Everyday at least for that great patroness... loved not least because she paid her bills on time. This illustrated chronology of the porcelain, its commissioning and use, is a magnificent bo... read more
Born in 1799, Atkins was the first person to illustrate a book with photographs. Her cyanotypes - of ferns, algae, parrot feathers, seaweed - are exquisite.
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
Overlooking the Beaulieu River, Exbury comprises 200 acres of outstanding woodland gardens. Begun in 1919, it became home to countless rare rhododendrons, collected and bred by three generat... read more
A powerful novel set in the closing stages of WW2, in which a 12-year-old girl escapes to the German countryside with her mother and older sister. Translated from the German.
This extraordinary Californian garden was the creation of Ganna Walska, a Polish opera singer who bought the estate of Montecito in 1943 while briefly married to her sixth husband. Thereafte... read more
We heard about Molotov's library in Rachel Polonsky's superb Molotov's Magic Lantern (£12.99). Now we have a portrait of Stalin through the books he read - and he was an avid reader all his... read more
Gleaming with finds from recent excavations, this accompanies the Fitzwilliam's splendid exhibition of artefacts of the Saka people - ornate metalwork of people and animals, real and imagina... read more
Argues that the abolition of the slave trade in Britain owed more to a deep cultural shift - one that valued the idea of individual freedom - than it did to the actions of particular indi... read more
Manon Gropius (1916-1935) was the daughter of Walter and Alma. Her attempts to free herself from maternal expectations and the recurrent image of herself in her stepfather's novels are movin... read more
A strange and magical memoir of growing up in prosaic England with Anglo-Burmese parentage. Teak trees interweave oaks; myth and imagery chase each other through the author's odyssey through... read more
Set in 1742, this is a rollicking reworking of Moonfleet in which a wild, cross-dressing teenage girl joins a bloodthirsty gang of smugglers to avenge her father's murder.
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
A re-issue from 1963 - an adored classic that has been out of print ever since. Two owls share the secret of their happiness with the greedy and squabbling barnyard fowl but to no avail. Mar... read more
Philby's granddaughter has drawn on unpublished letters for this tense novel about Edith Tudor-Hart, the woman who introduced Philby to his Soviet handler.
The spark for this remarkable memoir was a scribbled list of paintings that belonged to the Parisian author's great-grandparents - Degas, Renoir, Monet, Tiepolo etc - of which she knew nothi... 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
Incredible though it seems, in the closing years of the GDR the Stasi trained operatives to become poets in order to infiltrate literary circles. Years of sleuthing has yielded this remarkab... read more
Last autumn we had the great Dutch writer's 533: A Book of Days, a sort of diary of the pandemic on Menorca. Now we have this single poem which repeatedly refers back to images of wartime; h... read more
By looking at the surviving remains of eleven ships, from a prehistoeric prow to the propellor of an ocean liner, TM has written a fascinating maritme history of Britain.