"Ian Nairn taught a generation to look, and another one to write"Ian Nairn lit up the pages of the architectural press, broadsheets and TV screens with his incandescent reports on the uglification of Britain, not just by standard eyesores but by the prissy and the pretentious and the blunderings of planners and architects creating new buildings and roads which show no respect for the places they invade. There is spreading across the country, he warned, a blight of ...

LONGLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 2014‘A symphonic poem about postwar England and Englishness … A masterpiece’ Financial TimesThe 1950s were not grey. In Jonathan Meades’s detailed, petit-point memoir they are luridly polychromatic. They were peopled by embittered grotesques, bogus majors, vicious spinsters, reckless bohos, pompous boors, drunks, suicides. Death went dogging everywhere. Salisbury had two industries: God and the Cold War. For the child, delight is to b...

‘One of the funniest and truest writers we have. No one understands England better than Meades.’ Stephen FryAn inventively nasty, gruesomely comic paean to the sylvan heights of Forest Hill and Upper Norwood, a warped map of the death trade’s quotidian strangeness.Henry Fowler was twice, long ago, runner-up in the Oil Fuels Guild-sponsored Young Funeral Director of the Year competition. His intense loyalties are to his parents, to his wife and children, to the family firm a...

LONGLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 2014‘A symphonic poem about postwar England and Englishness … A masterpiece’ Financial TimesThe 1950s were not grey. In Jonathan Meades’s detailed, petit-point memoir they are luridly polychromatic. They were peopled by embittered grotesques, bogus majors, vicious spinsters, reckless bohos, pompous boors, drunks, suicides. Death went dogging everywhere. Salisbury had two industries: God and the Cold War. For the child, delight is to b...

Jonathan Meades has an obsessive preoccupation with places. He has spent thirty years constructing sixty films, two novels and hundreds of pieces of journalism that explore an extraordinary range of them, from natural landscapes to man-made buildings and 'the gaps between them', drawing attention to what he calls 'the rich oddness of what we take for granted'.This book collects fifty-four pieces and six film scripts that dissolve the barriers between high and low culture, good and ...

A hilarious anthology of comic treasures written by Britain's "comic genius"—the former editor of Punch and beloved regular on BBC's Radio 4 ( The Times).Alan Coren was one of contemporary Britain's most prolific humorists. Over his forty-year career, Coren wrote comic and satirical pieces for The New Yorker, The Times, Observer, Tatler, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, and Punch, and publi...

Oliver Postgate's death in December 2008 was greeted with great sadness. For over forty years his name was synonymous with the best in children's television - Bagpuss, The Clangers, Ivor the Engine, The Pogles, Noggin the Nog, Pingwings. Oliver wrote and narrated the stories, while Peter Firmin illustrated the characters and made the puppets. Their classic films are still loved by viewers of all ages.In this delicious autobiography Oliver Postgate describes how he came to create his...

Just after ‘Bring Up the Bodies’ author Hilary Mantel won the Man Booker for ‘Wolf Hall’, she fell gravely ill. This is her remarkable hospital diary.Originally published in the London Review of Books, this diary by the acclaimed author Hilary Mantel explores in forensic detail her loss of dignity, her determination, the concentration of the senses into an animalistic struggle to get through, and the attendant hallucinations she was plagued by during her stay in hospital.Wi...

This "interesting, insightful book" by the author of Deep South reveals "a side of Britain few visitors see" ( The New York Times Book Review).After eleven years as an American living in London, the renowned travel writer Paul Theroux set out to travel clockwise around the coast of Great Britain to find out what the British were really like. The result is this perceptive, hilarious record of the journey. Whether in Cornwall or Wales, Ulster or Scot...

Collected Poems made publishing history when it first appeared, and has now sold more than two million copies, to an ever-growing readership. This newly expanded edition includes Betjeman's verse autobiography, Summoned by Bells. With a new Introduction by Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, Collected Poems is the definitive Betjeman companion.

An engaging, wickedly funny and splendidly anecdotal memoir of a career spent among writers, agents, publishers and bookmen and women of every stripe.Jeremy Lewis's first memoir, 'Playing for Time', was hailed by James Lees-Milne as 'the funniest and best written book I've read for years.' His second, 'Kindred Spirits', was described by John Carey as 'sheer pleasure from start to finish'. Now he has written a third autobiographical account of his encounters with literary figures ov...

Diana Athill's childhood was idyllic, brought up in the Norfolk countryside. Aged only fifteen, she fell in love with a young undergraduate. They travelled to Oxford, engaged to be married. Then everything fell apart in the cruellest possible way. In this classic modern memoir, Diana Athill dissects the terrible consequences of loss and her struggle to rebuild a personality destroyed by sadness. Yet for all its unhappiness, Instead of a Letter remains a story of hope, written with the fran...