Superbly readable and revealing letters, full of malice and gossip, from a master historian

When they met in 1947 Trevor-Roper, a young historian at Christ Church, Oxford, was 33. Berenson, the world-famous art critic, was 82, frail but still intensely curious about the world. Trevor Roper promised to write to him and his letters continued until Berenson's death in in 1959. Elegantly constructed, beautifully and precisely written, they are shot through with high-octane malice, sharp judgements and blistering comments, and many wonderfully funny episodes.

Trevor-Roper was an intellectual heavyweight, but subjects range widely: several brilliant set-pieces on Oxford college elections, books, journalism, publishing, politics (postwar Europe, ex-Nazis and collaborators, the Cold War, Suez, etc), history and history-writing, personal life (including marriage to Earl Haig's daughter Alexandra after her messy divorce), travel, gossip, and so on.

He has a memorable journey on a pilgrims' bus in Persia, goes behind the Iron Curtain to meet Communist dignitaries and speeds in his glamorous grey Bentley to visit duchesses in the Scottish borders. Figures in the letters include Evelyn Waugh, Isaiah Berlin, A.L. Rowse, Anthony Eden, Gerald Brenan, A.J.P.Taylor, Arnold Toynbee, Dimitri Shostakovitch, C.S. Lewis and Harold Macmillan.

Barry Cryer has collaborated with some of the great names in comedy from the mid-1950s onwards. Baz recalls, reminisces, recounts and other words beginning with 'R', on a trip down Memory Lane, pausing only for tea and macaroons at the Stannah Stairlift Cafe. What memories - if only he can remember them

Shortly after her sixteenth birthday, Ritva is sent away to Seili, an island to the south of Finland. A former leper colony, Seili is now home to 'hopeless cases' - to women the doctors call mad. But Ritva knows she doesn't belong there. As biting winter follows biting winter, she longs to be near to her sister, and wonders why her father ever allowed her to be taken to this desolate place.

Hope arrives in the form of Martta, a headstrong girl who becomes Ritva's only friend. Martta is a Sami, from the north. All through her childhood, Ritva's mother told her wonderful Sami legends and tales - of Vaja the reindeer, the stolen sealskin, of a sacred drum hidden long ago. When Ritva and Martta decide to make their escape, this is where they will head.

So begins an odyssey over frozen sea and land towards a place where healing and forgiveness can grow. This is a story about friendship, about seeing the world through a different perspective, and the stories and tales that can make up a life.

To understand why James Farrell murdered his wife of more than 45 years, especially after such a long and stable marriage, the reader is taken back four decades to an earlier affair when he fell in love with his wife's cousin Ella.

When the British dispatched 400 tanks against the Germans at the Battle of Cambrai in 1917, the result was a draw for the armies--but a win for the tank, following its first major role in combat. But the initial British successes were due to innovations in artillery, not tanks--and tanks didn't keep the Germans from recapturing their losses. Bryn Hammond shows how generals and politicians seduced by the tank's mythical abilities helped create a more mobile army in the following decades.

An autobiography of Top Gear co-host Richard Hammond, told througheight significant road journeys he has taken In a new and very appropriate form of autobiography, Richard Hammond tells his life story through a series of significant driving episodes. He's a child in the back seat of Dad's car on the way to the seaside. He's on his first bike, a red one; then on his first motorcycle, a Honda MTX50. He's at the wheel of his first car, and with his first girlfriend. He is driving a furniture delivery van as part of his first job. Now he is showing off with a friend, risking everything. Then he is surging ahead in an open-top, a successful TV star. Next, a car crash that made national headlines.This is an emotional road map in which each chapter has its own registration number, and its own distinctive interior. This memoirsurges on to its destination, reversing or moving quickly through the gears, reliving the central episodes and conflicts of Richard's life. Although there are precious few road-rage monologues against four-wheel drivers and men in vests in white vans, Richard Hammond's readers will quickly recognize the funny, self-deprecating, and balanced ease that has made him a beloved television host.

Inside the lives of the scientists who are exploring the world, our universe, the past and ourselves.

Based on the interviews broadcast on BBC Radio 4's hugely popular series, The Life Scientific: Explorers takes science out of its box and introduces us to the men and women who make it happen.

The explorers featured in this volume include: Michele Dougherty, the mathematician who persuaded the Cassini mission to Saturn to make a diversion; Richard Fortey on his love of trilobites; Monica Grady, Meteorite Lady; neurosurgeon Henry Marsh on slicing through our thoughts; the Director of the British Antarctic Survey, Jane Francis; Brian Cox on quantum mechanics; and Nobel Prize winner John Sulston on why he thought it would be a good idea to sequence the human genome.

Barry Cryer is a National Treasure - this is his brilliant collection of true, tall, stories from his fifty years in comedy.

Throughout his career, Barry Cryer has collaborated with all the greats, from Max Miller to Tony Hancock, Bob Hope, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, John Cleese, Kenny Everett, Tommy Cooper, Spike Milligan, Morecambe and Wise ... in fact pretty well all the best comedians and comic writers since the mid-1950s. He has also collaboratively penned series like 'Hello Cheeky!', toured with Willie Rushton in their show 'Two Old Farts in the Night', and is a panellist on 'I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue'.

This is his collection of completely true apocryphal stories from these fifty years, packed with jokes, fascinating asides and riveting portraits of the major figures in comedy.

'This is a bold and fascinating mystery novel of ideas. John David Morley enfolds science and human loss with great fictional cunning' Ian McEwan on The Book of Opposites

Spanning the decades from World War II to the Yugoslav conflict, Ella Morris is the story of a remarkable woman, and of the toll history takes on individual lives.

Born in Berlin on the eve of Hitler's rise to power, Ella Andrzejewski escapes Soviet-occupied Europe and finds a safe haven in England. Here, she marries George Morris, but subsequently falls in love with Claude de Marsay, a French student ten years her junior.

The intrusion of Claude upsets the balance of the Morris household, while the effects of Ella's traumatic past continue to be felt. As the decades pass and Europe lurches towards another conflict, Ella's children and grandchildren struggle to find their peace in a continent still reverberating with the echoes of war.

A groundbreaking study of the numerous academics and technocrats without whom Hitler's crude anti-Semitism could never have been translated into a systematic policy of genocide.

The story of Mika, a Jewish boy, who finds a way to survive in the Warsaw ghetto - a stunning novel for anyone who was moved by The Tattooist of Auschwitz

I was twelve when the coat was made. Nathan, our tailor and dear friend, cut it for Grandfather in the first week of March 1938. It was the last week of freedom for Warsaw and for us...

Even in the most difficult of lives, there is hope. When Mika's grandfather dies in the Warsaw ghetto, he inherits not only his great coat, but its treasure trove of secrets. In one remote pocket, he finds a papier mache head, a scrap of cloth... a puppet prince. And what better way to cheer the cousin who has lost her father, the little boy who is ill, the neighbours living in one cramped room, than a puppet show? Soon the whole ghetto is talking about the puppet boy - until the day when Mika is stopped by a German officer and is forced into a secret life...

This is a story about survival. It is an epic journey, spanning continents and generations, from Warsaw to the gulags of Siberia, and two lives that intertwine amid the chaos of war. Because even in wartime, there is hope...