Showing 25–36 of 40 resultsSorted by latest
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£9.99
This is the curious story of our long love affair with books. Whether comfort reads or cult novels, we carry them with us, inhale the smell of their pages, scrawl in their margins, and protect them from book thieves and bathwater. Despite the many enemies of reading – from poverty to prejudice, from the Spanish Inquisition to Orwellian regimes – its power has endured across centuries. This is partly thanks to people like Martin Latham, the longest-serving Waterstones manager (‘It’s not a career, it’s a philosophic path’). In ‘The Bookseller’s Tale’, Martin uncovers the history of our collective book-obsession, and introduces us to the Canterbury bookshop that has been his working home for three decades, complete at various points with two rocking horses, a hammock for staff naps, and an excavated Roman bath-house floor.
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£15.99
A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith.
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£20.00
So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom’s long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? ‘On Freedom’ examines such questions by tracing the concept’s complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate.
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£25.00
The year is 1851. It’s a time of radical change in Britain, when industrial miracles and artistic innovations rub shoulders with political unrest, poverty and disease. It’s also a turbulent time in the private life of Charles Dickens, as he copes with a double bereavement and early signs that his marriage is falling apart. But this formative year will become perhaps the greatest turning point in Dickens’s career, as he embraces his calling as a chronicler of ordinary people’s lives, and develops a new form of writing that will reveal just how interconnected the world is becoming. ‘The Turning Point’ transports us into the foggy streets of Dickens’s London, closely following the twists and turns of a year that would come to define him, and forever alter Britain’s relationship with the world.
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£25.00
In a career spanning six decades, David Lodge has been one of Britain’s best-loved and most versatile writers. With ‘Varying Degrees of Success’ he completes a trilogy of memoirs which describe his life from birth in 1935 to the present day, and together form a remarkable autobiography. His aim is to describe honestly and in some detail the highs and lows of being a professional creative writer in several different genres: prose fiction, literary criticism, plays for live theatre and screenplays for film and television.
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£14.99
For 40 years Christopher Hitchens’ essays have been an essential element of the literary life of America and the UK. ‘Arguably’ is the definitive selection.
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£10.99
Luck plays an important part in the careers of writers. In this work, David Lodge explores how his work was inspired and affected by unpredictable events in his life.
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£9.99
This telling of the story of Jane’s life shows us how and why she lived as she did, examining the rooms, spaces and possessions which mattered to her, and the way in which home is used in her novels to mean both a place of pleasure and a prison.
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£12.99
Funny, warm and wise, Bleaker House is a book about trying, and failing, to write a novel.
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£20.00
A radical look at Jane Austen
As you’ve never seen her – as a lover of farce, comic theatre and juvenilia. The Genius of Jane Austen celebrates Britain’s favourite novelist 200 years after her death and explores why her books make such awesome movies, time after time.
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£25.00
This telling of the story of Jane’s life shows us how and why she lived as she did, examining the rooms, spaces and possessions which mattered to her, and the way in which home is used in her novels to mean both a place of pleasure and a prison.
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£16.99
In 2012, the world arrived in London for the Olympics and Ann Morgan went out to meet it. She read her way around all the globe’s 196 independent countries (plus one extra), sampling one book from every nation – from classics and folk tales to current favourites and commercial triumphs, via novels, short stories, memoirs, biographies, narrative poems and countless mixtures of all these things. Her literary adventures shed light on the issues that affect us all: personal, political, national and global. What is cultural heritage? How do we define national identity? Is it possible to overcome censorship and propaganda? And how can we celebrate, challenge and change our remarkable world?
