Lost, Stolen or Shredded

Rick Gekoski

The stories behind the disappearances of some of our most famous works of art - and some that never ...

Like Sherlock Holmes's dog in the night time, sometimes the true significance of things lies in their absence. Rick Gekoski tells the very human stories that lie behind some of the greatest losses to artistic culture - and addresses the questions such disappearances raise.Some of the ...

Spell It Out

David Crystal

An enlightening tour of English spelling that untangles'stationery'from'stationary'- and explains ...

Why is there an'h'in ghost? William Caxton, inventor of the printing press and his Flemish employees are to blame: without a dictionary or style guide to hand in fifteenth century Bruges, the typesetters simply spelled it the way it sounded to their ...

The Story of English in 100 Words

David Crystal

An eye-opening tour of the English language through the ages

Featuring Latinate and Celtic words, weasel words and nonce-words, ancient words ('loaf') to cutting edge ('twittersphere') and spanning the indispensable words that shape our tongue ('and','what') to the more fanciful ('fopdoodle'), Crystal takes us along the winding byways of language via the rude, the obscure and the downright ...

You Talkin'To Me?

Sam Leith

A witty, elegant enquiry into the art of persuasion

Rhetoric is what gives words power. It's nothing to be afraid of. It isn't the exclusive preserve of politicians: it's everywhere, from your argument with the insurance company to your plea to the waitress for a table near the window. It convicts criminals (and then frees them on appeal). It causes governments to rise and fall, best men to be ...

Tolstoy

Rosamund Bartlett

Tolstoy'sWar and PeaceandAnna Kareninaare considered two of the greatest novels ever written. Here ...

In November 1910, Count Lev Tolstoy died at a remote Russian railway station attended by the world's media. He was eighty-two years old and had lived a remarkable and long life during one of the most turbulent periods of Russian history.Born into a ...

Lives of the Novelists

John Sutherland

This is the most complete history of fiction in English ever published. The world's greatest ...

Arranged in chronological order the novelist's lives are opinionated, informative, frequently funny and often shocking. Professor Sutherland's authors come from all over the world; their writings illustrate every kind of fiction from gothic, penny ...

Howards End is on the Landing

Susan Hill

A year of reading from home, by one of Britain's most distinguished authors

Early one autumn afternoon in pursuit of an elusive book on her shelves, Susan Hill encountered dozens of others that she had never read, or forgotten she owned, or wanted to read for a second time. The discovery inspired her to embark on a year-long voyage through her books, forsaking new purchases ...

Letters To Lily

Alan MacFarlane

In a frank and unpretentious series of letters addressed to a teenage granddaughter, this highly original book teaches us to know and understand the world we live in and its rules, and how to behave in it. In these thirty letters, Alan Macfarlane answers his granddaughter's questions about how the world works, how it got to be as it is, what it could be, and where she fits in. Lily's enquiries ...