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

Aaron Shapiro

Aaron T Beck

Aaron Vallance

Aaron Young was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, and read Politics and Communications at The University of Liverpool. He is a BAFTA-nominated director, producer and executive producer with over 20 years of experience across projects for the BBC, PBS, Channel 4, Channel 5, UKTV, UK Film Council and Arts Council England. A long-time collaborator of acclaimed historian, James Holland, he is the producer and director of the BAFTA-shortlisted BBC titles ‘Battle of Britain: The Real Story’ and, ‘Dam Busters: The Race to Smash the German Dams’, as well as ‘The Battle for Malta’, ‘Normandy ’44: The Battle Beyond D-Day’, the RTS-nominated ‘Imphal &amp; Kohima: Britain’s Greatest Battle.’, and the 3-part series, 'Normandy '44: D-Day and the Battle for France. His most recent credits include 'Hidden Histories of WWII', 'Lost Temples of Cambodia', the RTS-winning ‘Lost Home Movies of Nazi Germany’, and ‘Prue Leith: Journey with My Daughter’. Aaron was named in the inaugural list of BAFTA ‘Brits to Watch.’ He is the co-owner of award-winning film and television production company, Bright Button Productions, and lives with his wife and children in Poundbury, Dorset.

Aaron Young

Aatish Taseer

Abbe Prevost

Abbey Bryant is an NYC-based award-winning illustrator. With her BFA in Children's Book Illustration, her notable illustrated books include Nautilus award winner Hazel Mist, Hypnotist as well as an Enchanted Fairy House Kit with Scholastic's Klutz! 
 
As a queer illustrator, LGBTQ+ themes and stories hold a spot near to her heart. Most days she can be found around the city drawing New Yorkers or sketching trees at the park.

Abbey Bryant

Abbey Clancy is a model, television presenter and the host of chart-topping podcast The Therapy Crouch. She was the runner-up of Britain's Next Top Model in 2006, winner of Strictly Come Dancing in 2013 and went on to present Britain's Next Top Model. Later this year she will host Celebrity Homes on ITV.

Abbey Clancy

Abbie Greaves studied at Cambridge University before working in a literary agency for a number of years. She was inspired to write her first novel, The Silent Treatment, after reading a newspaper article about a boy in Japan who had never seen his parents speak to one another before. 
 
Abbie lives in Brighton with her boyfriend.

Abbie Greaves

Abbie Ross is a British author and psychotherapist. Her first book, Hippy Dinners, a funny and poignant memoir of her bohemian childhood in 1970s North Wales, has been optioned by Baby Cow, who are developing it into an 8-part television series. 
Before turning to writing, Abbie had a successful career as a producer at Aardman Animations, the acclaimed studios behind Wallace &amp; Gromit and the film Chicken Run. 
Today, she divides her time between her thriving psychotherapy practice in Bristol, and her writing, and finds that the two careers complement each other perfectly.

Abbie Ross

Abbie Spallen

Abbie Taylor lives in Dublin. She works as a doctor and has two daughters.

Abbie Taylor

Abby L Yates co-founded the Ghostbusters with Erin Gilbert. Ghosts from Our Past was her first book, now finally back in print.

Abby L Yates

Abby Lee

Abby Rawlinson is an integrative therapist with a private practice based in east London, UK. Her work mixes traditional psychotherapeutic theories with cutting-edge, evidence-based techniques into a style that feels relatable, down-to-earth, and compassionate. Abby regularly contributes to articles, including but not limited to Stylist, Elle, BBC, Harpers Bazaar, Sheerluxe, Women's Health, and Psychologies. She can be found on Instagram @therapywithabby or online at therapywithabby.co.uk

Abby Rawlinson

Abby Wambach is a two-time Olympic gold medallist, FIFA World Cup champion, six-time winner of the U.S. Soccer Athlete of the Year award and one of Time’s Most Influential People. She is a founder of Treat Media, an award-winning media company that makes art for humans who want to stay human. Abby is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Wolfpack and the New York Times bestseller Forward. Named one of the ‘50 Most Powerful People in Podcasting,’ she is co-host of the chart-topping podcast We Can Do Hard Things, which has received over a half billion plays. Abby is an executive producer of the Sundance award-winning film Come See Me in the Good Light, part owner of the NWSL’s Angel City Football Club and sits on multiple boards. Her most recent book, We Can Do Hard Things: Answers to Life’s 20 Questions, created with Glennon Doyle, Amanda Doyle and Treat Media, is being hailed as ‘the guidebook for being alive.’

Abby Wambach

Abel &amp; Cole’s story starts in 1988 with Keith Abel flogging potatoes door-to-door. ‘Of course potatoes are organic,’ he thought, ‘they’re vegetables’. However, he quickly discovered how unnecessarily complicated our food system had become and, consequently, realised the huge benefits of going organic and never looked back. In fact, Abel &amp; Cole still get veg from the farm where Keith's first organic spuds came from. 
To this day, their priorities remain the same. Now, selling 100% organic produce, Abel &amp; Cole believe that organic farming (a holistic system that encourages biodiversity) is the very best way to go. It protects our countryside and the critters that inhabit it, insists on the very best animal welfare, supports your local community and, frankly, tastes heaps better. Abel &amp; Cole think so anyway.

Abel & Cole Limited

Abhijit Banerjee, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). In 2011, he was named one of Foreign Policy magazine’s top 100 global thinkers. Banerjee served on the U.N. Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.

Abhijit V. Banerjee

Abhishek Mukherjee, 30, is a Delhi-based journalist. He holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from Delhi University, a post-graduate diploma in journalism from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Raipur. He also likes dogs.

Abhishek Mukherjee

Abi Elphinstone grew up in Scotland where she spent most of her childhood running wild across the moors, hiding in tree houses and building dens in the woods. After being coaxed out of her tree house, she studied English at Bristol University and then worked as an English teacher in Africa, Berkshire and London. She is the bestselling and multi-award shortlisted author of RUMBLESTAR (first in The Unmapped Chronicles), SKY SONG &amp; THE DREAMSNATCHER TRILOGY, published by S&amp;S. When she's not writing, Abi volunteers for Beanstalk, speaks in schools and travels the world looking for her next story.

Abi Elphinstone

Abi Falase is a Black British writer and director, reimagining fundamental societal concepts in inventive new worlds. Abi has written and directed a number of plays, including The Village and Rush with the Almedia Theatre, as well as Rift for Immediate Theatre and was shortlisted for the BBC Scriptworks ‘A Thousand Stories’ scriptwriting competition in 2021.

Abi Falase

Abi Titmuss

Abie Longstaff is the eldest of six children and grew up in Australia, Hong Kong and France. She knows all about squabbling, chaos and bossing younger sisters around. So she logically began her career as a barrister. She started writing when her children were born. Her favourite childhood books were Hating Alison Ashley, A Little Princess, Maura's Angel and The Black Stallion and she sneakily reads them again sometimes. Abie lives in Hove with her family.

Abie Longstaff

Abigail Ahern

Abigail is a Brighton-based writer, illustrator and creative producer. Original storytelling has always been at the heart of Abigail's career and she has spent a decade leading social media campaigns for some of the biggest TV &amp; entertainment clients in the world. Abigail also used to perform stand-up comedy and won several tiny trophies for her onstage humour; which involved life-size illustrations, ridiculous songs and rambling stories about her family.

Abigail Balfe

Abigail Docherty

Abigail Foster is a Chartered Accountant and founder of Elent Finance, a financial education company designed to demystify the world of finance and empower you to achieve financial wellbeing. 
 
Abigail has worked with leading financial institutions across the UK, including HMRC, the Bank of England and Downing Street, and global companies such as Google and Goldman Sachs. She hosts a weekly money segment on LBC radio and has also appeared as a finance expert on ITV, Channel 5 and Sky News.

Abigail Foster

Abigail Owen is the #1 New York Times and #1 USA Today bestselling author of 30+ books that range from upper YA (18+) epic romantasy to new adult modern mythic romantasy to super spicy adult paranormal romance. She loves magical worlds with plots that move hot and fast, feisty heroines with sass, heroes with heart, a dash of snark, and oodles of HEAs! Other titles include: wife, mother, Star Wars geek, ex-competitive skydiver, AuDHD, spreadsheet lover, Jeopardy! fanatic, organizational guru, true classic movie buff, linguaphile, wishful world traveler, and chocoholic. Abigail currently resides in Austin, Texas, with her own swoon-worthy hero, their (mostly) angelic teenagers, and an adorable fur baby.

Abigail Owen

Abigail Ulman was born and raised in Melbourne. She has a BA in Creative Arts from the University of Melbourne/VCA and was a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University. This is her first book.

Abigail Ulman

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Dawn French

A SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER 
___________________________ 
The hilarious and heartwarming memoir from one of Britain's best-loved comedians and Women's Prize longlisted author, Dawn French. 
 
Dawn French is one of the greatest comedians of our time with a career that has spanned nearly four decades. Loved for her irreverent humour, Dawn has achieved massive mainstream success while continuing to push boundaries and challenge stereotypes. Here, she describes the journey that would eventually establish her as a perhaps unlikely, but nevertheless genuine, national treasure. 
 
As part of the much loved duo French and Saunders, Dawn helped create a repertoire of brilliantly observed characters, impersonating everything from Madonna and Harry Potter to The Exorcist. Dawn's iconic role in the Vicar of Dibley showcased not only her talent but also her ability to take a controversial and topical issue and make it mainstream - and very funny. 
 
From her early years as an RAF child and her flat-sharing antics with Jennifer Saunders, to her outspoken views on sizism and her marriage to Lenny Henry, Dear Fatty chronicles the extraordinary and hilarious rise of a complex, dynamic and unstoppable woman.

Dear Fatty

Lisa Gee

When Lisa Gee's six-year-old daughter, Dora, goes to an open audition for the West End production of The Sound of Music, it's just a fun way to occupy some time in the Easter holidays. But when Dora unexpectedly lands the role, Lisa soon learns that Dora's brush with fame has less to do with paparazzi and lucrative paydays and more to do with endless rehearsals and outsize egos. 
 
Part fairy tale, part cautionary tale, this is the hilarious, engaging account of one child's step into the limelight. From the initial try-out with over a thousand Von Trapp hopefuls to performing on the London stage with Connie Fisher and an encounter with Julie Andrews, mother and daughter navigate the minefield of rehearsals, auditions and fame. This is a heart-warming glimpse into the sometimes not-so-glamorous world of show business and the delicate balance between being proud and being pushy. Stage Mum is a story for every parent who dreams big and every child who dreams bigger.

Stage Mum

A J Jacobs

Avoiding shellfish was easy. The stoning of adulterers proved a little more difficult - and potentially controversial. Was it enough to walk up to an adulterer and gently touch them with a stone? Even that could be grounds for accusations of assault, especially with female adulterers in Manhattan. So what's a good Bible-reading boy to do? 
 
Raised in a secular family but increasingly interested in the relevance of faith in our modern world, A.J. Jacobs decides to dive in head first and attempt to obey the hundreds of less-publicized rules. The resulting spiritual journey is at once funny and profound, reverent and irreverent, personal and universal, and will make you see history's most influential book with new eyes.

The Year of Living Biblically

Chelsea Handler

Chelsea Handler is a woman on a mission. She's smart, sassy and not afraid to speak her mind. From an early age Chelsea knew exactly what she wanted and even in the trickiest of situations, she's never one to pass up an opportunity. Like the time she convinced her third-grade class she was shooting movies with Goldie Hawn on location in the Galapagos just to get them to 
like her, or when she spent the night in a women's prison, contemplating an affair with the inmate who killed her own sister. Chelsea it seems, has done it all, and a whole lot more ... 
 
Any mishaps along the way just spur Chelsea on further. Whether she is being dry-humped by a sumo masseur, dumped by her Big Red experiment or kicked out of a London restaurant with her pants down, Chelsea is always armed with an unshakeable disregard for rules and is incapable of leading a quiet life. 
 
Are You There Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea is an entertaining memoir-in-stories that will have you rolling around with laughter.

Are you there Vodka? It's me, Chelsea

Beth Harbison

Four very different women...all addicted to shoes. 
 
Lorna is up to her eyeballs in debt but can't help bidding for the newest Jimmy Choos on eBay. Helene is unhappily married to a politician who keeps threatening to cancel her credit cards. Sandra pays her shoe bills by working as a phone sex operator. And Joss is a nanny who has found herself in a family from hell and will do just about anything to get out of the house on her night off. 
 
When they come upon a classified advert, inviting shoe lovers to a weekly shoe-swap, each one jumps at the chance to meet fellow addicts. But none of them realise that they will come away with much, much more than just a new pair of kitten heels...

Shoe Addicts Anonymous

P.G. Wodehouse

Meet the hilarious British dilettante Bertram 'Bertie' Wooster who can't seem to help finding himself in the middle of awkward social situations, calling upon his valet Jeeves to escape embarrassment.

A Jeeves and Wooster novel 
 
The beefy 'Stilton' Cheesewright has drawn Bertie Wooster as red-hot favourite in the Drones club annual darts tournament - which is lucky for Bertie because otherwise Stilton would have beaten him to a pulp and buttered the lawn with him. Stilton does not, after all like men who he thinks are trifling with his fiancée's affections. 
 
Meanwhile Bertie has committed a more heinous offence by growing a moustache, and Jeeves strongly disapproves - which is unfortunate, because Jeeves's feudal spirit is desperately needed. Bertie's Aunt Dahlia is trying to sell her magazine Milady's Boudoir to the Trotter Empire and still keep her amazing chef Anatole out of Lady Trotter's clutches. And Bertie? Bertie simply has to try to hold onto his moustache and hope he gets to the end in one piece.

Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

(Jeeves & Wooster)

A Jeeves and Wooster novel 
 
Just as Bertie Wooster is a member of the Drones Club, Jeeves has a club of his own, the Junior Ganymede, exclusively for butlers and gentlemen's gentlemen. In its inner sanctum is kept the Book of Revelations, where the less than perfect habits of their employers are lovingly recorded. The book is, of course, pure dynamite. So what happens when it disappears into potentially hostile hands? 
 
Tossed about in the resulting whirlwind you'll find lots of Wodehouse's favourite characters - and a welcome return to Market Snodsbury, in the middle of one of the most chaotic elections of modern times.

Much Obliged, Jeeves

A Blandings novel 
 
Can the Empress of Blandings win the Fat Pigs class at the Shropshire Show for the third year running? Galahad Threepwood, Beach the butler and others have put their shirt on this, and for Lord Emsworth it will be paradise on earth. But a substantial obstacle lurks in the way: Queen of Matchingham, the new sow of Sir Gregory Parsloe Bart. Galahad knows this pretender to the crown must be pignapped. But can the Empress in turn avoid a similar fate? 
 
In this classic Blandings novel, pigs rise above their bulk to vanish and reappear in the most unlikely places, while young lovers are crossed and recrossed in every room in Blandings Castle.

Pigs Have Wings

(Blandings Castle)

A Jeeves novel 
 
Captain Biggar, big-game hunter and all round tough guy, should make short work of the two bookies who have absconded with his winnings after a freak double made him a fortune. But on this occasion Honest Patch Perkins and his clerk are not as they seem. In fact they're not bookies at all, but the impoverished Bill Belfry, Ninth Earl of Rowcester and his temporary butler, Jeeves. 
 
Bertie Wooster has gone away to a special school teaching the aristocracy to fend for itself 'in case the social revolution sets in with even greater severity'. But Jeeves will prove just as resourceful without his young master, and brilliant brainwork may yet square the impossible circle for all concerned.

Ring for Jeeves

A Blandings novel 
 
As a peer of the realm, Clarence, Ninth Earl of Emsworth, has an occasional duty to leave the Empress of Blandings, surely the most considerable pig in the whole world, and travel to London for the opening of parliament. It comes hard to him, for he has a proper sense of the priorities in life, which rate pigs and flowerbeds higher than politicians. 
 
But no sooner has he returned to Blandings than his real problems begin: the dastardly Duke of Dunstable is out to steal the Empress. His sister Lady Constance has inflicted on him a particularly nasty new secretary. And the Church Lads' Brigade are camped all over his lawns. 
 
Thank God for the Earl of Ickenham, better known as Uncle Fred, whose own particularly devious brand of sweetness and light aims to banish blackmailers and pig-stealers and restore true love all over the castle grounds.

Service with a Smile

Charlie Croker

Have you ever arrived in a hotel room and been baffled by the information provided? 
Beware of your luggage. 
In your room you will find a minibar which is filled with alcoholics. 
Do not throw urine around. 
 
Have you ever been to a restaurant and wondered what on earth to order? 
Bored Meat Stew 
Lorry Driver Soup 
Kiss Lorraine 
 
Have you ever arrived in an airport and found that the supposedly helpful signs just make you feel more lost? 
You are required to declare all sorts of private things. 
Departure. Bus stop. Car rectal. 
Please buy your ticket consciously. 
 
Charlie Croker has, and in 2006 he gathered together what he thought was the definitive collection of English language howlers for his bestselling book Lost in Translation. But he reckoned without the great British public. Not only was the book a smash hit, it also opened the floodgates to a deluge of emails and letters stuffed full of further mistranslations and mutilated phrases. From a leaflet from the Museum of Rasputin in Russia (which is apparently situated in a house that belonged a pilot fish Zubov) to a song title on a pirated Pink Floyd CD (Come Fartably Numb), the scrambled sentences just kept flooding in. At the same time Charlie has continued his travels and picked up gems of his own. With such a wealth of material, a sequel wasn't just a necessity, it was a public service, and Still Lost in Translation is even more addictive, whimsical and side-splittingly hilarious than the first book.

Still Lost in Translation

More misadventures in English abroad

Favell Lee Mortimer

Todd Pruzan

In the middle of the 1800s, Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer set out to write an ambitious guide to all the nations on Earth. There were just three problems: 
 
She had never set foot outside Shropshire. 
She was horribly misinformed about virtually every topic she turned her attention to. 
And she was prejudiced against foreigners. 
 
The result was an unintentionally hilarious masterpiece: 
'The French like being smart but are not very clean.' 
'The Japanese are very polite people - much politer than the Chinese - but very proud.' 
'The Scotch will not take much trouble to please strangers.' 
 
In The Clumsiest People in Europe, Todd Pruzan has gathered together a selection of Mrs Mortimer's finest moments, celebrating the woman who turned ignorance into an art form.

The Clumsiest People in Europe

A Bad-Tempered Guide To The World

A Jeeves and Wooster novel 
 
Trapped in rural Steeple Bumpleigh, a man less stalwart than Bertie Wooster would probably give way at the knees. 
 
For among those present were Florence Craye, to whom Bertie had once been engaged and her new fiancé 'Stilton' Cheesewright, who sees Bertie as a snake in the grass. And that biggest blot on the landscape, Edwin the Boy Scout, who is busy doing acts of kindness out of sheer malevolence. 
 
All Bertie's forebodings are fully justified. For in his efforts to oil the wheels of commerce, promote the course of true love and avoid the consequences of a vendetta, he becomes the prey of all and sundry. In fact only Jeeves can save him...

Joy in the Morning

A Blandings novel 
 
Uncle Fred is one of the hottest earls who ever donned a coronet. Or as he crisply puts it, 'There are no limits, literally none, to what I can achieve in the springtime.' 
 
Even so, his gifts are stretched to the limit when he is urged by Lord Emsworth to save his prize pig, the Empress of Blandings, from the enforced slimming cure of the haughty Duke of Dunstable. Pongo Twistleton knows his debonair but wild uncle shouldn't really be allowed at large - especially when disguised as a brain surgeon. He fears the worst. And in yet another brilliant novel by the master of English comedy, Pongo will soon find his fears are amply justified.

Uncle Fred in the Springtime

Richard Littlejohn

Richard Littlejohn's cast of characters &shy; including Two Jags, the Wicked Witch, Captain Hook and the Mad Mullah of the Traffic Taliban &shy; are now part of the fabric of the nation. He ridicules the country Britain has become over the past ten years - the barmy bureaucracy, the surveillance state, the petty interference in our lives, the suffocating regulations, policemen and judges who think they're part of the social services and the insanities of the 'elf 'n' safety industry, which has created such idiocies as forcing revellers celebrating Guy Fawkes Night to watch a bonfire on a big screen. 
 
'Littlejohn has been ... a vivid exponent of a great British columnar style that stretches back five centuries or more. He's a distant, bastard cousin of Thomas Nash, Daniel Defoe and Alexander Pope. Cassandra and Bernard Levin might justly buy him a pint in the Cheshire Cheese. Like or loathe him, he's the real, talented deal.' Observer

Littlejohn's Britain

Alan Alda

He's one of America's most recognisable and acclaimed actors-a star on Broadway, an Oscar nominee for The Aviator, and the only person to ever win Emmys for acting, writing, and directing during his eleven years on M*A*S*H. Now Alan Alda has written a memoir as elegant, funny, and affecting as his greatest performances. 'My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six,' begins Alan Alda's irresistible story. The son of a popular actor and a loving, but mentally ill mother, he spent his early childhood backstage in the erotic and comic world of burlesque and went on after early struggles to achieve extraordinary success in his profession. 
 
Yet Never Have Your Dog Stuffed is not a memoir of show business ups and downs. It is a moving and funny story of a boy growing into a man who then realizes he has only begun to grow. It is the story of turning points in his life, events that would make him what he is - if only he could survive them. 
 
From the moment as a boy when his dead dog is returned from the taxidermist's shop with a hideous expression on his face, and he learns that death can't be undone, to the decades-long effort to find compassion for the mother he lived with but never knew, to his acceptance of his father in him, personally and professionally, he learns the hard way that change, uncertainty and transformation are what life is made of, and the good life is made of welcoming them. 
 
Never Have Your Dog Stuffed, filled with curiosity about Nature, good humour and honesty, is the crowning achievement of an actor, author, and director, but surprisingly, it is the story of a life more filled with turbulence and laughter than any he's ever played on the stage or screen.

Never Have Your Dog Stuffed

'Many people feel like a one-night stand is something to be ashamed or embarrassed of. I disagree...' 
 
We've all (well not quite all, perhaps) had at least one: a one-night stand. Often embarrassing and uncomfortable, occasionally outlandish, but most times just a necessary and irresistible evil, the one-night-stand is a social rite as old as sex itself and as common as a bar stool. 
 
Enter Chelsea Handler. Gorgeous, sharp, and anything but shy, Chelsea loves men... Lots of them. My Horizontal Life chronicles Chelsea's romps through the bedrooms of a host of potential suitors, uncovering what can happen in one night of passion between a man and a sometimes very intoxicated woman. 
 
From her short fling with a Vegas stripper named Thunder to her even shorter fling with a very short man, she recalls her myriad one-night stands with hilarious honesty. My Horizontal Life is a sensationally frank and funny memoir of sexual life, and a gloriously quirky take on why we do the things we do. Whether you have been there yourself or not, its one guilty pleasure you won't be ashamed to talk about in the morning...

My Horizontal Life

Steven Jacobi

What makes people laugh? Where does the urge to make people laugh come from? And just how hard can it really be to become a stand-up comedian? In pursuit of the answers to these questions - and more - writer and comedy obsessive, Steven Jacobi has set himself a horrifying task: to perform as a stand-up comic in six comedy clubs around Britain. (The Amused Moose, at the Enterprise in Chalk Farm; XSMalarkey in Manchester; the Cheeky Monkey at the Station in Kings Heath, Birmingham; Ha! in New York; Oi! Oi! in Eastbourne and Up the Creek in Greenwich, London.) 
As he gathers together material for his big adventure, Jacobi tracks down his comedy heroes, Ken Dodd and Woody Allen and seeks their advice and wisdom. He looks at the long tradition of British humour and looks to, among others, a Python, Eric Sykes, Frank Skinner and Steve Coogan to get their take on comedy. 
Only then does he embark on his ordeal, logging - in unsparing detail - the venues, audiences, hecklers and humiliation. All the while charting his all-important material, evolving - and hopefully refining - as he travels across the country on his masochistic odyssey.

Laughing Matters

Gerard Jones

In the depths of the Depression, out of the crowded tenements of New York and Cleveland, the comic book superhero leapt into being. Out of a mix of geekiness, science fiction, and outsider yearning, a crew of young men from working-class Jewish neighbourhoods and shady backgrounds created a series of blue-eyed, chisel-nosed crime fighters and adventurers who quickly captured the imaginations of young and old. Within a few years their creations had spawned a new genre that still dominates youth entertainment seventy years later. 
 
Gerard Jones draws on exhaustive research to portray how the immigrant experience and an outsider mentality shaped the vision of the make-believe hero, while a bizarre melting-pot of left-wing politics, mob money and the worlds of soft-porn and detective magazines contributed to the publishing world that produced the comics and brought them to millions. He chronicles how the success of the comics provoked a backlash that nearly destroyed the industry in the 1950s, and how later they surged back, inspiring a new generation to transmute pre-war fantasies into art, literature, blockbuster movies and graphic novels. 
 
Men of Tomorrow rivetingly demonstrates how the creators of the superheroes established their crucial place in the modern imagination.

Men Of Tomorrow

Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book

Mark Wallington

Mark Wallington has a dream. He is going to change the face of British comedy. 
 
Unfortunately for the residents of north London, he's going to finance this dream by becoming a gardener. 
 
The result is The Day Job, an account of a year spent working in other people's gardens: people like Mrs Fleming who is convinced there is buried treasure in the bottom bed; Mr Walters who is trying to create a fascist state policed by gnomes in his well-guarded plot in Gospel Oak; Mrs Glover who is probably the most attractive woman living in Britain; and poor Mr Nugent, who likes to save his urine in jam jars and pour it over his compost. 
 
Over four seasons Wallington crosses Hampstead Heath from job to job. He survives brushes with the evil contract gardeners who keep trying to knock him off his bicycle. He strives to impress literary agent Herman Gapp who might represent him - depending on what sort of job he does on Gapp's Alpine Terrace. He even finds time to fall for a housecleaner-cum-actor named Helen, as he becomes part of a strange band of artistes, each with a day job of their own, all waiting for that first break. 
 
This is the story of long nights spent in the back room of a pub trying to write unsolicited scripts, and of much longer days spent trying to understand the British and their strange obsession with gardening.

The Day Job

Adventures of a Jobbing Gardener

Travels with Boogie is the story of two city slickers - one an unattractive but streetwise mongrel from Stockwell, the other the long-suffering author - and how they came to terms with England's countryside and waterways. 
 
First they had to survive against all odds as they embarked on a heroic journey up hill and down dale, with rucksacks full of Kennomeat, along Britain's longest coastal footpath - from Somerset to Devon, from Cornwall to Dorset. And they did it. Then, undaunted, they took on the treacherous waters of the Thames. Not exactly as Mark had planned, however: this time his companion was to be the delectable Jennifer - but she was held up at the office, and when Boogie was dropped off at the kennels the other dogs complained. 
 
Travels with Boogie is a witty and fascinating account of a mismatched couple and of the people they meet and places they visit.

Travels With Boogie

500 Mile Walkies and Boogie Up the River in One Volume

On leaving school or university, you feel pretty pleased with yourself. You've learnt a lot, your'e well-read and you know a whole bunch of obscure facts guaranteed at some point to appear in the questions on Mastermind or University Challenge. Then you get a job, and ten years later youre more eloquent and eager to argue about Britney and Big Brother than Beckett and the Brontes. Sound familiar? 
 
Well it happened to AJ Jacobs too. As an editor at Esquire, Jacobs had built up a rather impressive knowledge of celebrity trivia - and the cure was going to take a long time. While others might take to reading a broadsheet at the weekend, Jacobs chose to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica. All 33,000 pages of it. 
 
Bill Bryson meets Schott's Original Miscellany meets Woody Allen. Part assemblage of fascinating trivia, part journey through adulthood, all laugh-out-loud funny.

The Know-It-All

One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World

Eric Garcia

Is it possible to have it all? If by 'all' you mean a succession of irritants building up into one great mess, then that's exactly what Cassandra French has got. A mother who's under house arrest for fraud. A blonde, yoga instructor of a friend who's the sort of man magnet you want your boyfriend staying well clear of. A boring and highly frustrating job as a lawyer for a Hollywood film studio. And three men in her basement. 
 
Actually, the three men are proving to be the least of her worries.They're (ahem) enrolled in Cassandra French's Finishing School for Boys, a school that, after one bad date too many, Cassandra founded to train young men into better human beings.The curriculum includes colour co-ordination, behaviour on dates and, occasionally, sex. 
 
Everything is going swimmingly well, until she enrols Jason Kelly, the studio's biggest star. Suddenly, it seems, Cassie is in well over her head...

Cassandra French's Finishing School For Boys

Eve Ensler

Eve Ensler is back and has set her sight slightly higher with an intimate contemplation of her second greatest obsession: her tortured relationship with her post-forties stomach. 
 
Ensler toured the world asking women about their bodies and gives us their wild and wonderful and deeply moving stories. She frames these stories with her own personal journey, serving up riotous excerpts from her lifelong dialogue with her stomach - a sassy and conniving antagonist in its own right. We follow her through the serial seduction of low-carb diets, ab rollers and personal trainers, to the wise words of a woman who taught her how to love her body, and see that it was good...

The Good Body

William Cook

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore are the greatest double act that Great Britain has ever produced. This collection of their works is a comprehensive compilation of the finest comedy sketches that Cook and Moore ever wrote together - from the beginning of their partnership, in the groundbreaking stage show, Beyond The Fringe, to the notorious taboo busting Derek and Clive LPs that captured the spirit of punk rock, and inspired the scatological anarchy of Alternative Comedy. Featuring transcripts of one night stands long since almost forgotten, as well as a wealth of virtually unknown material, including previously unpublished scripts for Not Only But Also, Goodbye Again is a revelation, even for Cook and Moore's most informed fans. 
 
As well as illuminating their work, this book also promises to shed light on their intimate yet turbulent relationship. It will show how these two diametrically opposed men; tall and athletic Cook from a middle class public boarding school background, and diminutive, club-footed Moore, working class but with an impressive musical talent, came together to develop the closest of partnerships based on an instinctive, virtually intuitive sense of humour. Goodbye Again will chart the extraordinary friendship between the two men and its almost telepathic intensity, which not only bought them together but also pulled them apart time after time, until their eventual reconciliation.

Goodbye Again

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore

Molly Watson

When two city girls embark on an afternoon of idle window-shopping in Worcestershire and end up buying a horse, their lives swerve gloriously off course. Within weeks they have abandoned their careers in London in favour of life in the wilds of Ledbury. But their dreams of a sunny rural idyll, preferably funded by a landed local bachelor, are quick to shatter. Thrown into a hair-raising world where the horses have cocaine habits and the locals have developed their own alternative to Viagra, Molly Watson and her sister Annabel make their way through the maelstrom that is country life to hilarious effect.

In The Pink

A Rural Odyssey

A.N. Wilson

The Daily Legion is a tabloid that peddles celebrity gossip and denounces asylum seekers. However, its financial survival depends on the support of a brutal African government. Recklessly defending this corrupt dictatorship, the newspaper faces off against Father Vivyan Chell, an Anglican monk and missionary who is working to overthrow the corrupt regime. 
 
My Name Is Legion is a savage satire on the morality of contemporary Britain - its Press, its politics, its Church, its rich, its underclass. Wilson's London is a bleak, if occasionally hilarious, place: murderous, lustful, money-obsessed and haunted by strange gods.

My Name Is Legion

Deborah Coates

Cats have been with us for thousands of year. They are: 
 
Enigmatic friends 
Lone hunters, family pets 
Our garden tigers 
 
and they too can be a man's best friend. The haiku is an ancient and honourable Japanese verse form - three lines, seventeen syllables - encapsulating a vision of the poem's subject; a person, place, even a cat... 
 
CAT HAIKU presents cats as you've never seen them before. In a series of brilliant vignettes, Deborah Coates gets inside the minds of our cats and comes up with some surprising revelations. You will never look at your (or anyone else's) cat the same way again.

Cat Haiku

Lin Cook

An intimate and entertaining portrait of one of comedy's greatest geniuses by those who knew Peter Cook best and can write abut his rare talent. The contributors include Clive Anderson, Alan Bennett, John Cleese, Stephen Fry, William Goldman, Barry Humphries, Eric Idle, Dudley Moore and Michael Palin.

Something Like Fire

Peter Cook

For his many friends and fans, Peter Cook was quite simply the funniest man they'd ever encountered. And nearly eight years since his death, his status as one of Britain's greatest comedians shows no sign of shrinking. Despite his reputation for idleness, Peter Cook was a great comedy writer, who created countless outrageous sketches and articles and was famed for his prolific role in the satire boom of the 1960s. The very best, the most famous and some of the most unusual of his comic masterpieces are collected here. Some of these pieces have never been published before, others are out of print, a few only survive in print, and many have only ever been seen or heard - never read. This collection ranges from Cook's first writing, at school and university, via Beyond The Fringe, with Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller, his dualogues with Moore as Pete &amp; Dud and Derek &amp; Clive, and their brilliant TV series, Not Only But Also, to transcripts of his late, great TV appearances, and a selection of his journalism for the Daily Mail, the Evening Standard and Private Eye.

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