The essence and success of The Tao of Coaching has always been its focus on the practical tips and techniques for making work more rewarding through the habit of coaching - and this philosophy continues to underpin this brand new reissue.

The book's premise is simple: that to become an effective coach, managers and leaders need master only a few techniques, even though mastery obviously requires practice. Each chapter focuses on a specific technique - or Golden Rule - of coaching to help practice make perfect.
Tried and tested by generations within and beyond the workplace, this succinct and engaging book gives readers the tools to:

- create more time for themselves, by delegating well
- build, and enjoy working with, effective teams
- achieve better results
- enhance their interpersonal skills.

It demonstrates that coaching is not simply a matter of helping others and improving performance, but is also a powerful force for self-development and personal fulfilment.

The follies of finance have threatened the stability of the global economy, and the world of finance has become increasingly complex and sophisticated, but also greedy, cynical and self-interested. The Long and the Short of It provides a guide to the complexities of modern finance and explains how to put your finances in the only hands you can confidently trust - your own.

In this new, wholly updated edition of The Long and the Short of It, you will learn everything you need to be your own investment manager. You will recognise your investment options, the institutions that try to sell them, and how to distinguish between fact and fiction in what companies say. You will discover the principles of sound investment and the research that supports these principles. Crucially, you will learn a practical investment strategy and how to implement it.

Leading economist and hugely successful investor John Kay uses his academic credentials and practical experience to lay out the key principles of investment with characteristic clarity and dry humour. This is the only book about finance and investment anyone needs, and the one book they must have.

Voted Britain's favourite poem in 1996, 'Warning', written in 1961, is known and loved the world over. Its declaration of defiance, so vividly and cleverly expressed, appeals to the rebel in all of us as we secretly yearn to throw off the shackles of propriety and enjoy the gleeful freedom of cocking a snook at the rest of the world.

In the poem's respectable middle-aged woman, as she indulges in her fantasy of the gabby old crone with her outrageous clothes and dotty behaviour, Jenny Joseph has created a character whose thoughts have been quoted at conferences and funerals, used to cheer up sick friends, remembered with pleasure by children and adults alike. Found in schoolbooks from Alaska to Singapore, the poem has been stitched, stamped, quilted, set to music, printed on cards, written on cakes and made into films.

Now, for the first time, 'Warning' appears as an illustrated book with drawings by Pythia Ashton-Jewell specially designed to suit its unique character.

In September 1939, housewife and mother Nella Last began a diary whose entries, in their regularity, length and quality, have created a record of the Second World War which is powerful, fascinating and unique. When war broke out, Nella's younger son joined the army while the rest of the family tried to adapt to civilian life. Writing each day for the Mass Observation project, Nella, a middle-aged housewife from the bombed town of Barrow, shows what people really felt during this time. This was the period in which she turned 50, saw her children leave home, and reviewed her life and her marriage - which she eventually compares to slavery. Her growing confidence as a result of her war work makes this a moving (though often comic) testimony, which, covering sex, death and fear of invasion, provides a new, unglamorised, female perspective on the war years.'Next to being a mother, I'd have loved to write books.' Oct 8, 1939

A superbly pithy account of the controversies surrounding the failure of Ireland's potato crop from 1845-1848.

The Durrell family are immortalised in Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals and its ITV adaptation, The Durrells. But what of the real life Durrells? Why did they go to Corfu in the first place - and what happened to them after they left?

The real story of the Durrells is as surprising and fascinating as anything in Gerry's books, and Michael Haag, with his first hand knowledge of the family, is the ideal narrator, drawing on diaries, letters and unpublished autobiographical fragments.

The Durrells of Corfu describes the family's upbringing in India and the crisis that brought them to England and then Greece. It recalls the genuine characters they encountered on Corfu - Theodore the biologist, the taxi driver Spiro Halikiopoulos and the prisoner Kosti - as well as the visit of American writer Henry Miller. And Haag has unearthed the story of how the Durrells left Corfu, including Margo's and Larry's last-minute escapes before the War. An extended epilogue looks at the emergence of Larry as a world famous novelist, and Gerry as a naturalist and champion of endangered species, as well as the lives of the rest of the family, their friends and other animals.

The book is illustrated with family photos from the Gerald Durrell Archive, many of them reproduced here for the first time.

We've become used to thinking of plants as things for us to use: as food, tools, resources, or just as an attractive background to our own lives.

But it's time to change our minds.

New research shows that plants can think, plan - and may even have memories. We share our planet with beings whose potential we have only glimpsed. Featuring the writing of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Susie Orbach and Merlin Sheldrake, This Book is a Plant will be your handbook to the new reality: showing you a pathway to completely reimagine your relationship with a different kind of natural world. Delve into a world of moss and fungi: Sheila Watt-Cloutier transports us to the Arctic spring, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan discovers the pleasures of painting trees, and Rebecca Tamás puts roots down through earth and soil.

This Book is a Plant is made from paper: it was once part of a tree. But it's also a seed: the first shoots of a radical new way of seeing the world around you.

Christmas is a time of goodwill to all men--or is it?

As the nights draw in, throw another log on the fire and settle back into your armchair to enjoy this collection of ten classic Christmas mysteries, in which crime's best known sleuths, from Rebus to Holmes and Cadfael to Father Brown, uncover murder and mayhem galore.

Whether it's a Christmas goose with a surprising secret cargo, a murdered pantomime dame, or a killer who departs the scene of the crime without leaving a single footprint, these stories will puzzle and delight in equal measure. And along the way, there'll be enough carols and Christmas pudding, mistletoe and mulled wine, to warm the heart of a stone-cold killer--perhaps.

Includes stories for the festive season from Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, Edmund Crispin, G.K. Chesteron, Ngaio Marsh, Carter Dickson, Margery Allingham, and Ellis Peters.

In this bestselling classic, James Finn Garner has rewritten classic stories for more enlightened times; from Snow White's relationship with seven vertically challenged men, Little Red Riding Hood, her grandma and the cross-dressing wolf who set up an alternative household based on mutual respect and cooperation, to the Emperor who was not naked but was endorsing a clothing-optional lifestyle.

At last, here is bedtime reading free from prejudice and discrimination of witches, giants, dwarves, goblins and fairies everywhere. For anyone brought up on sexist, racist, sizeist and ethnocentrist reading matter, James Finn Garner's stories have been purged of the influence of an insensitive cultural past to become fables for our times.

Idiocy is all around us, whether it's the uncle spouting conspiracy theories, the colleagues who repeat your point but louder, or the commuters who still don't know how to use an escalator. But what is the answer to this perpetual scourge? Here, philosopher Maxime Rovere turns his attention to the murkiest of intellectual corners. With warmth, wit and wisdom, he illuminates a new understanding of idiots, one which examines our relations to others and our own ego, offers tools and strategies to dismantle the most desperate of idiotic situations, and even reveals how to stop being the idiots ourselves (because we're always someone else's idiot). Expertly translated by David Bellos, this is an erudite, enjoyable and much-needed solution to a most familiar vexation.

There is nothing simple about the idea of civilisation. It is a concept with multiple and contested meanings. Prefix it with the word 'western' and you have a whole new set of problems. Equally thorny is the belief, once commonplace, that civilisation was a singular project, a phenomenon that spread across parts of the world from a single source. The view that multiple civilisations emerged independently at various times and in various places across the world was not an idea many Victorian thinkers had much time for. Indeed, in the age of European Empires, nations justified their domination of other peoples by claiming they were engaged in a great 'civilising mission'. Perhaps all that is certain about the concept of civilisation is that its opposite, barbarism, is toxic. In Civilisations, David Olusoga travels the world to piece together the shared histories that link nations. In Part One, First Contact, we discover what happened to art in the great Age of Discovery, when civilisations encountered each other for the first time? Although undoubtedly a period of conquest and destruction it was also one of mutual curiosity, global trade and the exchange of ideas In Part Two, The Cult of Progress we see how the Industrial Revolution transformed the world, impacting every corner, and every civilisation, from the cotton mills of the Midlands, through Napoleon's conquest of Egypt, to the demise of both Native American and Maori populations and the advent of photography in Paris in 1839. Incredible art - both looted and created - relay the key events and their outcomes throughout the world.

The popular broadcaster and columnist sets out to discover the unsung pleasures of drinking in moderation. Ever since Adrian Chiles was a teenager, drinking was his idea of a good time - and not just his, but seemingly the whole nation's. Still, it wasn't very good for him: the doctor made that clear. If you lined them up, Adrian must have knocked back three miles of drinks. How many of them had he genuinely wanted? A mile? There's an awful lot of advice out there on how to quit booze completely. If you just want to drink a bit less, the pickings are slim. Yet while the alcohol industry depends on a minority of problem drinkers, the majority really do enjoy in moderation. What's their secret? Join the inimitable Chiles as he sets out around Britain and plumbs his only slightly fuzzy memories of a lifetime in pubs in a quest to find the good drinker within.

Join Rebecca Lee, professional text-improver, as she embarks on a fascinating journey to find out how words get from an author's brain to finished, printed books. She'll reveal the dark arts of ghostwriters, explore the secret world of literary agents and uncover the hidden beauty of typesetting. Along the way, her quest will be punctuated by a litany of little-known (but often controversial) considerations that make a big impact: ellipses, indexes, hyphens, esoteric points of grammar and juicy post-publication corrections. After all, the best stories happen when it all goes wrong. From foot-and-note disease to the town of Index, Missouri - turn the page to discover how books get made and words get good. Or, at least, better.

In June 1922, just seven months after Sinn Féin negotiators signed a compromise treaty with representatives of the British government to create the Irish Free State, Ireland collapsed into civil war. While the body count suggests it was far less devastating than other European civil wars, it had a harrowing impact on the country and cast a long shadow, socially, economically and politically, which included both public rows and recriminations and deep, often private traumas. Drawing on many previously unpublished sources and newly released archival material, one of Ireland's most renowned historians lays bare the course and impact of the war and how this tragedy shaped modern Ireland.

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 in order to get to know her own collection again.

A book which is left on a shelf for a decade is a dead thing, but it is also a chrysalis, packed with the potential to burst into new life. Wandering through her house that day, Hill's eyes were opened to how much of that life was stored in her home, neglected for years. Howard's End is on the Landing charts the journey of one of the nation's most accomplished authors as she revisits the conversations, libraries and bookshelves of the past that have informed a lifetime of reading and writing.

All human beings, says an African legend, have an animal double. Some are benign, others wicked. When Kibandi, a boy living in a Congolese village, reaches the age of eleven, his father takes him out into the night, and forces him to drink a vile liquid from a jar which has been hidden for years in the earth. This is his initiation.

From now on he, and his double, a porcupine, become accomplices in murder. They attack neighbours, fellow villagers, people who simply cross their path. Throughout his life Kibandi relies on his double to act out his grizzly compulsions, until one day even the porcupine baulks, and turns instead to literary confession.

he key to success lies in getting to the top - right?

Wrong. Not everyone can be No. 1, and more importantly, not everyone wants to be.

Consiglieri turns the spotlight on the second-in-commands - the advisers, assistants and counsellors (or 'consiglieri') - who are too often disparaged as the 'No. 2'. Far from being also-rans, these are the crucial vice-presidents, first lieutenants and right-hand men and women whose influence can determine the fate of countries, companies and individual ventures all over the world.

In this timely celebration of the done-down deputy, Richard Hytner (himself a former CEO and now deputy chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi) presents a remarkable array of powerful advisers, from Alastair Campbell and Hillary Clinton to Rasputin, Machiavelli and Peter Mandelson, and talks to outstanding consiglieri in contemporary business, politics, sport and the arts, revealing in the process what motivates these so-called No. 2s, what makes them great and what their bosses can do to help them flourish.

Stylish, clever and entertaining, Consiglieri is packed with invaluable advice for every kind of leader, whether in the limelight or the shadows. It may also be one of the wittiest business books ever.

The Top 10 Sunday Times Bestseller. For history nerds and food lovers, the curious and the hungry, an entertaining journey stretching across the British Isles. Packed with the story of British cheese from an expert storyteller and master cheesemonger.

Entertaining and surprising look at world history events to reveal the consequences of decisions taken by translators.

Think of any scene of disaster and you'll find Sikh volunteers rallying to the site to perform seva - pronounced 'say-va', meaning selfless service - feeding migrant workers, helping riot victims, and cleaning up after earthquakes and floods. Why has this 30 million strong community become the world's Good Samaritan? What is it about their values that makes so many of them do so much good? And how is it that they're also able to channel so much joy and laughter while serving others?

Through science-based studies, interviews with Sikhs and a look at history and fables, Seva unlocks seven Sikh-inspired rules to help anyone become kinder, happier and lead a more meaningful life. A secular handbook for the modern world, Seva is a beautiful, inspiring and moving book that will change you from the inside out.