This is the journal Didion wrote in 1999 detailing her sessions with a psychiatrist. They concern her work, her daughter and her own childhood and parents.
Larissa Salmina was a wild child of the USSR who rose to be Keeper of Italian Drawings at the Hermitage; Francis Haskell was a distinguished, deracinated Cambridge art historian. They met in... read more
The un-making of the Raj: the 50-year process by which a single entity was torn into a dozen modern nations. SD tackles the immense complexities with gusto and intelligence.
The undermining of Communism in Poland and elsewhere through books: here is the story of the CIA programme to disseminate banned literature (Arendt, Solzhenitsyn, Orwell, etc.) behind the Ir... read more
A history of our wooded past - the 'wildwood' of our earliest hunter-gatherer ancestors, the neolithic agricultural clearances and the many centuries since of timber consumption.
Hearty, unpretentious recipes scribbled down at home and further afield: fish pie, shoulder of lamb, ragu, hot buttered crab, ceviche, Laotian chicken salad...
When this adventurous seeker after the authentic and delicious loaded her saddle bags and toottled off to France to research One More Croissant for the Road, the nation was confident she wou... read more
After the success of The Secret of Cooking, BW has returned to the psychology of food and the emotional heft of battered wooden spoons: an elegant mix of memoir and interrogation.
It is almost impossible to remember that the characters aren't four real women. Powerful, evocative and continually surprising in all its insights, Dream Count is a vivid exploration of how ... read more
The Renaissance polymath Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who spent his life in pursuit of a grand unified theory of the Sublime while navigating the period's political shenanigans. A new book... read more
The death of the author's father brings her to Shetland and the pandemic kept her there. What follows is a powerful, nuanced tale of navigating the challenge of a big onshore windfarm that h... read more
Favourite and lover of James I and beloved friend of his son; husband, father, art collector, tireless statesman... The cost of his pearl-spilling outfit when he went to meet Henrietta Maria... read more
The author pays tribute to the merchant seamen of many countries, as well as the Allied navies, who experienced the harrowing dangers of the Arctic convoys in support of the essential Soviet... read more
Six centuries are nothing to Orsola Rosso, daughter of a C15th glassmaker in Murano, who overcomes tradition to become a glassmaker herself. Time seems to pass in a very different way in Ven... read more
The first publication of Tolkien's collected poetry, from all periods of his life as well as his long preoccupation with Middle Earth: in three hardback volumes, with a slipcase.
From childhood to the 1970s and her marriage to Sonny - therefore doesn't include her account of a surprising publicity stunt in 1979 (?) when she appeared at a boys school not unknown to li... read more
Further investigations into the development of intelligence on earth, following his Other Minds (2018) and Metazoa (2020). Moving away from octopuses, he examines how life has been altered b... read more