Related to: 'The Mitford Girls'

Five siblings: two celebrated (novelist Henry and the philosopher William James); two brothers overshadowed by them; and one dazzling sister, Alice. Beginning with the peculiar courtship of Henry James Sr and Mary Walsh in the late 1830s and ending with the death of Henry James Jr in 1916, HOUSE OF WITS tells the story of the James family's driven and anguished quest through some of the most glittering and varied scenes of the nineteenth century. Restless and striving, the Jameses were always searching for a better house or palazzo, a better school for the children, a more exciting metropolis to live in, a snobbier club to join, a bigger and brainier magnum opus to write. Never satisfied with their conquests, they shifted from New York to grand imperial Victorian London, jaunting to German spas and Italian ruins, before they at last settled in fiercely academic Boston, a city that matched their ambitious intellectual aims and afterward launched the younger Jameses towards careers, marriages and never-satisfied international house-hunts of their own.With a narrative that calls to mind the spirit of a Henry James novel, but with an even stranger cast of characters, HOUSE OF WITS dazzlingly recreates the interactions in the lives of an astounding family.

The archetype of the stern, silent Englishman dedicated to his duty, the Duke of Wellington had all the subtlety and variety of genius. WELLINGTON uncovers the sensitive child of Irish aristocrats pushed into the army, making his name in India before returning to lead the Allied Armies to victory against Napoleon in the Peninsular War and at Waterloo. Swapping battlegrounds for political minefields, Wellington emerges as a conservative Tory Prime Minister of a country demanding every variety of reform. Many strands gradually come together in his character, to make at last the ideal he had always held out for himself; 'the retained servant of king and people'. WELLINGTON triumphantly succeeds in revealing an unforgettable, appealing and very human character. Magisterial, vivid, exhaustively researched, sympathetic yet balanced, rich in personal details but scholarly too. Elizabeth Longford's classic biography was greeted with a storm of acclaim.

WEST WITH THE NIGHT appeared on 13 bestseller lists on first publication in 1942. It tells the spellbinding story of Beryl Markham -- aviator, racehorse trainer, fascinating beauty -and her life in the Kenya of the 1920s and 30s.Markham was taken to Kenya at the age of four. As an adult she was befriended by Denys Finch-Hatton, the big-game hunter of OUT OF AFRICA fame, who took her flying in his airplane. Thrilled by the experience, Markham went on to become the first woman in Kenya to receive a commercial pilot's license.In 1936 she determined to fly solo across the Atlantic -- without stopping. When Charles Lindbergh did the same, he had the wind behind him. Markham, by contrast, had a strong headwind against her and a plane that only flew up to 163 mph. On 4 September, she took off ... Several days later, she crash-landed in Nova Scotia and became an instant celebrity.

'An epic tale' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'Fascinating' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'Anyone with curiosity will find a reason to read Origins Reconsidered: it is a superb account of the state of knowledge concerning the evolution of our species ...Richard Leakey sees the wood and not just the trees' NEW SCIENTIST

Rulke the Great Betrayer is free at last to use the deadly construct he has spent a thousand years perfecting. To succeed he needs just one thing - Karan's unique sensitive talent.Karan and her lover Llian are lost in the Nightland, trapped in an alien palace that is collapsing about them. Only Rulke can open the gate and send them home to Santhenar, but Karan is terrified he will corrupt Llian.Yggur and Mendark, sworn enemies, struggle to tame the power of the rift. They must seal the gate before Rulke brings forth his construct. If they fail he will ravage the world. And if they succeed, Karan and Llian will be trapped in the Nightland for eternity ...

On Sunday mornings Jim White has the following choice: visit the supermarket, buy trellising at B'n'Q, or stand on the sidelines of a muddy municipal football pitch, his trouser cuffs wetter than a weekend in Llandudno, shoulder-to-shoulder with a motley crew of mums, dads, step-parents and same-sex life partners all screaming at their beleaguered offspring. You'll find Jim in the same place every week, failing to organise a bunch of lads into something resembling a team while on the far side of the park his opposite number, a wannabe Mourinho in brashly monogrammed tracksuit, struts the sidelines, shouting - always shouting. This is the hilarious story of Jim White's time as manager of his son's football team: the highs, the lows, and the dog turd in the centre circle. At this level, winning spirit is not so much about passion, pride and belief as praying that your star centre forward has remembered his boots. Most importantly, it's about the enduring relationship between fathers, sons and football. This is the story no one who has ever watched his or her child play sport will want to miss.

This classic account of the great Irish rebellion of 1798 remains the only full-scale history of that tragic event. As relevant today as it was when first published in 1969, THE YEAR OF LIBERTY is now reissued with the addition of a chronology and a glossary of terms. In May 1798 a hundred thousand peasants rose against the British government in Ireland. By the time the revolt had been put down four months later, thirty thousand dead were literally rotting in heaps in a smoking and desolate countryside. Yet it was not a schoolroom story of the heroic oppressed rising against the brutal oppressor, but the result of a complex, tragic, often absurd and sometimes heroic interplay between different groups of people. A tough and arrogant oligarchy of country gentlemen, mainly Protestant and mainly British in origin, lived off a Catholic peasantry. Meanwhile, idealistic merchants and hot-headed young lawyers dreamed and plotted for an Irish Republic on the French model. From a mass of sources including confidential government reports, contemporary newspapers, poems, broadsheets and letters, the author pieces together a story at once complex, tragic, absurd and heroic.