Abilio Estévez

Abir Mukherjee is the bestselling author of the award-winning Wyndham &amp; Banerjee series of crime novels set in 1920s India and the British Book Awards Crime Thriller of the Year 2025 Hunted. His books have been translated into sixteen languages and won various awards including the CWA Dagger for best Historical Novel, the Prix du Polar Européen, and the Wilbur Smith Award for Adventure Writing. 
 
 
He also co-hosts the popular Red Hot Chilli Writers podcast which takes a wry look at the world of books, writing, and the creative arts, tackling everything from bestsellers to pop culture. Abir grew up in Scotland and now lives in Surrey with his wife and two sons. 
 
 
Website: abirmukherjee.com Twitter, Threads &amp; Instagram: @radiomukhers Facebook: AuthorAbir

Abir Mukherjee

Abolqasem Ferdowsi

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham L. Newman is a professor at the School of Foreign Service and Government Department at Georgetown University. He is a 2022-2023 Berlin Prize winner and his work has been published in leading outlets like The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, Nature, Science, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Harvard Business Review, and Politico.

Abraham Newman

Abraham Verghese

Absolut Vodka

Ad Putter

Ada Moncrieff is the author of Murder Most Festive, Murder at the Theatre Royale and Murder at Maybridge Castle. She lives and works in London.

Ada Moncrieff

Adam Aleksic is a linguist and content creator posting educational videos as the “Etymology Nerd” to an audience of over two million. As a linguistics student at Harvard College, he founded and served as president of the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society. He’s discussed online language on NPR, repeatedly contributed to The Washington Post, and his work has been mentioned in The New York Times, The Economist, and The Guardian. He’s lectured on language and social media at Stanford, Yale, Georgetown, and other top universities, including a TEDx talk at the University of Pennsylvania. Adam is based in New York City, where he spends a lot of time scrolling TikTok for “research.”

Adam Aleksic

Adam Alter is an Associate Professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, and holds an affiliated appointment within the Psychology Department. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel and Behave and has written for The New York Times, New Yorker, Atlantic, Wired, Popular Science and numerous other publications.

Adam Alter

Professor Adam Balen is lead clinician at one of the UK's largest and most successful IVF units at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. In recognition of his research on fertility and related conditions, he holds a DSc (the highest academic degree in medicine) from the University of Leeds. Adam is internationally renowned, holding roles with the World Health Organisation (WHO), the International Federation of Gyneacology and Obstetrics (FIGO) and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gyneacologists (RCOG). He runs both NHS and private fertility clinics so he understands the issues that arise from both sides and he works closely with fertility patient support organisations across the UK. Adam regularly features in the media on all aspects of reproductive health and lectures widely throughout the world.

Adam Balen

Adam Baron

Adam Bornstein

Adam Brookes grew up in the UK and was a journalist with BBC News for many years. As a foreign correspondent he was based in Indonesia, China and the United States. Along the way he reported from many other countries, including Iraq, Afghanistan and North Korea. He lives in Washington DC.

Adam Brookes

Adam Buxton

Adam Christopher is the New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Shadow of the Sith and Stranger Things: Darkness on the Edge of Town. He has also written official tie-in novels for the hit CBS television show Elementary and the award-winning Dishonored video game franchise. Co-creator of the twenty-first-century incarnation of Archie Comics superhero The Shield, Adam has also written for the universes of Doctor Who and World of Warcraft, and is a contributor to the internationally bestselling Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View anniversary anthology series and the all-ages Star Wars Adventures comic. Adam’s original novels include Made to Kill and The Burning Dark, among many others, and his debut novel Empire State was both a SciFi Now and Financial Times book of the year.

Adam Christopher

Adam Foulds's most recent books are In the Wolf’s Mouth, The Quickening Maze, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Encore Award and the European Union Prize for Literature, and The Broken Word, which won the Costa Poetry Award and the Somerset Maugham Award. He has recently been awarded the E.M. Forster Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and named as one of Granta’s ‘Best of Young British Novelists’.

Adam Foulds

Dr Adam Fox is a highly qualified and respected allergy specialist and consultant paediatric allergist and clinical lead for Allergy at Guy's &amp; St Thomas' Hospitals. The Times recently named him as one of Britain's top 100 children’s doctors. 
 
www.allergyfreebabyandtoddler.com

Adam Fox

Adam Frost

Adam Galinsky is currently the Morris and Alice Kaplan Professor of Ethics and Decision in Management at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He received his PhD from Princeton University in Social Psychology and his B.A. from Harvard University.

Adam Galinsky

Adam Glasser

Adam Goodfellow

Adam Goodwin

Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist at Wharton, where he has been the top-rated professor for seven straight years. His books have sold millions of copies, his TED talks have been viewed more than 30 million times, and he hosts the hit podcast Re:Thinking. His pioneering research on motivation and meaning has enabled people to reach their aspirations and exceed others' expectations. His viral piece on languishing was the most-read New York Times article of 2021 and the most-saved article across platforms. He has been recognized as one of the world's ten most influential management thinkers and Fortune's 40 Under 40, and has received distinguished scientific achievement awards from the American Psychological Association and the National Science Foundation. Grant received his B.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, and he is a former Junior Olympic springboard diver. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and their three children.

Adam Grant

Adam and Charlotte met in Zanzibar while working with Voluntary Services Overseas. Upon their return to the UK, Charlotte completed an MA at Oxford Brookes and started her career in publishing. Adam in the meantime became writer-in-residence at the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre before co-founding Storytelling Schools, an international organisation dedicated to training teachers in oracy, literacy and creativity. Adam and Charlotte's first book together was the best-selling and award-winning Spaghetti with the Yeti. Since then, Adam and Charlotte have continued to follow their passion for creating engaging books that inspire interaction and creativity in young readers.

Adam Guillain

ADAM HAMDY is a bestselling author and screenwriter. His most recent novel, The Other Side of Night, was an NPR best book of 2022 and a New York Times best thriller of the year, and has been described as ingenious and deeply moving. He is the author of the Scott Pearce series of modern spy thrillers, Black 13, Red Wolves and White Fire, and the Pendulum trilogy. Keep up to date with his latest books and news at www.adamhamdy.com.

Adam Hamdy

Adam Hart-Davis

Adam Haslett is the author of the story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here and the novels Imagine Me Gone and Union Atlantic. He has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and his books have been translated into over thirty languages. His journalism on culture and politics has appeared in The Financial Times, Esquire, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, The Nation, and The Atlantic, among others. He lives in New York City.

Adam Haslett

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Roberto Calasso

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-modern-classics/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_Modern_Classics_Series_26_06">Choose 3 timeless classics for only £21 over on the Penguin Shop</a>

Throughout his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, Proust repeatedly refers to colours as Tiepolo Pink or Tiepolo Red. Who exactly was the artist that he so memorable transformed into colour? 
 
The eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo spent his life executing commissions in churches, palaces and villas, creating frescoes that are among the glories of Western art. The life of an epoch swirled around him - but though his contemporaries admired him, they failed to understand him. 
 
Few have attempted to tackle Tiepolo's series of bizarre and haunting etchings, but Roberto Calasso rises to the challenge, interpreting them as chapters in a dark narrative that contains the secret of Tiepolo's art. Blooming ephebes, Oriental sages, owls, snakes: we will find them all within the pages of this book, along with Venus, Time, Moses, angels, Cleopatra and Beatrice of Burgundy - a gypsyish company always on the go. 
 
Calasso makes clear that Tiepolo was more than a dazzling intermezzo in the history of painting. Rather, he represented a particular way of meeting the challenge of form: endowed with a seemingly effortless style, Tiepolo was the last incarnation of that peculiar Italian virtue sprezzatura, the art of not seeming artful.

Tiepolo Pink

Michel Foucault

We talk about sex more and more, but are we more liberated? 
 
The first part of Michel Foucault's landmark account of our evolving attitudes in the west shows how the nineteenth century, far from suppressing sexuality, led to an explosion of discussion about sex as a separate sphere of life for study and examination. As a result, he argues, we are making a science of sex which is devoted to the analysis of desire rather than the increase of pleasure.

The History of Sexuality: 1

The Will to Knowledge

The second volume of Michel Foucault's pioneering analysis of the changing nature of desire explores how sexuality was perceived in classical Greek culture. From the stranger byways of Greek medicine (with its advice on the healthiest season for sex, as well as exercise and diet) to the role of women, The Use of Pleasure is full of extraordinary insights into the differences - and the continuities - between the Ancient, Christian and Modern worlds, showing how sex became a moral issue in the west.

The History of Sexuality: 2

The Use of Pleasure

In the third volume of his acclaimed examination of sexuality in modern Western society, Foucault investigates the Golden Age of Rome to reveal a decisive break from the classical Greek version of sexual pleasure. Exploring the moral reflections of philosophers and physicians of the era, he identifies a growing anxiety over sexual activity and its consequences. At the core of this transformation Foucault found the principles of the 'care of the self': the belief that the self is an object of knowledge to be cultivated over time, and the implications this has for ethics and behaviour.

The History of Sexuality: 3

The Care of the Self

Edward W. Said

'Stimulating, elegant and pugnacious' Observer 
 
In this highly acclaimed work, Edward Said surveys the history and nature of Western attitudes towards the East, considering Orientalism as a powerful European ideological creation - a way for writers, philosophers and colonial administrators to deal with the 'otherness' of eastern culture, customs and beliefs. He traces this view through the writings of Homer, Nerval, Flaubert, Disraeli and Kipling, whose imaginative depictions have greatly contributed to the West's romantic and exotic picture of the Orient. Drawing on his own experiences as an Arab Palestinian living in the West, Said examines how these ideas can be a reflection of European imperialism and racism.

Orientalism

Margery Kempe

The story of the eventful and controversial life of Margery Kempe - wife, mother, businesswoman, pilgrim and visionary - is the earliest surviving autobiography in English. Here Kempe (c.1373-c.1440) recounts in vivid, unembarrassed detail the madness that followed the birth of the first of her fourteen children, the failure of her brewery business, her dramatic call to the spiritual life, her visions and uncontrollable tears, the struggle to convert her husband to a vow of chastity and her pilgrimages to Europe and the Holy Land. Margery Kempe could not read or write, and dictated her remarkable story late in life. It remains an extraordinary record of human faith and a portrait of a medieval woman of unforgettable character and courage.

The Book of Margery Kempe

Angela Y. Davis

'Black women were equal to their men in the oppression they suffered; they were their men's social equals within the slave community; and they resisted slavery with a passion equal to their men's' 
 
Ranging from the age of slavery to contemporary injustices, this seminal history of race, gender and class inequality by the radical political activist Angela Davis offers an alternative view of female struggles for liberation. Tracing the intertwined histories of the abolitionist and women's suffrage movements, Davis examines the racism and class prejudice inherent in so much of white feminism, and in doing so brings to light new pioneering heroines, from field slaves to mill workers, who fought back and refused to accept the lives into which they were born.

Women, Race & Class

Penguin Modern Classics

John le Carré

West Germany in the 1960s is a simmering cauldron of radical protests. Amid the turmoil Leo Harting, a Second Secretary in the British Embassy, has gone missing - along with more than forty Confidential embassy files. Alan Turner of the Foreign Office must travel to Bonn to recover them. As he gets closer to the truth of Harting's disappearance, he will discover that the face of Cold War Europe - and the attentions of the British Ministry itself - are far uglier that he could possibly have imagined. 
Le Carré's searing Cold War novel creates a world where the lines between right and wrong, good and evil, are horribly blurred.

A Small Town in Germany

Audre Lorde

The woman's place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep 
 
The revolutionary writings of Audre Lorde gave voice to those 'outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women'. Uncompromising, angry and yet full of hope, this collection of her essential prose - essays, speeches, letters, interviews - explores race, sexuality, poetry, friendship, the erotic and the need for female solidarity, and includes her landmark piece 'The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House'. 
 
'The truth of her writing is as necessary today as it's ever been' Guardian

Sister Outsider

28 June 2019 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising - the most significant event in the gay liberation movement and the catalyst for the modern fight for LGBTQ rights in the United States. Drawing from 
the New York Public Library's archives, The Stonewall Reader is a collection of firsthand accounts, diaries, periodic literature and articles from LGBTQ magazines and newspapers that documented both the years leading up to and the years following the riots. Most importantly, this anthology shines a light on forgotten figures who were 
pivotal in the movement, such as Lee Brewster, head of the Queens Liberation Front and Ernestine Eckstine, one of the few out, African American, lesbian activists in the 1960s.

The Stonewall Reader

Jan Karski

'Insistently asks the question: What would you do? Would you fight, or acquiesce, or collaborate? ... Karski was deeply patriotic and ludicrously brave ... an astonishing testament of survival' Ben Macintyre, author of Operation Mincemeat 
 
It is 1939. Jan Karski, a brilliant young Polish student, enjoys a life of parties and pleasure. Then war breaks out and his familiar world is destroyed. Now he must live under a new identity, in the resistance. And, in a secret mission that could change the course of the war, he must risk his own life to try and save those of millions.

Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World

From the Hebrew Bible's shadowy realm of Sheol to twenty-first-century visions of Hell on earth, The Penguin Book of Hell takes us through three thousand years of eternal damnation. Along the way, you'll take a ferry ride with Aeneas to Hades, across the river Acheron; meet the Devil as imagined by a twelfth-century Irish monk - a monster with a thousand giant hands; wander the nine circles of Hell in Dante's Inferno; and witness the debates that raged in Victorian England when new scientific advances cast doubt on the idea of an eternal hereafter. Drawing upon religious poetry, epics, theological treatises, stories of miracles and accounts of saints' lives, this fascinating volume of hellscapes illuminates how Hell has long haunted us, in both life and death.

The Penguin Book of Hell

Anne Frank

"June, 1942: I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support." 
 
In Amsterdam, in the summer of 1942, the Nazis forced teenager Anne Frank and her family into hiding. For over two years, they, another family and a German dentist lived in a 'secret annexe', fearing discovery. All that time, Anne kept a diary. 
 
An intimate record of tension and struggle, adolescence and confinement, anger and heartbreak, this is the definitive edition of the diary of Anne Frank.

The Diary of a Young Girl

The Definitive Edition

Among all the technological accomplishments of the last century, none has captured our imagination more deeply than the movement of humans into outer space. From Sputnik to SpaceX, the story of that journey is told as never before in The Penguin Book of Outer Space Exploration. 
 
Renowned space historian John Logsdon has uncovered the most fascinating items in the NASA archive and woven them together with expert narrative guidance to create a history of how Americans got to space and what they've done there. Beginning with rocket genius Wernher von Braun's vision for voyaging to Mars and closing with Elon Musk's contemporary plan to get there, this volume traces major events like the founding of NASA, the first American astronauts in space, the moon landings, the Challenger disaster, the daring Hubble Telescope repairs and more.

The Penguin Book of Outer Space Exploration

NASA and the Incredible Story of Human Spaceflight

Ryszard Kapuscinski

When the great Ryszard Kapuscinski was a young journalist in the early 1960s, he was sent to the farthest reaches of his native Poland between foreign assignments. The resulting pieces brought together in this new collection, nearly all of which are translated into English for the first time, reveal a place just as strange as the distant lands he went on to visit. 
 
From forgotten villages to collective farms, Kapuscinski explores a Poland that is post-Stalinist but still Communist; a country on the edge of modernity. He encounters those for whom the promises of rising living standards never worked out as planned, those who would have been misfits under any political system, those tied to the land and those dreaming of escape.

Nobody Leaves

Impressions of Poland

Evelyn Waugh

In 1581 Edmund Campion, a Jesuit priest working underground in Protestant England, was found guilty of treason and hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. Years later he would be beatified. Evelyn Waugh's compelling and elegant narrative is a homage to the man he revered as a poet, scholar, hero and martyr. He tells Campion's story with a novelist's eye for detail, from his success as an Oxford scholar, through his travels around Europe, his doomed secret mission to England and on to his capture and dramatic trial. 
 
Vividly re-creating a time of persecution and surveillance, Waugh writes that 'the hunted, trapped murdered priest is our contemporary and Campion's voice sounds to us across the centuries'.

Edmund Campion: Jesuit and Martyr

In 1935 Italy declared war on Abyssinia and Evelyn Waugh was sent to Addis Ababa to cover the conflict. His acerbic account of the intrigue and political machinations leading up to the crisis is coupled with amusing descriptions of the often bizarre and seldom straightforward life of a war correspondent rubbing shoulders with less-than-honest officials, Arab spies, pyjama-wearing radicals and disgruntled journalists. Witty, lucid and penetrating, Evelyn Waugh captures the dilemmas and complexities of a feudal society caught up in twentieth-century politics and confrontation.

Waugh in Abyssinia

Norman Mailer

Miami, Summer 1968. The Vietnam War is raging; Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy have just been assassinated. The Republican Party meets in Miami and picks Richard Nixon as its candidate, to little fanfare. But when the Democrats back Lyndon Johnson's ineffectual vice president, Hubert Humphrey, the city of Chicago erupts. Antiwar protesters fill the streets and the police run amok, beating and arresting demonstrators and delegates alike, all broadcast on live television, and captured in these pages by one of America's fiercest intellects.

Miami and the Siege of Chicago

An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968

October 21, 1967, Washington, D.C. 20,000 to 200,000 protesters are marching to end the war in Vietnam, while helicopters hover overhead and federal marshals and soldiers with fixed bayonets await them on the Pentagon steps. Among the marchers is Norman Mailer. From his own singular participation in the day's events and his even more extraordinary perceptions comes a classic work that shatters the mould of traditional reportage. Intellectuals and hippies, clergymen and cops, poets and army MPs crowd the pages of a book in which facts are fused with techniques of fiction to create the nerve-end reality of experiential truth. 
 
The Armies of the Night uniquely and unforgettably captures the Sixties' tidal wave of love and rage at its crest and a towering genius at his peak.

The Armies of the Night

History as a Novel / The Novel as History

The murdered man had been an agent - once, long ago. But George Smiley's superiors at the Secret Service want to see the crime buried, not solved. Smiley will not leave it at that, not when it might lead him all the way to Karla, the elusive Soviet spymaster . . . 
 
Smiley's People is a thrilling confrontation between one of the most famous spies in all fiction and his Cold War rival, Karla. Like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy, it is as tense and unforgettable as only le Carré's novels can be.

Smiley's People

Richard Cobb

The most difficult and often savage relationship in 20th century western Europe was between the French and the Germans. Twice, cataclysmic wars were fought out on their borders, successfully by the French in 1914-18 and unsuccessfully in 1940. Both wars led to military occupation--for the large block of northern France behind the German trenches in the First World War and ultimately the whole country in the Second. 
 
Richard Cobb's extraordinary book is a meditation on the whole idea of occupation. How do you survive? When do you collaborate? What moral compromises are necessary? Above all, it is a book about the way that history gives a shape and rationality to events which for those living through them are completely mysterious, and terrifying. For those trapped under German rule--frightened, confused, malnourished--what is the right course of action? French and Germans, Germans and French recreates, with a brilliant mix of wit and sympathy, the story of one of the modern era's great dramas.

French and Germans, Germans and French

A Personal Interpretation of France under Two Occupations, 1914–1918/1940–1944

Ishmael Reed

Deep in the American South, 'land of the hunted and the haunted,' three young slaves have broken free. But they have their former master hot on their heels, and they must outrun, outwit, or outgun him and his personal 'CIA' if they are to secure their freedom--all while dodging the bullets of the Civil War raging on around them. When the three men part ways, the adventure begins: the first buys up a huge number of arms in readiness for a final showdown; the second sells his body for pornographic flicks; while the third, Raven Quickskill, hero, poet, heartbreaker, swigs champagne on a non-stop jumbo jet to Canada. Flight to Canada is fun, pacey, adventurous, and touched by Reed's taste for the absurd. Reed takes us on a wild ride through a nineteenth-century Virginia that looks a lot like the West today, littered with everything from Xerox copiers to jumbo jets, and casts an unsettling sideways look at history, race and the American media.

Flight to Canada

E. H. Carr

'E.H. Carr, author of the monumental History of Soviet Russia, now proves himself to be not only one of our most distinguished historians but also one of the most valuable contributors to historical theory' Spectator 
 
In formulating an answer to the question of 'What is History', Carr argues that the 'facts' of history are simply those which historians have chosen to focus on. All historical facts come to us as a result of interpretive choices by historians influenced by the standards of their age. 
 
Now for the first time in Penguin Modern Classics, with an introduction by Richard J. Evans, author of the Third Reich trilogy.

What is History?

Eduardo Galeano

'Football is a pleasure that hurts' 
 
This unashamedly emotional history of football is a homage to the romance and drama, spectacle and passion of a 'great pagan mass'. Through stories of superstition, heartbreak, tragedy, luck, heroes and villains, those who lived for football and those who died for it, Eduardo Galeano celebrates the glory of a game that - however much the rich and powerful try to control it - still retains its magic. 
 
'The Uruguayan whose writing got right to the heart of football ... readers were never in doubt of the warmth of the blood running through his veins' Guardian 
 
'Galeano can run rings round our glamorous football intelligentsia' When Saturday Comes 
 
'Stands out like Pele on a field of second-stringers' New Yorker

Football in Sun and Shadow

Allen Ginsberg

In 1977, twenty years after the publication of his landmark poem 'Howl' and Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Allen Ginsberg decided it was time to teach a course on the literary history of the Beat Generation. In The Best Minds of My Generation - a compilation of lectures from the course, expertly edited by renowned Beats scholar, Bill Morgan - Ginsberg gives us the convoluted origin story of the 'Beat' idea. Amongst anecdotes of meeting Kerouac, Burroughs and other figures for the first time, Ginsberg elucidates the importance of music, and particularly jazz rhythms, to Beat writing, discusses their many influences - literary, pharmaceutical and spiritual - and paints a portrait of a group who were leading a literary revolution. A unique document that works both as historical record and unconventional memoir, The Best Minds of My Generation is a vivid, personal and eye-opening look at one of the most important literary movements of the twentieth century.

The Best Minds of My Generation

A Literary History of the Beats

Richard Stokes

Poetry and music have been associated with each other from the very beginning. The Penguin Book of English Song draws together a great variety of English poetry (including Irish, Scots and Welsh writers) that has reached a wider audience through the magic of music. Richard Stokes's rich anthology of verse stretches from the fourteenth century to the twentieth, collecting poems that have inspired musical settings by one hundred English poets, along with a treasure trove of illuminating notes and marginalia about their lives, work and, often, their approach to music. 
 
Stokes gathers together in a single volume a huge amount of information about English song that will assist musicians in performing these works, and enlighten all those enthusiasts who delight in the fusion of words and music that has produced countless moments of incandescent magic.

The Penguin Book of English Song

Seven Centuries of Poetry from Chaucer to Auden

The study of history was invented in the ancient world. Treading uncharted waters, writers such as Plutarch and Lucian grappled with big questions such as how history should be written, how it differs from poetry and oratory, and what its purpose really is. This book includes complete essays by Dionysius, Plutarch and Lucian, as well as shorter pieces by Pliny the Younger, Cicero and others, and will be an essential resource for anyone studying history and the ancient world. 
 
Runner-up in the 13th Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature. 
 
"an excellent tool for the study of ancient historiography at all levels, and it is bound to become a standard point of reference in the future" Bryn Mawr Classical Review

On Writing History from Herodotus to Herodian

Thomas Hobbes

'The life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short' 
 
 Written during the chaos of the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan asks how, in a world of violence and horror, can we stop ourselves from descending into anarchy? Hobbes' case for a 'common-wealth' under a powerful sovereign - or 'Leviathan' - to enforce security and the rule of law, shocked his contemporaries, and his book was publicly burnt for sedition the moment it was published. But his penetrating work of political philosophy opened up questions about the nature of statecraft and society that influenced governments across the world. 
 
 Edited with an Introduction by Christopher Brooke

Leviathan

Nick Joaquin

Nick Joaquin is widely considered one of the greatest Filipino writers, but he has remained little-known outside his home country despite writing in English. With the post-colonial sensibilities of Junot Diaz, Teju Cole, and Jhumpa Lahiri and an ironic perspective of colonial history resonant with Marques and Llosa, Joaquin is a long-neglected writer ready to join the ranks of the world classics. His work meditates on the questions and challenges of the Filipino individual's new freedom after a long history of colonialism, exploring folklore, centuries-old Catholic rites, the Spanish colonial past, magical realism, and baroque splendour and excess. This collection features his best-known story, 'The Woman Who Had Two Navels,' centred on Philippine emigrants living in Hong Kong and later expanded into a novel, the much-anthologised story 'May Day Eve,' and a canonical play, A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino.

The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic

George Lamming

In a sleepy fishing village in 1930s Barbados, nine-year-old G. leads a life of quiet mischief. While the village lies tranquil in the shadow of its English landlord, Mr Creighton, and his towering house on the hill, G. makes his own fun, crab catching, teasing preachers, and playing among the pumpkin vines. Yet from this world of boyish pursuits, the precocious G. finds himself slowly awakening to strange goings-on in adult society. All around him, sudden bursts of violence - a devastating flood on the morning of his birthday; the headmaster unduly flogging his schoolmates on Empire day - hint at a brutality and destruction lurking beneath the apparently peaceful order of things. 
 
As the mounting wrongs of the present drive the villagers to rise up against Mr Creighton, the fissures in the façade of his Barbadian 'little England' begin to crack open, laying bare the central, bruising secret at the heart of their shared past. And as the world he knows crumbles before his eyes, G. is spurred ever closer to a life-changing decision. Poetic, unsettling, this classic coming-of-age novel is a story of tragic innocence, as a poor village boy comes to consciousness amid the collapse of colonial rule in mid-century Barbados.

In the Castle of My Skin

Atlantia

Avalon

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BBC Classics

BBC Earth

BBC Radio’s The Lord of the Rings

BBC TV Soundtracks

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Baby Touch

Ballroom Girls

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Bear Mountain Rescue Series

Beasts of Prey

The complete boxed collection of Beatrix Potter's beloved Peter Rabbit books

Beatrix Potter Originals

Beautiful Creatures

Bel Dame Apocrypha

Bella Wallis Victorian Mysteries

Belle

Ben & Holly's Little Kingdom

Bergman Brothers

Big Ideas for Little Philosophers

Bill Clinton & James Patterson stand-alone thrillers

Bill Smith / Lydia Chin

Bim Blake

Bindi Babes

Tim and Biscuit, two unlikely friends, always seem to get themselves into difficult situations. From their first meeting in Cliffhanger, where bookish Tim is forced to endure an activities camp, to Buried Alive, where a quiet camping holiday turns out to be full of surprises, there is never a dull moment with these two around.Jaqueline Wilson’s hilarious duo of books catalogues their escapades, triumphs and failures, with a good helping of snacks along the way!

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