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 Henson

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 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 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 Roberts

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 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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Richard Leigh

Michael Baigent

In this enthralling historical detective story, the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail trace the flight after 1309 of the Knights Templar from Europe to Scotland, where the Templar heritage was to take root, and would be perpetuated by a network of noble families. That heritage, and the Freemasonry that arose from it, became inseparable from the Stuart cause. The Temple and the Lodge charts the birth of Freemasonry through the survival of Templar traditions, through currents of European thought, through the mystery surrounding Rosslyn chapel, and through an elite cadre of aristocrats attached as personal bodyguards to the French king. Pursuing Freemasonry through the 17th and 18th Centuries, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh reveal its contribution to the fostering of tolerance, progressive values, and cohesion in English society, which helped to pre-empt a French-style revolution. Even more dramatically, the influence of Freemasonry emerges as key facto in the formation of the United States of America as an embodiment of the ideal 'Masonic Republic'.

The Temple And The Lodge

Donald James

World's End is the story of Donald Wheal¹s childhood in Chelsea's World's End at the height of the Second World War. 
 
Not for him the privileged bohemian world of Chelsea a few hundred yards away. Descended from rural immigrants, ladies of the night and bare-knuckle fighters, Donald Wheal¹s upbringing took place amidst grimy factories and generating plants, illegal street bookmakers, dog tracks, tenements and street walkers who plied their trade in Piccadilly and Soho. 
 
World's End is the story of how he and his family struggled free from this underclass. It is also an individual history of the Second World War, of a small boy¹s grappling with the bitter separation of evacuation, the return to an already battered London, the wonderland of bomb-damaged houses to play in, and the nights of terror as the Blitz returned.

World's End

Franklin Foer

What in the world has the power to liberate women in Iran while provoking antagonism between Catholics and Protestants in Scotland, to lure Nigerians to the cold of the Ukraine while heating up class warfare in the US heartlands, and both profit local gangsters and create local - and international - celebrities? 
 
Foer presents an unexpected, uniquely revealing tour of the politics and culture of football from Milan to Tehran. He examines the game's role in sustaining ancient hatreds and rivalries (Serbia's Red Star and Croatia's Dinamo); in supporting the migration of players and the rise of the football oligarchs (such as Silvio Berlusconi, President of AC Milan - and of Italy); and in defending the virtues and vices of old-fashioned nationalism. As Foer brilliantly illuminates, the Balkan War, anti-Semitism, Jewish identity, racism, social integration, media manipulation, and American patriotism have all been influenced by, as well as have had a dramatic effect on, football. 
 
On his travels, Foer encounters a collection of fans that is stranger than fiction: from a British hooligan with a Jewish mother, a Nazi father and a career as a soldier of fortune, to a fan club in Serbia that turns into a brutal anti-Muslim paramilitary unit. The result is an unforgettable parade of uniquely memorable fans - each set into his - or her - unique political and cultural context.

How Football Explains The World

Barbara Freese

An enthralling journey, across time and across continents, using the fascination with coal and the crucial need for it as a way of approaching some of the most fundamental questions of human existence. 
 
'A passionate plea for a more considered way of treating the earth, its resources and its inhabitants' DAILY TELEGRAPH 
____________________________________________________________ 
 
Coal has transformed societies and shaped the fate of nations. It launched empires and triggered wars. Above all, it fuelled the Industrial Revolution in Britain, propelling the rise of a small rural kingdom into the greatest commercial empire in the world. 
 
Taking us on a rich historical journey that begins on the banks of the river Tyne, Barbara Freese explores the profound role coal has played in human history and continues to play in todays world. The first half of the book is set in Britain and tells how coal transformed Britain and ushered in the industrial age. The rest of the book looks at America and China, at the birth of the unions and the closing of the mines, and at the energy industry today. With oil prices on the rise and no end in sight to our insatiable appetite for energy, the world is turning again to coal. 
____________________________________________________________ 
'Elegant and engaging . . . No subject is more important for understanding the recent past, and preparing for the future.' SUNDAY TIMES 
 
'The incredible story of Britain's black goal.' DAILY MAIL 
 
'Eloquent . . . unsparing . . . The relation between carbon and climate change has seldom been so clearly and readably explained.' SCOTSMAN 
 
'As much about the growing scientific evidence of the damage coal causes to the environment as it is about the social history of the Industrial Revolution.' FINANCIAL TIMES 
 
'An absorbing book that never loses its grip.' NEW SCIENTIST 
 
'Fascinating . . . It lingers hauntingly in the mind.' NEW STATESMAN 
 
'As this human history of coal makes clear, there are no easy answers. . . A welcome contribution to the search for a sustainable energy economy.' NATURAL HISTORY 
 
'Coal, while it fairly acknowledges what the substance has done for people, devotes its more swashbuckling passages to describing what it has done to them' NEW YORK TIMES BOOKS REVIEW

Coal

A Human History

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

Paul Bloom

Why is a forgery worth so much less than an original work of art?What's so funny about someone slipping on a banana peel? Why, as Freud once asked, is a man willing to kiss a woman passionately, but not use her toothbrush? And how many times should you baptize a two-headed twin? Descartes' Baby answers such questions, questions we may have never thought to ask about such uniquely human traits as art, humour, faith, disgust, and morality. 
 
In this thought-provoking and fascinating account of human nature, psychologist Paul Bloom contends that we all see the world in terms of bodies and souls. Even babies have a rich understanding of both the physical and social worlds. They expect objects to obey principles of physics, and they're startled when things disappear or defy gravity. They can read the emotions of adults and respond with their own feelings of anger, sympathy and joy. 
 
This perspective remains with us throughout our lives. Using his own researches and new ideas from philosophy, evolutionary biology, aesthetics, theology, and neuroscience, Bloom shows how this way to making sense of reality can explain what makes us human. The myriad ways that our childhood views of the world undergo development throughout our lives and profoundly influences our thoughts, feelings, and actions is the subject of this richly rewarding book.

Descartes' Baby

How Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human

Gordon F Sander

'A major contribution to our understanding of the Second World War in all its complexity.' John Keegan in his Introduction. 
 
The inspiring story of a German-Jewish family named Frank which, like Anne Frank's family and 25,000 other Dutch and other 'stateless' Jews, 'dived under' in Nazi-occupied Holland in 1942 - but miraculously survived. Told by the grandson of the head of the family, this is the gripping odyssey of the other Frank family: from childhood in an assimilated German-Jewish family at Breitenheim, through the deceptively good life of Berlin in the 1920s, to the rise of Hitler and their flight to apparently safe Holland, the nightmarish ordeal of their thousand day long 'submersion' in a small apartment in The Hague, and the joy and pain of liberation and their final journey to America, the same route Anne Frank might have taken had she not been betrayed. Based on personal testaments, records and family interviews, the book describes their life behind closed curtains in constant fear of discovery. In 1945, after many adventures and appalling vicissitudes, they finally emerged to face the uncertainties of postwar Holland and the promise of the New World.

The Frank Family That Survived

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

Philip Ball

Is there a 'physics of society'? Philip Ball's investigation into human nature ranges from Hobbes and Adam Smith to modern work on traffic flow and market trading, across economics, sociology and psychology. Ball shows how much of human behaviour we can understand when we cease trying to predict and analyse the behaviour of individuals and look to the impact of hundreds, thousands or millions of individual human decisions, in circumstances in which human beings both co-operate and conflict, when their aggregate behaviour is constructive and when it is destructive. By perhaps Britain's leading young science writer, this is a deeply thought-provoking book, causing us to examine our own behaviour, whether in buying the new Harry Potter book, voting for a particular party or responding to the lures of advertisers.

Critical Mass

Constance Hays

Coca-Cola is the world's best-known brand, and perhaps the most quintessentially American one: a beverage with no nutritional value, sold variously as a remedy, a tonic and a refreshment. The story of Coca-Cola is also a tale of carbonisation, soda fountain shops, dynastic bottling businesses, and ultimately, globalisation and billion-dollar promotional campaigns. New York Times reporter Constance L. Hays examines the 119-year history of Coke - a story of opportunity, hope, teamwork and love as well as salesmanship, hubris, ambition and greed. There is an entirely new chapter for this paperback edition, covering the recent Dasani debacle and events since the hardback published in February 2004.

Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company

Tim Pat Coogan

Ireland's bestselling popular historian tells the story of contemporary Ireland - controversial, authoritative and highly readable. Tim Pat Coogan's biographies of Michael Collins and DeValera and his studies of the IRA, the Troubles and the Irish Diaspora have transformed our understanding of contemporary Ireland, and all have been massive bestsellers. Now he has produced a major history of Ireland in the twentieth century. Covering both South and North and dealing with cultural and social history as well as political, this enthralling work will become the definitive single-volume account of the making of modern Ireland.

Ireland In The 20th Century

John Pearson

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At Ronnie Kray's funeral, London crime expert John Pearson saw a man he didn't recognise - but who all the notorious criminals present deferred to. 
 
This is the remarkable true story of that man: 'the Englishman'. 
 
Investigations revealed that the Englishman was never mentioned in any of the previous books on organised crime, not because he wasn't involved, but because everyone was too scared to speak his name. Moreover, he was as legendary a figure on the streets of New York as on the streets of London. 
 
Pearson persuaded the mysterious criminal leader to talk to him - and the result was a story even more extraordinary than that of the Kray twins. Here Pearson reveals the true story of the Englishman who became the adopted son of Joey Pagano, the head of one of the major New York crime families. Here the Englishman tells the story that no-one else dared to tell. 
_____________________________ 
John Pearson's The Profession of Violence created the myth of the Kray twins, and remains a classic of true crime and the principal work on East London criminals.

One Of The Family

Neil McKenna

‘I have put my genius into my life but only my talent into my work’. 
 
So said Oscar Wilde of his remarkable life – a life more complex, more erotic, more troubled and more triumphant than any of his contemporaries ever knew or suspected. 
 
Neil McKenna’s The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde charts fully for the first time Oscar’s astonishing erotic odyssey through Victorian London’s sexual underworld. 
Oscar Wilde emerges as a man driven personally and creatively by his powerful desires for sex with men, and Neil McKenna argues compellingly and convincingly that Oscar’s Wilde’s life and work can only be fully understood and appreciated in terms of his sexuality. 
 
The book draws of a vast range of sources, many of them previously unpublished, and includes startling new material like the statements made to the police by the male prostitutes and blackmailers ranged against Oscar Wilde at his trial which have been lost for over a century. 
 
Dazzlingly written, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde meticulously and brilliantly reconstructs Oscar Wilde’s emotional and sexual life, painting an astonishingly frank and vivid portrait of a troubled genius who chose to martyr himself for the cause of love between men.

The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

Herbert Asbury

Herbert Asbury, author of The Gangs of New York and The Gangs of Chicago, turns his attention to chronicle the seedy underworld of San Francisco, from its gold-rush glories to its subterranean opium dens. Houses of ill repute play host to shanghaied sailors, and the Chinese tong wars rage around the city. San Francisco's historic past is here brought to life in all its scintillating and infamous glory.

The Gangs Of San Francisco

Amy Chua

Amy Chua's remarkable and provocative book explores the tensions of the post-Cold War globalising world. As global markets open, ethnic conflict worsens and democracy in developing nations can turn ugly and violent. Chua shows how free markets have concentrated disproportionate, often spectacular wealth in the hands of resented ethnic minorities - 'market-dominant minorities'. Adding democracy to this volatile mix can unleash suppressed ethnic hatred and bring to power 'ethno-nationalist' governments that pursue aggressive policies of confiscation and revenge. Chua also shows how individual countries may be viewed as market-dominant minorities, a fact that could help to explain the rising tide of anti-American sentiment around the world and the visceral hatred of Americans expressed in recent acts of terrorism. 
 
Chua is not an anti-globalist. But in this must-read bestselling book she presciently warns that, far from making the world a better and safer place, democracy and capitalism - at least in the raw, unrestrained form in which they are currently being exported - are intensifying ethnic resentment and global violence, with potentially catastrophic results.

World On Fire

Ben Mezrich

Real life all too rarely offers stories that are quite as satisfying as fiction. Bringing Down the House is one of the exceptions: a real-life action thriller oozing with money, sex and some extremely dodgy dealing... 
 
Cheating in casinos is illegal; card-counting - making a record of what cards have so far been dealt to enable the player to make some prediction of what cards remain in the deck - is not. But casinos understandably dislike the practice and make every effort to keep card-counters out of their premises. Bringing Down the House tells the true story of the most successful financial scam ever, in which teams of brilliant young mathematicians and physicists won millions of dollars from the casinos and blackjack tables of Las Vegas, in the process getting drawn into the high life of drugs, sex and spending big. 
 
Bringing Down the House is as readable and as fascinating as Liar's Poker or Barbarians At the Gate, an insight into a closed, excessive and utterly corrupt world of gambling in Las Vegas.

Bringing Down The House

Home to the notorious 'Blue Book', which listed the names and addresses of every prostitute living in the city, New Orleans's infamous red-light district gained a reputation as one of the most raucous in the world. But the New Orleans underworld consisted of much more than the local bordellos. It was also well known as the early gambling capital of the United States, and sported one of the most violent records of street crime in the country. In The Gangs of New Orleans, Herbert Asbury, author of The Gangs of New York, chronicles the immense underbelly of 'The Big Easy'. From the murderous exploits of Mary Jane 'Bricktop' Jackson and Bridget Fury, two prostitutes who became famous after murdering a number of their associates, to the faux-revolutionary 'filibusters' who, backed by hundreds of thousands of dollars of public support - though without official governmental approval - undertook military missions to take over the bordering Spanish regions in Texas, the French Quarter had it all. Once again, Asbury takes the reader on an intriguing journey through a unique history of the American underworld.

The Gangs Of New Orleans

An Informal History of the French Quarter Underworld

Christopher Knight

Robert Lomas

This is the extraordinary story of Knight and Lomas's fourteen year quest to uncover the secret teachings buried beneath Roslin Chapel near Edinburgh. Their quest ends with extraordinary revelations about early human history - the origins of Christianity, of Freemasonry and of science. They show that all were charged with a belief in a secret cosmic code, linking, for example, the Exodus from Egypt,  the founding of Solomon's Temple and the Star of Bethlehem. This book reveals for the first time why there were such high expectations of a Messiah at the time of the birth of Jesus Christ. The Book of Hiram will change everything you thought you knew about both the Bible and Freemasonry.

The Book Of Hiram

Sally Ward

The ability to use language well is one of the greatest gifts you can give your children. Helping them to communicate, to listen, and to understand, will build the foundation of their future learning. BabyTalk is a revolutionary programme for babies and children up to the age of four from leading language therapist Dr Sally Ward. The programme will:--optimise your child's language development--Enhance your child's ability to concentrate and learn--Enrich your child's imaginative play--Maximise the potential of your child's intelligenceThe BabyTalk programme takes just half an hour of playtime a day, is simple, stress-free, easily followed by any parent, carer or childcare professional - and above all, is great fun!

Babytalk

A.N. Wilson

People, not abstract ideas, make history, and nowhere is this more revealed than in A. N. Wilson's superb portrait of the Victorians, in which hundreds of different lives have been pieced together to tell a story - one which is still unfinished in our own day. The 'global village' is a Victorian village and many of the ideas we take for granted, for good or ill, originated with these extraordinary, self-confident people. What really animated their spirit, and how did they remake the world in their view? In an entertaining and often dramatic narrative, A. N. Wilson shows us remarkable people in the very act of creating the Victorian age.

The Victorians

David Hughes

In one spring month of 1856 Archibald Campbell Tait (later to be Archbishop of Canterbury) and his wife Catharine suffered the loss of five daughters, aged between two and ten, in an epidemic of scarlet fever. In his diary Tait refers to these beloved children as 'the lent jewels'. The couple bore their bereavement with a fortitude that could be sustained only by faith. Without similar convictions, but in the hope of laying bare a comparable belief for himself, David Hughes explores the themes of love and loss, intermingling his own experience, both as child and father, with the story of another of Tait's contemporaries, someone with a different but nonetheless powerful focus on life, a man known only as 'Walter', author of the erotic memoir My Secret Life. At the same time Catharine was drowning her grief in words by writing a heartbreaking account of her children's deaths. All these presences, and more modern ones, haunt the chapters of this many-layered documentary. With a dexterity of style and abundance of sympathy that have made him so appealing a writer, Hughes now delves into two centuries of underlying attitudes to sex, dreams and mortality, in an effort to reconcile them in his own daily life. The result of his sometimes sad but always eager search is splendidly uplifting.

The Lent Jewels

The Gangs of New York is a tour through a now unrecognisable city of abysmal poverty and habitual violence centred around the infamous slum of Five Points, with its rival Irish and American gangs. Cobbled from legend, memory, police records, the self-aggrandizements of aging crooks, popular journalism, and solid historical research, this is a powerful account of New York City's tumultuos past. Asbury presents the definitive work on this subject, an illumination of the gangs of old New York that ultimately gave rise to the modern Mafia and its depiction in cult films like The Godfather.

The Gangs Of New York

The British Association For The Advancement Of Science

In September 2001 the British Association for the Advancement of Science (the BA) embarked on the world's largest, and most unusual, scientific experiment. The aim of the project was to find the world's funniest joke, and answer important questions about the psychology of humour. For example, Do men and women find the same jokes funny? Does our sense of humour change as we get older? What is the best time of day to tell a joke? Do different nations laugh at the same jokes? The experiment was called LaughLab and was carried out as part of Science Year in the UK. An Internet site was established containing two sections: in the first, people submitted their favourite jokes; in the second they answered a few simple questions about themselves - male or female, age, nationality, etc - and then rated how funny they found a random selection of jokes. The experiment captured the imagination of individuals throughout the world. 40,000 jokes were received and evaluated by 350,000 people. At the end of the project the information was carefully examined and discoveries made about the jokes that made men giggle and women groan, those that tickled kids but not adults, and the jokes that were the most popular in different countries. Along the way the 'winning' jokes in different categories were uncovered, including the best 'doctor' jokes

Laughlab

The Scientific Quest for the World's Funniest Joke

Michaelbaden & Marion Roach

Michael Baden and Marion Roach take readers to the autopsy table in the morgue and practically place the scalpel in their hands to show how advances in forensic science are solving crimes as never before.  They visit cases both famous and ordinary to explain why the first hour at a crime scene is crucial.  They reveal, for the first time, how a key clue to the killer of Nicole Brown Simpson was lost during the transportation of her body to the morgue.  In another case, they show how something as obscure as the imprint of a button on a dead man's skin was overlooked until months later when, while reviewing the crime-scene photos, Dr Baden saw it, causing the case to take an astonishing turn. Baden and Roach invite readers to be present at the analysis of soil, plant matter, insects, blood spatters, bone, teeth, hair, weather and other crime-scene evidence to witness how the startling accuracy of science can improve the chances of a just verdict. Dead Reckoning has already been hailed, before publication, as a classic of rigorous an enlightened writing about forensic pathology, both in its principles and in its practice.

Dead Reckoning

The New Science of Catching Killers

Greg Marinovich

Joao Silva

The Bang-Bang Club was a group of four young war photographers, friends and colleagues: Ken Oosterbroek, Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva, war correspondants during the last years of apartheid, who took many of the photographs that encapsulate the final violent years of racist white South Africa. Two of them won Pulitzer Prizes for individual photos. Ken, the oldest and a mentor to the others, died, accidentally shot while working; Kevin, the most troubled of the four, committed suicide weeks after winning his Pulitzer for a photograph of a starving baby in the Sudanese famine. Written by Greg and Joao, The Bang-Bang Club tells their uniquely powerful war stories. It tells the story of four remarkable young men, the stresses, tensions and moral dilemmas of working in situations of extreme violence, pain and suffering, the relationships between the four and the story of the end of apartheid. An immensely powerful, riveting and harrowing book, and an invakuable contribution to the literary genre of war photography. An eye-opening book for readers of Susan Sontag.

The Bang-Bang Club

Snapshots from a Hidden War

Anthony Clare

An exploration of the challenged state of masculinity in our post-feminist society of gender equality.                                                                                                            As we reach the millennium, there is hardly anything to be done that cannot be done by women - where does this leave men?   Have men been pushed out of parenting - even of procreation?   The brute strength of the male is no longer necessary to mine coal or build ships - or even make war.  Men don't have to "provide" for their families, as more women harness their intelligence and generate their own incomes.  Is it surprising that male suicides outnumber female by a factor of 3 or 4 to 1, or that the predilection of males to be violent - once seen as a source of pride - now seems to threaten our very culture and civilisation? Is what Clare calls the "phallic man" - assertive, authoritative, dominant, in control not only of himself but of women - dying out?                                                                           As a practising psychiatrist, Anthony Clare brings a knowledge of science and medicine plus a deep understanding of the human heart and mind to this lively, readable, fair-handed and above all sympathetic examination of the male in today's society.

On Men

Masculinity in Crisis

John Humphrys

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For decades, John Humphrys has been at the beating heart of the BBC's news division. 
 
From the 9 O'Clock News desk to his marathon 32-year stint on the Today Programme, Humphrys has had a remarkable career as a journalist, steering the coverage of stories and issues that have defined multiple generations of British life. If the country has a pulse, John Humphrys is the man whose finger is firmly on it. 
 
In Devil's Advocate, Humphrys draws on his immense experience to detail the huge, sweeping changes that have overtaken Britain during his career. From the thorny geopolitical questions of the UK's relationship with Europe and America to the subtler ways our national social and moral values have changed, Humphrys sees a deep unease at the heart of a divided union, and identifies what truly links us all: consumer populism. 
 
As our lives and media become increasingly commercialised, the fabric of daily life begins to fray and a growing thoughtlessness and even hysteria emerge in public debate. Our children, growing up online, are losing their innocence at an ever-earlier age. In an age when our control over the world seems to be fraying, Humphrys wonders if we've ever had much say in our destination. 
 
A brilliant and incisive analysis of the changing state of Britain from one of the leading lights of BBC journalism.

Devil's Advocate

* What is the standard view of history is completely wrong? * What if science and writing developed from an advanced prehistoric civilisation in the British Isles? * What is written evidence in the Dead Sea Scrolls records megalithic history and provides the plans for a machine that could rebuild civilisation following a global catastrophe? * And what if Jesus and his brother James were practitioners of megalithic astronomy? In URIEL'S MACHINE Knight & Lomas offer powerful new evidence that our planet was hit by seven mountain-sized lumps of comet, creating a series of giant waves that ripped across the globe. Putting together the latest findings of leading geologists with their own sensational new archaeological discoveries, they show how a civilisation emerged and was able to build an international network of sophisticated astronomical observatories which provided accurate calendars, could measure the diameter of the planet and accurately predict comet impact years in advance. The revelation that this is the true purpose of the great megalithic sites in Western Europe, built long before the Egyptian pyramids.

Uriel's Machine

Reconstructing the Disaster Behind Human History

David Maurer

'Of all the gifters, the confidence man is the aristocrat, ' wrote David Maurer, a proposition he definitively proved in The Big Con. A professor of linguistics who specialised in underworld argot, Maurer won the trust of hundreds of swindlers. They let him in on not simply their language, but their folkwrys and the astonishingly complex and elaborate schemes whereby unsuspecting marks, hooked by their own greed and dishonesty were 'taken off' - i. e. , cheated - of thousands upon thousands of dollars. The products of amazing ingenuity, crack timing and attention to every last detail, these 'big cons', as thoroughly scripted and rehearsed as any Hollywood production, richly deserve Maurer's description as 'the most effective swindling device which man has ever invented. ' The Big Con is a treasure trove of American lingo (the write, the rag, the pay-off, ropers, shills, the cold poke and the convincer) and indeliable characters (Yellow Kid Weil, Barney the Patch, the Seldom-Seen Kid, Limehouse Chappie and Larry the Lug). First published in 1940, The Big Con makes compelling reading whilst being the most authentic and utterly authoritative study on the con artist and his game.

The Big Con

There is now no published theory to explain the enigma of the Turin Shroud that fits the known evidence. Many people want the shroud to be proof of Christ's mission, but Knight and Lomas prove that it is not. The truth behind the shroud is an epic story of pride, greed, powerlust and suffering. It had been prophesised that the Messiah would return shortly after 1230AD. Jacques de Molay was born in 1244, beacame a Templar in 1265 and Grand Master om 1297; the Templars regarded themselves as the guardians of the secret teachings of Jesus. In 1307 Molay was arrested at the instigation of the Pope, who was alarmed at the spread of this influence - and was crucified. Using the latest scientific techniques , the authors prove that the shroud Molay was wrapped in is the one now known as the Turin Shroud.

The Second Messiah

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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