Adam Henson is perhaps the best-known farmer in the UK, presenting on BBC's Countryfile to millions of viewers each Sunday evening. He's also appeared on Lambing Live, Secret Britain, Coast and Inside Out. Adam also runs the award-winning Cotswold Farm Park in Gloucestershire, which welcomes family visitors all year round and is home to many rare breeds. He has a monthly column in Countryfile magazine, as well as the Cotswold Life magazine. He has written several books including the Sunday Times bestseller Like Farmer, Like Son. This is his first children's book and it is the perfect introduction to the farm.

Adam Henson

Adam Henson presents Countryfile, often from his 650-hectare farm in the Cotswolds. Having studied Agriculture at college, Adam took over Bemborough Farm from his father, Joe. The farm now grows wheat, spring barley and oilseed rape, runs a flock of 400 commercial ewes and has the UK's leading collection of rare breeds, many of which are in demand for film sets and advertisements. Cotswold Farm Park (www.cotswoldfarmpark.co.uk) offers a total countryside experience for all the family, welcoming more than 100,000 visitors each year. 
 
Adam presented Lambing Live with Kate Humble, writes for Countryfile magazine and has appeared on Radio 4's On Your Farm and Farming Today. He is the author of three previous books, Adam’s Farm: My Life on the Land, the Sunday Times bestseller, Like Farmer, Like Son and A Farmer and His Dog.

Adam Higginbotham writes for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, GQ, Businessweek, Smithsonian, Men’s Journal, and The Atavist. He began his career in magazines and newspapers in London, where he was the editor-­in-chief of The Face and a contributing editor at The Sunday Telegraph. The author of Midnight in Chernobyl, he lives in New York City.

Adam Higginbotham

Adam Hills is an internationally recognised comedian and host of award-winning Channel 4 show The Last Leg. His collection of stories from a life in comedy, Best Foot Forward, was a Times bestseller.

Adam Hills

Adam Howling

Adam J. Kurtz

Adam Jacot de Boinod

ADAM JOHNSON won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2013 for his second novel, the New York Times bestseller The Orphan Master’s Son (‘Excavates the very meaning of life’ New York Times). His short story 'Nirvana' won the prestigious Sunday Times/EFG Short Story Award. He is the author of acclaimed story collections, Fortune Smiles and Emporium and the novel Parasites Like Us. He teaches creative writing at Stanford University and lives with his family in San Francisco.

Adam Johnson

Adam Kay is a former doctor who has written five million books and sold seven copies. No, hang on – he’s written seven books and sold five million copies. His debut book, This is Going to Hurt, is a literary sensation: a Sunday Times number one bestseller for over a year, winning a record-breaking four National Book Awards and selling over 3 million copies. Kay adapted This is Going to Hurt as a BAFTA-winning comedy-drama series for the BBC. Adam Kay’s children’s books have been translated into 32 languages and sold over 1 million copies, making him one of the UK’s bestselling children’s authors. Kay’s Anatomy became the fastest-selling children’s general non-fiction hardback of the decade. His first picture book, Amy Gets Eaten, was published in 2023, and his first children’s novel, Dexter Procter the Ten-Year-Old Doctor, was published in September 2024.

Adam Kay

Adam studied illustration and animation, and received a BA followed by an MA from the Edinburgh College of Art. As a student he won a competition to create a short film for MOMI and Channel 4, and once his career producing animated commercials was under way, he became an illustrator as well. He has regular columns in the UK and the US.

Adam Larkum

Adam Lashinsky

Adam Macqueen

Adam Mars-Jones

Adam O'Riordan was born in Manchester in 1982, where he currently lives. In 2008 he became the youngest Poet-in-Residence at The Wordsworth Trust, the Centre for British Romanticism. His first collection In the Flesh (2010) win a Somerset Maugham Award. He is the Academic Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Adam O'Riordan

Adam Phillips, formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London, is a practising psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He is the author of numerous works of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, including most recently On Giving Up, On Wanting to Change, Attention Seeking, In Writing, Unforbidden Pleasures and Missing Out. He is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations, and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.

Adam Phillips

Adam Rackley

Adam Richardson is the UK's top trending health and fitness coach with a rapidly growing audience across both TikTok and Instagram. Adam is passionate about removing barriers to exercise and movement, a philosophy that is key to his work as a Personal Trainer in which he strives to help his clients feel more confident, as well as more fit and healthy.

Adam Richardson

Adam Roberts is the author of The Amateur Gourmet and Secrets of the Best Chefs, and coauthor of Give My Swiss Chards to Broadway. He started his food blog, The Amateur Gourmet, in 2004 and currently writes The Amateur Gourmet Newsletter on Substack. Roberts has also written for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, and for film and television. He lives in Brooklyn with his husband and their dog, Winston. Food Person is his first novel.

Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts is acknowledged as the senior scholar of international relations in the UK. He was Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at Oxford University 1986-2007, and President of the British Academy 2009-13 - the head of humanities in Britain. He was on the Council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London (2002-08), a member of the UK Defence Academy Advisory Board (2003-15) and is now on the Board of Advisers of the Lieber Institute for Law and Land Warfare at the United States Military Academy, West Point.

Adam Robinson is based in the Middle East and is a regular contributor to newspapers in the Arab world and also to the British media. He is the author of numerous books on the region, including Bin Laden: Behind the Mask of the Terrorist.

Adam Robinson

Adam Ross

Adam Rutherford is an award-winning writer, broadcaster, and geneticist at University College London. His books include A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, The Book of Humans, and the Sunday Times bestseller How to Argue with a Racist. He has written and presented numerous documentaries for BBC radio and television, including Inside Science and The Cell. Adam has also worked as a science advisor on many films, including the Oscar-winning Ex Machina (2015) and Annihilation (2018).

Adam Rutherford

Adam Smith

Adam Smyth runs the 39 Step Press, an experiment in printing, from a cold barn in Oxfordshire. He is also Professor of English Literature and the History of the Book at Balliol College, University of Oxford.

Adam Smyth

Adam Sweeting

Adam Tandy

Adam Thirlwell was born in London in 1978. The author of three previous novels, his work has been translated into thirty languages. His essays appear in the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and he is an advisory editor of the Paris Review. His awards include a Somerset Maugham Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2018 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has twice been selected by Granta as one of their Best of Young British Novelists.

Adam Thirlwell

Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956. His first novel, Ulverton, appeared in 1992 and he has published two books of stories and ten further novels, most recently Missing Fay (2017), and six poetry collections. 
 
 
www.adamthorpe.net

Adam Thorpe

Adam Tooze is the author of the highly praised Crashed, The Deluge and The Wages of Destruction, all published by Allen Lane. He has been the recipient of the Wolfson Prize for History, the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Prize and the Lionel Gelber Prize. Tooze has taught at Cambridge and Yale and is now Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University.

Adam Tooze

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Neil Young

Quirky and wonderfully candid, Neil Young's new book of reminiscences is as compelling as his first book. He returns with more unforgettable stories about his six decades in the music business - but this is not your average rock biography. He centres this new work on one of his life's passions, cars, using the framework of all the cars he's ever owned to construct a narrative of his life and career, exploring and demonstrating how memories are attached to objects. Young also expresses regret for the environmental impact of his past cars, and now passionately advocates the use of clean energy. 
Special Deluxe is a mix of memoir and environmental politics by one of the most gifted and influential artists of our time.

Special Deluxe

Coleen Nolan

Coleen Nolan has lived her entire life in the spotlight. From touring the world in the Nolan Sisters to being one of our favourite TV presenters, she always creates headlines. But in No Regrets, her latest number one bestselling memoir, Coleen talks candidly for the first time about the tragic early death of her beloved sister Bernie, heart-breaking family feuds and how she had to walk away from her TV career to heal herself after the life she knew was torn apart.

No Regrets

Iain Sinclair

On the trail of the American Beats, Iain Sinclair makes a delirious and perhaps ill-fated expedition in the footsteps of Malcolm Lowry, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Charles Olson and Gary Snyder. It is a journey in search of literary ghosts behind mirages of volcanoes and the Old West. In which rumours vie with false memories and unreliable reports to steer our guide from one strange adventure into another. It is an odyssey in which the beginning offers no clues as to where it may end.

American Smoke

Journeys to the End of the Light

John Eliot Gardiner

Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the most unfathomable composers in the history of music. How can such sublime work have been produced by a man who seems so ordinary, so opaque - and occasionally so intemperate? 
 
In this remarkable book, John Eliot Gardiner distils the fruits of a lifetime's immersion as one of Bach's greatest living interpreters. Explaining in wonderful detail how Bach worked and how his music achieves its effects, he also takes us as deeply into Bach's works and mind as perhaps words can. The result is a unique book about one of the greatest of all creative artists.

Music in the Castle of Heaven

A Portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach

Graham Nash

In this candid and riveting autobiography Graham Nash tells it all: the love, the sex, the jealousy, the drugs, and the magical music-making. 
 
This is one of the great rock and roll stories: growing up in poverty in postwar Manchester, where Nash founded the Hollies with schoolfriend Allan Clarke and the incredible success that followed, friendships with all the great British bands of the 60s including the Beatles, the Stones and the Kinks, decamping to America and becoming the lover of Joni Mitchell (for whom he wrote 'Our House') and achieving superstardom with David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Neil Young.

Wild Tales

Jennifer Saunders

Jennifer Saunders' comic creations have brought joy to millions. From Comic Strip to Comic Relief, from Bolly-swilling Edina in Ab Fab to her takes on Madonna or Mamma Mia, her characters are household names. 
 
But it's Jennifer herself who has a place in all our hearts. This is her funny, moving and frankly bonkers memoir, filled with laughter, friends and occasional heartache - but never misery. 
 
BONKERS is full of riotous adventures: accidentally enrolling on a teacher training course with a young Dawn French, bluffing her way to each BBC series, shooting Lulu, trading wild faxes with Joanna Lumley, touring India with Ruby Wax and Goldie Hawn. 
 
There's cancer, too, when she becomes 'Brave Jen'. But her biggest battle is with the bane of her life: the Laws of Procrastination. As she admits, 'There has never been a Plan. Everything has been fairly random, happened by accident or just fallen into place. I'm off now, to do some sweeping...' 
Prepare to chuckle, whoop, and go BONKERS.

Bonkers

My Life in Laughs

John Yorke

We all love stories. But why do we tell them? And why do all stories function in an eerily similar way? John Yorke, creator of the BBC Writers' Academy, has brought a vast array of drama to British screens. Here he takes us on a journey to the heart of storytelling, revealing that there truly is a unifying shape to narrative forms - one that echoes the fairytale journey into the woods and, like any great art, comes from deep within. From ancient myths to big-budget blockbusters, he gets to the root of the stories that are all around us, every day.

Into The Woods

How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them

Paul Kildea

Paul Kildea's Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century is the definitive biography of Britain's greatest modern composer - now in paperback 
 
Benjamin Britten was Britain's greatest twentieth-century composer, who broke decisively with figures such as Elgar and Vaughan Williams and recreated English music in a fresh, modern, European form. Paul Kildea's biography has been acclaimed as the definitive account of Britten's extraordinary life, exploring his deeply held and controversial pacifism; his complex forty-year relationship with Peter Pears; and his creation of an artistic community in Aldeburgh. Above all, however, this book helps us understand the relationship of Britten's music to his life, and takes us as far into its unique alchemy as we are ever likely to go. 
 
PAUL KILDEA is a writer and conductor who has performed many of the Britten works he writes about, in opera houses and concert halls from Sydney to Hamburg. His previous books include Selling Britten (2002) and (as editor) Britten on Music (2003). He was Head of Music at the Aldeburgh Festival between 1999 and 2002 and subsequently Artistic Director of the Wigmore Hall in London, and lives in Berlin. 
 
'Must now rank as the standard work' Financial Times 
 
'Indispensable ... This is a masterly, highly readable account and the most comprehensive to date of the life and work of one of the 20th century's great musical figures' Barry Millington, Evening Standard 
 
'[A] wise, cautious, challenging book ... Kildea's verbal explorations of the music are done with level-headed sensitivity leavened by a quirky lightness of touch' Alexandra Harris, New Statesman

Benjamin Britten

A Life in the Twentieth Century

Nick Hornby

'I decided that I wanted to write a little book of essays about songs I loved ... Songs are what I listen to, almost to the exclusion of everything else.' 
 
In his first non-fiction work since Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby writes about 31 songs that either have some great significance in his life - or are just songs that he loves. He discusses, among other things, guitar solos and losing your virginity to a Rod Stewart song and singers whose teeth whistle and the sort of music you hear in Body Shop. 
 
'The soundtrack to his life ... a revealing insight into one of Britain's most popular writers' Evening Standard

31 Songs

David Robinson

David Robinson's definitive and monumental biography of Charlie Chaplin, the greatest icon in the history of cinema, who lived one of the most dramatic rags to riches stories ever told. 
 
Chaplin's life was marked by extraordinary contrasts: the child of London slums who became a multimillionaire; the on-screen clown who was a driven perfectionist behind the camera; the adulated star who publicly fell from grace after personal and political scandal. This engrossing and definitive work, written with full access to Chaplin's archives, tells the whole story of a brilliant, complex man. 
 
David Robinson is a celebrated film critic and historian who wrote for The Times and the Financial Times for several decades. His many books include World Cinema, Hollywood in the Twenties and Buster Keaton. 
 
'A marvellous book... unlikely ever to be surpassed' Spectator 
 
'I cannot imagine how anyone could write a better book on the great complex subject... movingly entertaining, awesomely thorough and profoundly respectful' Sunday Telegraph 
 
'One of the great cinema books; a labour of love and a splendid achievement' Variety 
 
'One of those addictive biographies in which you start by looking in the index for items that interest you... and as dawn breaks you're reading the book from cover to cover' Financial Times

Chaplin

His Life And Art

Victoria Beckham

From the time when, as an eight-year-old girl, she saw the movie Fame, Victoria wanted to be a star. There was a line from the title song that stayed with her - 'I'm gonna live forever, I'm gonna learn how to fly'. With this extraordinary book she gives us the chance to follow her on her journey from lonely teenager to international star; to fly alongside her. At heart is an uplifting story of tenderness and passion, but kidnap threats and media lies have often turned the dream into a nightmare. Incredibly frank and told with coruscating humour, Victoria's autobiography describes her extraordinary life as it really is. LEARNING TO FLY is more compelling than any novel.

Learning to Fly

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Benjamin Britten single-handedly transformed the reputation of British classical music. The enormous popular appeal of his great works, such as Peter Grimes (1945) and the Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1946), make him the most successful opera composer of any born in the twentieth century. But his success was not without controversy and pain: he was accused of fleeing Britain to avoid military service, he was widely known to be sexually obsessed with boys and he suffered an astonishing array of illnesses. 
 
This short book combines a colourful overview of his life with pithy descriptions of all of his major musical works, providing an intimate portrait of this highly unusual man and the perfect introduction to a towering figure of British culture.

David Thomson

In this triumphant work David Thomson, one of film's greatest living experts and author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, tells the enthralling story of the movies and how they have shaped us. 
 
Sunday Times, New Statesman, The Times, Guardian, Observer and Independent BOOKS OF THE YEAR 
 
Taking us around the globe, through time and across multiple media, Thomson tracks the ways in which we were initially enchanted by this mesmerizing imitation of life and let movies - the stories, the stars, the look - show us how to live. But at the same time he shows us how movies, offering a seductive escape from the everyday reality and its responsibilities, have made it possible for us to evade life altogether. The entranced audience has become a model for powerless citizens trying to pursue happiness by sitting quietly in a dark room. Does the big screen take us out into the world, or merely mesmerize us? That is Thomson's question in this great adventure of a book. A passionate feat of storytelling that is vital to anyone trying to make sense of the age of screens - the age that, more than ever, we are living in.

The Big Screen

The Story of the Movies and What They Did to Us

Union J

Join Union J as they embark on their journey to become THE next big boyband! 
 
Only a year ago, Union J were just average guys, dreaming of performing on the X Factor stage, making music and having legions of fans screaming their names. And now that dream has become a reality. 
 
Follow Union J's unique journey from ordinary boys to stars as one of the most popular acts on X Factor 2012, in their first official memoir. Packed full of exclusive photos, behind-the-scenes gossip and the individual stories of JJ, Jaymi, Josh and George, this book is a must-have for all J-Cats!

Our Story

Union J 100% Official

Steve Coogan

Peter Baynham

Armando Ianucci

Patrick Marber

Alan Partridge is Britain's most remarkable broadcaster. He's scaled the giddy heights of a short-lived TV chat show, and the crashing lows of twenty-six weeks in a motel equidistant between Norwich and London. He's survived the death of a guest on air, his wife leaving him for a fitness instructor, Toblerone addiction and his autobiography Bouncing Back being pulped. But Alan continues to bounce back - resilience and Gordon are his middle names. 
 
 Every Ruddy Word charts Alan's incredible journey - from his first, unforgettable radio chat show, to the recent construction of a house to his own specifications.

Alan Partridge: Every Ruddy Word

All the Scripts: From Radio to TV. And Back

David Foster Wallace

Signifying Rappers is an old-school classic from David Foster Wallace and his friend and room-mate Mark Costello, first published in 1990, long out of print, and previously unavailable outside the USA. 
 
A paean to the golden age of Hip-Hop and the first book to consider seriously its position as a vital force in American culture, Signifying Rappers is a must-read for fans of both Wallace and hip-hop. Set against the legendary 1980s scene, it maps the bipolarities of rap and pop, rebellion and acceptance, glitz and gangsterdom, with an energy and exuberance which is as fresh today as when it was written.

Signifying Rappers

Simon Spence

'This is the one. It's the definitive biography of the band, stuffed with photos that have never been seen before. The writing feels really fresh and definitive. It's a classic' Alex Heminsley BBC 6 Music Book of the Month 
 
'A comprehensive, no-holds-barred account... details with steely, forensic precision the story of the group's ascent, heyday and spectacular implosion. All the triumphs and disasters are here' The Sunday Times 
 
'A forensic, detailed and beautifully researched history of the Stone Roses.... full of new stuff' John Harris 
 
'For the casual listener, or die-hard fanatic, this is a genuine masterpiece' What Hi-Fi? Sound &amp; Vision 
 
'An era-defining, definitive biography' Q

The Stone Roses

War and Peace

'I felt that writing books fit me like a glove; I just started and I just kept going' 
 
Neil Young is a singular figure in the history of rock and pop culture generally in the last four decades. Reflective, insightful and disarmingly honest, in Waging Heavy Peace he writes about his life and career. From his youth in Canada to his first band's travels across the US seeking fame and girls, through Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills &amp; Nash, to his massively successful solo career and his re-emergence as the patron saint of grunge on to his role today as one of the last uncompromised and uncompromising survivors of rock 'n' roll - this is Neil's story told in his own words. 
 
In the book Young presents a kaleidoscopic view of personal life and musical creativity; it's a journey that spans the snows of Ontario to the LSD-laden boulevards of 1966 Los Angeles to the contemplative paradise of Hawaii today.

Waging Heavy Peace

A Hippie Dream

Tim Blanning

<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>

Once musicians such as Mozart were little more than court servants; now they are multimillionaire superstars wielding more power than politicians. How did this extraordinary change come about? 
 
Tim Blanning's brilliantly enjoyable book examines how everything from the cult of the romantic to technology and travel all fed the inexorable rise of music in the West, making it the most dominant and ubiquitous of the art forms. Encompassing balladeers, the great composers, jazz legends and rock gods, this is an enthralling story of power, patronage, creativity and genius.

The Triumph of Music

Composers, Musicians and Their Audiences, 1700 to the Present

Alice Montgomery

What happens to the boy next door when he becomes part of the planet's hottest boy band? 
 
 When Harry Styles auditioned for the X-Factor, little did he know he'd soon be leaving behind school, his Saturday bakery job, obscurity and an ordinary life. One Direction made it to the final and won a record deal, and it wasn't long before Harry's face covered bedroom walls up and down the country. 
 
 But how did Harry cope with his new-found fame? And what happens when you take America by storm in a 'British Invasion'? 
 
 With gorgeous green eyes and curls that send girls wild, Harry has found himself surrounded by beautiful women. But what's the truth behind the rumours? Here, his relationships with Caroline Flack, Taylor Swift and the married Lucy Horobin are laid bare. 
 
 And what next for Harry and 1D? This book will give you the low down on how Harry and the boys are set to take on the world.

Harry Styles

Roger Parker

Carolyn Abbate

Opera is in many ways the most extraordinary artistic medium of the last four hundred years. Prohibitively expensive and patently unrealistic, it can nevertheless paint the human passions with astonishing power and drama. This book, the first new, full-length, single-volume history of opera for more than a generation provokes in-depth discussions of many works by the greatest opera composers, from Monteverdi, Handel and Mozart, to Verdi and Wagner, to Strauss, Puccini, Berg, and Britten. There are lively discussions of opera's social, political and literary background, its economic cicumstances and the almost continual polemics that have accompanied its development through the centuries. Central to the book is an exploration of the tensions that have always sustained and enlivened opera. Abbate and Parker examine the problems that opera has faced in the last half century, when new works - which were once opera's life-blood - have shrunk to a tiny minority, have largely failed to find a permanent place in the repertoire. 
 
Yet the book's final message is one of celebration. Even if the majority of opera's most popular and enduring works were written in what is now a remote European past, in circumstances very different from our own, and the viability of contemporary opera is ever more in question, opera as an art form remains extraordinarily buoyant and challenging. It continues to transform people physically, emotionally, and intellectually, and to articulate human experience in ways no other art form can match.

A History of Opera

The Last Four Hundred Years

'I felt that writing books fit me like a glove; I just started and I just kept going' 
 
Neil Young is a singular figure in the history of rock and pop culture generally in the last four decades. Reflective, insightful and disarmingly honest, in Waging Heavy Peace he writes about his life and career. From his youth in Canada to his crazy journey out to California, through Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills &amp; Nash, to his massively successful solo career and his re-emergence as the patron saint of grunge on to his role today as one of the last uncompromised and uncompromising survivors of rock 'n' roll - this is Neil's story told in his own words. 
 
In the book Young presents a kaleidoscopic view of personal life and musical creativity; it's a journey that spans the snows of Ontario to the LSD-laden boulevards of 1966 Los Angeles to the contemplative paradise of Hawaii today. Along the way he writes about the music, the victims, the girls and the drugs; about his happy family life but also about the health problems he and his children have experienced; about guitars, cars and sound systems; about Canada and California and Hawaii.

Waging Heavy Peace Deluxe

Ivan March

Edward Greenfield

Robert Layton

Paul Czajkowski

INDEPENDENT BOOKS OF THE YEAR 
 
Downloads, CDs and DVD mean it is possible to listen to hundreds of thousands of classical recordings today - but how do you pick your way through the vast array of music now on offer? The Penguin Guide to the 1000 Finest Classical Recordings brings together the experience and enthusiasm of four of classical music's greatest experts, to create an essential guide to the best recordings. 
 
Clear, simple, easy-to-use A to Z listings of composers and performers 
Offers the pick of the latest CD releases, as well as established landmark recordings 
Covers every kind of classical music, from the medieval to the modern period 
Includes short guides to ballet, opera and the history of recording 
Indicates budget and mid-range price CDs 
 
Whether you are just starting to build a collection or tracking down a particular favourite, this guide offers a treasury of outstanding music.

The Penguin Guide to the 1000 Finest Classical Recordings

The Must-Have CDs and DVDs

Spike Milligan

'Keep talking, Milligan. I think I can get you out on Mental Grounds.''That's how I got in, sir.''Didn't we all.' 
 
The second volume of Spike Milligan's legendary recollections of life as a gunner in World War Two sees our hero into battle in North Africa - eventually. First, there is important preparation to be done: extensive periods of loitering ('We had been standing by vehicles for an hour and nothing had happened, but it happened frequently'), psychological toughening ('If a man dies when you hang him, keep hanging him until he gets used to it') and living dangerously ('no underwear!'). At last the battle for Tunis is upon them...

'Rommel?' 'Gunner Who?'

A Confrontation in the Desert

'My namer is Maria Antonoinetta Fontana, but everyone call me Toni.''I'm Spike,' sometimes known as stop thief or hey you.'Yeser, I know.' 
 
The sixth volume of Spike Milligan's off-the-wall account of his part in World War Two sees our hero doing very little soldiering. Because it's 1946. Rather, he is now part of the Bill Hall Trio - a 'Combined Services Entertainment' inflicted on unsuspecting soldiers across Italy and Austria - and is largely preoccupied with the unbearably beautiful ballerina, Ms Toni Fontana ('Arghhhhhhhhh!). But he must enjoy it while he can before he is demobbed and sent home to Catford - so he does ...

Goodbye Soldier

'It's all over, Von Arnheim has surrendered and he's very angry.''This could mean war...' 
 
The third volume of Spike Milligan's laugh-a-line account of life as a gunner in World War Two resumes on the eve of victory in North Africa. Now Britain's looniest war hero must combat some of the direst threats a soldier has ever faced - boredom ('Christ, I just thought of Catford'), a cold ('In this weather?' 'Yed.'), moving camp ('It's a sort of Brighton with camels'), relaxing on the beach ('Life was golden, and we were the assayers'), moving camp again ('We're already somewhere else'), a visit to Carthage ('It's terrible, it's like Catford') and a perilous encounter with the gloriously endowed Mademoiselle Villion ('"Help! massage," I said weakly'). Against the odds, they survive and are sent at last to Italy to be killed...

Monty

His Part in My Victory

A voice is calling across the land, "Bombardier Milligan.""Bombadier Milligan is dead," I replied in a disguised voice.The voice replied, "Then he's going to miss his breakfast." 
 
The fourth volume of Spike Milligan's legendary account of his time in the army during World War Two begins as he and his regiment land in sunny Italy in 1943 ('The ship touched the beach very gently, so gently I suspect it's not insured'). After a bout of Sandfly Fever, from which he soon recovers ('I'm ready to be killed again'), our plucky hero is piddled on by a farm dog ('Mussolini's revenge?') before forging his way inland towards the enemy and the sound of guns ('We're getting near civilisation'), where matters suddenly take a dark turn ('I was not really me any more') ...

Mussolini

His Part in My Downfall

'I had not informed my parents of my return, I wanted it to be a lovely surprise; it was, for me, they were away ...' 
 
The seventh and last volume of Spike Milligan's memoirs sees our hero returning from war and Italy ... but to what? Aside from shooting large, inaccurate guns at Germans, all he has done for five long years is blow a trumpet, tell rude jokes and write and perform sketches for the entertainment of bored and murderous soldiers - who on earth is going to pay a civilian to do more of that? From the giddy heights of Hackney Empire to a Zurich Freak Show and beyond, Spike makes his way through the backwaters of showbiz, first as band musician then as one-man wild-act and eventually in the company of a group of like-minded comedians called Harry Secombe, Michael Bentine and Peter Sellers. They decide to call themselves The Goons...

Peace Work

'At Victoria station the R.T.O. gave me a travel warrant, a white feather and a picture of Hitler marked "This is your enemy". I searched every compartment, but he wasn't on the train . . .' 
 
In this, the first of Spike Milligan's uproarious recollections of life in the army, our hero takes us from the outbreak of war in 1939 ('it must have been something we said'), through his attempts to avoid enlistment ('time for my appendicitus, I thought') and his gunner training in Bexhill ('There was one drawback. No ammunition') to the landing at Algiers in 1943 ('I closed my eyes and faced the sun. I fell down a hatchway'). 
 
Filled with bathos, pathos and gales of ribald laughter, this is a barely sane helping of military goonery and superlative Milliganese.

Adolf Hitler

My Part in his Downfall

Lee Evans

Lee Evans is one of the best-loved comedians in the country; a Hollywood star able to sell out arenas in the blink of eye. 
 
But he was not always such a roaring success. 
 
The Life of Lee is an utterly hilarious and very moving autobiography charting his ups and downs on the way to the top. Lee takes us on a darkly humorous journey through his childhood spent running wild on a Bristol housing estate, his unconventional school days and through a grim teenage period of numerous dead-end jobs. 
 
The book also reveals how as a boy Lee got his first taste of showbiz, accompanying his entertainer father around the rowdy, unforgiving working-men's club and theatre circuit. 
 
Desperately struggling to be accepted, this quiet young loner always saw himself as an outsider. But he finally met the love of his life and accidentally discovered the one place where he felt at home: the stage.

The Life of Lee

Black Star Series

Blacklist

Set inside Blandings Castle, this comedy series follows Lord Emsworth and his pig Empress as they meet with his dysfunctional family and friends, and the havoc that follows.

Blandings

Blandings Castle

Blood City Rollers

Bloodlines

Blossom Street

Blue Ant

Bluey

Bodyguard

Bodyguard Series

Bollocks to Alton Towers

Book of Dust Series

Borderlands

Born Wicked

Boudica: the last defender of the Celtic culture; the only woman openly to have led her warriors into battle; the only British warrior to have stood against the might of Imperial Rome - and triumphed. 
 
This is her story.

Boudica

Boy Soldier

Brain Chemicals

Brave Bunnies

Bridge

Bridget Jones's Diary

Brief Encounters

Bright Young Things

Brotherband

Arthur Bryant and John May are Golden Age detectives living in the modern world. Together they head up the Peculiar Crimes Unit, ready to solve any of the weird and wonderful crimes that fall across their desks.

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