A rollicking account of the pursuit of love among the Good, the Bad and the Beautiful; abridged from 3 large volumes of memoirs that he left on his death in 2011.
Parini really did travel around Scotland with Borges in an old Morris Minor, his ears flapping, heart opening and mind sharpening all the way. The result is a wonderful work of autofiction -... read more
Just 28 when he found Nineveh, Layard later witnessed the Charge of the Light Brigade and reported on the Indian Mutiny: his life was action-packed. This new biog argues that he was deeply r... read more
Petterson has not been kind to his protagonist, removing from him by traumatic means his wife, three daughters, parents and brothers. It is no surprise that he is pole-axed by grief; will Pe... read more
Witty and wandering memoir about the pursuit of happiness - indeed paradise - through all things "fishological", which include travelling about and stillness, people and solitude, childhood ... read more
The distinguished archaeologist looks at 15 'scenes' in Britain over the last million years, to understand the changing daily routines of people and their impact on the landscape.
From the author of the excellent 'The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are', an account of the dazzling city that was the hub of the known world in the C16th.
Raven is an American biologist whose cherished solitude in a remote part of Montana is interrupted by a fox, who begins visiting her daily. As an academic, any sense of a meaningful rela... read more
First published in 1930, this is a compendium of old recipes from the American South, rather than Bloomsbury. Fascinating even if some of the ingredients will be hard to come by, at least in... read more
A dizzying and quietly surreal novel of South London life narrated through an interlinked series of episodic character studies. Ridgway's neo-Beckettian prose is never less than needle sharp... read more
Patrick Leigh Fermor held that baroque architecture in Italy could never have existed without pasta in all its multitudinous and beguiling forms... Drawing on a decade and a half of living i... read more
The magnificent Eland publisher considers his ilk through the stories and gossip of 15 generations of farmers, colonels, brewers, naval commanders and horse-lovers, as told to him by a great... read more
Raised in Nazi Germany, at 18, Wulff Scherchen was Britten's muse and lover. When the composer went to the USA during the war, Wulff was interned as an enemy alien and transported to Canada,... read more