King Mansolain is a thousand years old and fading; his devoted attendant Hare ushers in a caravan of storytellers to keep him alive - a rabbit, a donkey, a mouse, a dwarf, a witch - while wa... read more
The international roots of modern science - Arab and Persian mathematical texts, Indian observatories, a C17th African botanist, a C19th Japanese who first described the structure of an atom... read more
The role of our emotions in the light of recent research in multiple fields - psychology, neuroscience, biology. Mlodinow is a hugely popular science writer, and has written books with Steph... read more
This two-volume masterpiece by the author of The Master and His Emissary is a long conversation between neuropsychology and philosophy, science and poetry, the two sides of our brains. Truly... read more
Hugely enjoyable and widely researched, this will be accompanied by the happy sound of gender stereotypes being liberated from their historic chains...
100 recipes, 100 photographs: more than a traditional cookbook, this celebrates Lee Miller's polymathic approach to life - surrealist, photographer, model, cook, war correspondent... The aut... read more
Elena Zelayeta, a blind chef born in Mexico; Marcella Hazan, whose book on Italian cooking is still monumental; Norma Shirley's take on Jamaican cuisine et al: a joyous celebration of these... read more
Jansson's temptation on a winter day, skate with samphire and gooseberries on a summer's one... A few well-considered, simple but richly pleasing recipes for each season. Brown butter, gremo... read more
Marzahn is a suburb of prefab GDR housing on the outskirts of Berlin. This odd but brilliant book, about a chiropodist who talks to her clients, is both memoir and portrait of modern Germany... read more
Forster is always undoing, and no less so in this account of the remote princely court of Dewas in Madhya Pradesh, where he visited and worked as private secretary to the Maharajah in the ea... read more
A traditional rock climber for a decade or more, Fleming describes the dance between the self and the rock and its electrifying charge. It's also, for her, the ultimate way to connect with n... read more
The story of three friendships made when the author lived in Herat in the 1970s; after the Communist coup, Russian occupation and civil war, she was able to pick up the threads of those frie... read more
Lucy Atkinson (1817-1893) was an English Atkinson was an English nanny working in Russia. In 1848 she set out with her new husband on a six-year exploration of Siberia and Central Asia, by f... read more
Thomas Robins the Elder (1716-1770) recorded the country estates of the Georgian gentry - their orchards, Rococo gardens and potagers - like no other, with both topographical accuracy and de... read more