Nigel Flaxton enjoyed a satisfying career in education covering the second half of the 20th century, This is an account of some of his experiences from old-fashioned monastic seclusion in training college just after the Second World War to three headships of new schools, the last being an upper school of over 900 students. Written with gentle humour, often at his own expense, he also comments on the very considerable changes in education in a broad sense during that period. He includes nea...

A professor and two students stumble across a highly unusual phenomenon. At first they attempt to keep it secret whilst investigating further, but leaks occur despite the intervention of MI5. The phenomenon involves a newly discovered element, synthesized by the professor and others together with a material deposited on earth by visitors from another planet who use the earth for observation. Their society is more advanced than that of earth, though they had no anticipation of the highly un...

NOW A MAJOR FILM STARRING DAME MAGGIE SMITH'The first book that ever made me laugh out loud' Adam Kay'Utter genius' Daily MailIn 1974, the homeless Miss Shepherd moved her broken down van into Alan Bennett's garden. Deeply eccentric and stubborn to her bones, Miss Shepherd was not an easy tenant. And Bennett, despite inviting her in the first place, was a reluctant landlord. And yet she lived there for fifte...

**Now celebrating the 42nd anniversary of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, soon to be a Hulu original series!“A madcap adventure . . . Adams’s writing teeters on the fringe of inspired lunacy.”—United Press International**Back on Earth with nothing more to show for his long, strange trip through time and space than a ratty towel and a plastic shopping bag, Arthur Dent is ready to believe that the past eight years were all just a figment of his stressed-out ima...

When she fell pregnant in London in 1938, Jean knew that she couldn't keep her baby. She was unmarried - her sweetheart having departed to set up a home for them both in South Africa - and living alone with no money or family close by.Afraid and desperate, she implored the panel of the Foundling Hospital, the institution set up by philanthropist Thomas Coram in 1739, to give her child the care that she could not. Allowed to nurse her newborn son for nine weeks, Jean was heartbroken...

The first volume of Clive James's autobiography.'I was born in 1939. The other big event of that year was the outbreak of the Second World War, but for the moment, that did not affect me.'In the first instalment of Clive James's memoirs, we meet the young Clive, dressed in short trousers, and wrestling with the demands of school, various relatives and the occasional snake, in the suburbs of post-war Sydney. His adventures are hilarious, his recounting of them even more so, ...

**‘A giant among fictional detectives’ – The TimesThe Way Through the Woods is the tenth novel in Colin Dexter's Oxford-set detective series.**Quietly, rather movingly, Strange was making his plea: 'Christ knows why, Lewis, but Morse will always put himself out for you.' As he put the phone down, Lewis knew that Strange had been right . . . in the case of the Swedish Maiden, the pair of them were in business again . . .They called her the ...

He thought he knew himself, his strength, weaknesses and limitations.A frightening encounter with two muggers, however, changed everything.He had knowledge which he had no conscious memory of learning.He had faculties which he had never known he possessed.He had memories beyond those of normal life. A life in which he had a different name.He could not remember everything but he knew some dreadful alien creatures were hunting him. With his wakening me...

The death of a young artist leaves Gently desperately piecing together the portrait of a murderer.When artist Shirley Johnson is murdered and her body dumped outside a provincial police headquarters, Gently is despatched from London to Northshire to take over the investigation. The prime suspect appears to be the woman's husband, a former bomber pilot with a guilty secret, but the other members of the woman's art group also have strong views about her and her controversial final pa...

Grey Area, like all of Will Self's fiction, is funny, bizarre and disturbing. From a London where every waiter is an aspiring writer to a supply teacher killed by the colossal philistinism of his pupils, this is a truly inimitable showcase of short stories.

It’s 1924, and Bandy is making a solo flight across the Atlantic in the Gander, a seaplane of his own design. Not for fame though – he’s fleeing from arrest for train robbery, from his job as Minister of Defence, and from his would-be assassin and friend George Garanine. From Iceland, to Iraq, to St Pancreas Hospital in London, Bandy’s career has never been more complicated, or his luck more of a roller coaster. When he finds new employment as Deputy Supreme Being of a mercenary air force,...

Thrust into the seedy underworld of hack reporters and Soho drinking dens, young Richard Hermes is skidding down a cocaine slope of self-destruction in pursuit of the impossibly beautiful socialite-cum-columnist Ursula Bentley. But between Richard and his object of desire stands his omnipresent nemesis, the lubricious Bell, doyen of late night radio shows, provider of drugs and gossip, and ringmaster of the Sealink Club.Erudite and witty as ever, this hilarious novella is vintage S...