and wisdom the everyday details of family life during the war: the domestic routine dogged by air raid warnings, the antics of soldiers stationed nearby taking every chance to improve their lot, the quiet strength of a small community faced with great adversity.

The Real 'Dad's Army'

The War Diaries of Col. Rodney Foster

St John Greene

'Kiss boys two times after I have gone' 
'Please teach the boys to say what they mean' 
'Mummy loved orange Club biscuits, jam and jelly and lemon curd' 
 
On her deathbed, Kate Greene's only concern was for her two little boys, Reef and Finn, and her loving husband, Singe. She knew she'd be leaving them behind very soon. 
 
Over her last few days, Kate created Mum's List. The couple talked and cried together as she wrote her thoughts and wishes down, trying to help the man she loved create the best life for their boys after she was gone. 
 
It wasn't the first time Singe and Kate had faced the spectre of death. Four years earlier, doctors discovered a large lump in baby Reef 's abdomen. Kate, pregnant with Finn, was so distressed that she gave birth dangerously early. Both boys pulled through, but afterwards Kate received the diagnosis that every woman dreads . . .

Mum's List

Colm Tóibín

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 Colm Tóibín's touching memoir. 
 
A Guest at the Feast moves from the small town of Enniscorthy to Dublin, from memories of a mother who always had a book on the go to the author's early adulthood, from a love of literature to the influences of place and family. Tóibín's captivating memoir is the story of a writer coming of age and his connections between home, work and love. It is a perfect gem of a book.

A Guest at the Feast

A Memoir

Rachel Johnson

'The whole place seemed completely bonkers: dusty, tatty, disorganized and impossibly old-fashioned, set in an age of doilies and flag-waving patriotism and jam still for tea, some sunny day.' 
 
Appointed editor of The Lady - the oldest women's weekly in the world - Rachel Johnson faced the challenge of a lifetime. For a start, how do you become an editor when you've never, well, edited? How do you turn around a venerable title, full of ads for walk-in baths, during the worst recession EVER? And forget doubling the circulation in a year - what on earth do you wear to work when you've spent the last fifteen years at home in sweatpants? 
 
Will Rachel save The Lady - or sink it?

A Diary of The Lady

My First Year As Editor

Samuel Pepys

As well as being the most celebrated diarist of all time, Samuel Pepys was also a hearty drinker, eater and connoisseur of epicurean delights, who indulged in every pleasure seventeenth-century London had to offer. 
 
Whether he is feasting on barrels of oysters, braces of carps, larks' tongues and copious amounts of wine, merrymaking in taverns until the early hours, attending formal dinners with lords and ladies or entertaining guests at home with his young wife, these irresistible selections from Pepys's diaries provide a frank, high-spirited and vivid picture of the joys of over-indulgence - and the side-effects afterwards.

The Joys of Excess

Keith Haring

Keith Haring is synonymous with the downtown New York art scene of the 1980's. His artwork-with its simple, bold lines and dynamic figures in motion-filtered in to the world's consciousness and is still instantly recognizable, twenty years after his death. This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition features ninety black-and-white images of classic artwork and never-before-published Polaroid images, and is a remarkable glimpse of a man who, in his quest to become an artist, instead became an icon.

Keith Haring Journals

Aung San Suu Kyi

In these unforgettable letters, Aung San Suu Kyi reaches out beyond Burma's borders to paint for her readers a vivid and poignant picture of her native land. 
 
Here she celebrates the courageous army officers, academics, actors and everyday people who have supported the National League for Democracy, often at great risk to their own lives. She reveals the impact of political decisions on the people of Burma, from the terrible cost to the children of imprisoned dissidents - allowed to see their parents for only fifteen minutes every fortnight - to the effect of inflation on the national diet and of state repression on traditions of hospitality. She also evokes the beauty of the country's seasons and scenery, customs and festivities, that remain so close to her heart. 
 
Through these remarkable letters, the reader catches a glimpse of exactly what is at stake as Suu Kyi fights on for freedom in Burma, and of the love for her homeland that sustains her non-violent battle.

Letters From Burma

Bee Rowlatt

May Witwit

Would you brave gun-toting militias for a cut and blow dry? 
 
May's a tough-talking, hard-smoking, lecturer in English. She's also an Iraqi from a Sunni-Shi'ite background living in Baghdad, dodging bullets before breakfast, bargaining for high heels in bombed-out bazaars and battling through blockades to reach her class of Jane Austen-studying girls. Bee, on the other hand, is a London mum of three, busy fighting off PTA meetings and chicken pox, dealing with dead cats and generally juggling work and family while squabbling with her globe-trotting husband over the socks he leaves lying around the house. 
 
They should have nothing in common. 
 
But when a simple email brings them together, they discover a friendship that overcomes all their differences of culture, religion and age. Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad is the story of two women who share laughter and tears, and swap their confidences, dreams and fears. And, between the grenades, the gossip, the jokes and the secrets, they also hatch an ingenious plan to help May escape the bombings of Baghdad . . .

Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad

The True Story of an Unlikely Friendship

Roger Deakin

When Roger Deakin died in August 2006, his death was considered by many to be a great loss to literature. Notes From Walnut Tree Farm collects together the jottings, musings and observations with which he filled a series of notebooks for the last six years of his life. In this beautiful illustrated collection, descriptions of walks on Mellis Common and thoughts on the importance of nature sit side by side with memories of the past and musings about literature, while perfectly rendered observations of the tiny, missable visual details of everyday life are skilfully woven with a gentle, wise philosophy. 
 
Organised into twelve months of impressions, the notes reveal a passionate but gentle character and his extraordinary, restless curiosity. Capturing Deakin's unique turn of phrase and inspired use of language, and infused throughout with the magically meditative tranquillity of Walnut Tree Farm, this is a charming introduction to one of the most important of modern nature writers, or the perfect follow-up to Wildwood and Waterlog.

Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

Gilbert White

The letters of the eminent naturalist Gilbert White are full of precise, unaffected and delightful observations of the wildlife of his beloved village of Selborne, describing the habits, colours and songs of birds from lapwings to barn-owls, wrens to house-martins. Here too are exquisite writings on trees, fossils, bats and rainfall, filled with intellectual curiosity and joy in the natural world. 
 
Generations of inhabitants have helped shape the English countryside - but it has profoundly shaped us too.It has provoked a huge variety of responses from artists, writers, musicians and people who live and work on the land - as well as those who are travelling through it.English Journeys celebrates this long tradition with a series of twenty books on all aspects of the countryside, from stargazey pie and country churches, to man's relationship with nature and songs celebrating the patterns of the countryside (as well as ghosts and love-struck soldiers).

Birds of Selborne

Dorothy Wordsworth

The beautiful and peaceful heart of the Lake District, Grasmere was an inspiration to both Dorothy and William Wordsworth. Hills, lakes and orchards, letter writing, walks and welcome visitors (including fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge) provoked in Dorothy's journal great, lyrical prose, which in turn influenced her brother's unsurpassed poetry. The two - journal entries and poems - are here set side by side, a glorious celebration of life and nature around Dove Cottage, over the first year they called it home. 
 
Generations of inhabitants have helped shape the English countryside - but it has profoundly shaped us too.It has provoked a huge variety of responses from artists, writers, musicians and people who live and work on the land - as well as those who are travelling through it.English Journeys celebrates this long tradition with a series of twenty books on all aspects of the countryside, from stargazey pie and country churches, to man's relationship with nature and songs celebrating the patterns of the countryside (as well as ghosts and love-struck soldiers).

Life At Grasmere

Valerie Grove

Novelist, playwright and barrister John Mortimer has led an extraordinarily rich life, privately and professionally, much of it in the public eye. His own writings, from the play A Voyage Round My Father to the memoirs Clinging to the Wreckage and Murderers and Other Friends, have given his many fans plenty of insights. But now for the first time a biographer has had full access to Mortimer, his circle of friends and colleagues, and their diaries and letters. The result is a riveting account of the life of one of the great figures of our time. A Voyage Round John Mortimer is revealing of many aspects of Mortimer's legal and literary career, from his first attempts at writing novels and the early help he offered his barrister father through to the great triumphs of Rumpole and the Oz trial.

A Voyage Round John Mortimer

Jonathan Safran Foer has long had a passion for the work of the twentieth-century American assemblage artist Joseph Cornell. Inspired by Cornell&rsquo;s avian-themed boxes, and suspecting that they would be similarly inspiring to others, Foer began to write letters. 
 
The responses he received from luminaries of American writing were nothing short of astounding. Twenty writers generously contributed pieces of prose and poetry that are as eclectic as they are imaginative, and the result is a unique collaborative project and one of the most significant engagements of literature with art for many years.

A Convergence of Birds

Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell

Richard P Feynman

Richard Feynman was one of the most inspirational men of our times. He won the Nobel Prize, wrote equations on napkins in strip joints, cracked safes for fun while working on the atom bomb, upset those in authority and touched countless lives. He also wrote hundreds of witty, eccentric and moving letters to his family, friends, critics, colleagues and devoted fans around the world. 
 
Now these letters have been brought together for the first time. From down-to-earth advice to eager students to discussions of time travel, blunt rebuttals to journalists to poignant exchanges with his first wife as she suffered from tuberculosis, they will introduce you to a unique person whose wisdom and lust for life inspired all those who came into his orbit.

Don't You Have Time to Think?

Heloise

Peter Abelard

The illicit relationship between Peter Abelard, a medieval philosopher, and his young pupil Heloise is one of history&rsquo;s most legendary and tragic love affairs. From reckless ecstasy to public scandal and cruel separation, their eloquent and intimate letters tell the story of their passionate, doomed romance. 
 
United by the theme of love, the writings in the Great Loves series span over two thousand years and vastly different worlds. Readers will be introduced to love&rsquo;s endlessly fascinating possibilities and extremities: romantic love, platonic love, erotic love, gay love, virginal love, adulterous love, parental love, filial love, nostalgic love, unrequited love, illicit love, not to mention lost love, twisted and obsessional love&hellip;.

Forbidden Fruit

From the Letters of Abelard and Heloise

Jan Peter Tripp

For a number of years until his death in 2001, W. G. Sebald and the German artist Jan Peter Tripp exchanged poems and lithographs.  Unrecounted is the result of this long artistic friendship - a creative dialogue inspired by shared concerns. Sebald's words and Tripp's images speak of moments salvaged from time passing, of our eyes bearing witness, and of memory and remembrance.

Unrecounted

Michael Moore

Will They Ever Trust Us Again? brings together hundreds of never-before-published letters that Mike has been sent - from GIs serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, from troops in US bases, from their mothers, wives and friends back home, from veterans who've fought around the globe - to show the reality beneath the political spin and TV propaganda. Their politics may vary from the Bushwhacked to the patriotic, but they all feel let down and lied to by government, they know the human cost of waging wars for the rich - and now they've had enough. 
 
Explosive, angry, moving and funny, this book shows who's really winning the battle for hearts and minds on the front line.

Will They Ever Trust Us Again?

Letters from the War Zone to Michael Moore

Guy Walters

James Owen

The Second World War was the first truly global conflict and sixty years on its consequences continue to shape the modern world. Season by season The Voice of War charts the course of the central event of the twentieth century using the diaries, letters and memoirs of those who were there, from Russian women fighter pilots to the prisoners of the Japanese to Londoners enduring the Blitz. Their first-hand accounts place us on the ramparts of Colditz, in the hiding places of the Warsaw Ghetto, aboard a dive bomber at Pearl Harbor, with Rommel in the desert and by Churchill's side in Downing Street. Unrivalled in the immediacy, range and power of the experiences it contains, it includes writing by, among others, Joseph Goebbels, Benito Mussolini, Christabel Bielenberg, Noel Coward, Robert Capa, Airey Neave, George Patton, Hermione Ranfurly, Arthur Koestler, James Lees-Milne, Martha Gellhorn, Sophia Loren and Primo Levi. Ambitious, instructive and entertaining, this is the definitive portrait of a world at war.

The Voice of War

The Second World War Told by Those Who Fought It

Kurt Cobain

The first publication of Kurt Cobain's diaries, which were found after his death in 1994.  Genuinely moving, provocative and candid, and suprisingly funny, pieces of writing which, as a whole, provide a unique account of the rise and fall of a greatpopular artist and icon.

Journals

A Private Thriller

A series of children's modern classic novels by renowned 20th century children's writers. All the titles in this series have the A Puffin Book logo, contemporary-style covers, and child-friendly endnotes.

A Puffin Book

A Ripley Novel

A Slice of the Moon

A Victorian Mystery

A Walk in...

A Women’s Murder Club Thriller

A chef Paul Delamare Mystery

Aberrations

Across the Universe

Actiphons

Adelia Aguilar

Adrian Mole

Adventures in Time

Aftermath

Against War

Age of X

Agent 21

Agent Z

Detective Aidan Waits is a troubled junior detective haunted by his past. Facing an uncertain future, and disconnected from his history, DC Waits and his partner, Detective Inspector Peter 'Sutty' Sutcliffe work on Manchester's streets to uncover the city's worst criminals among the grime of the underworld.

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