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Rome, 1944. Robert is a lonely American soldier looking for a girl. Lisa is cold and hungry, obliged to seek work at Mamma Pulcini's house on the Via Flaminia. Their lives come together in what should be a simple exchange, a temporary arrangement without love or complication. But in a city broken by war, its people defeated, nothing is simple. Based on Alfred Hayes'own experiences of wartime Italy, this spare, searing novel exposes the dark complexities of the relationship between men and women, victor and vanquished.

Asher’s career as a Hollywood screenwriter has come to a humiliating end; so has his latest marriage. Returning to New York, where he grew up, he takes a room at a hotel and wonders what, well into middle age as he is, he should do next. It’s not a question of money; it’s a question of purpose, maybe of pride. In the company of the arch young poet Michael, Asher revisits the streets and tenements of the Lower East Side where he spent his childhood, though little remains of the past. Michael introduces Asher to Aurora, perhaps his girlfriend, who, to Asher’s surprise, seems bent on pursuing him, too. Soon the older man and his edgy young companions are caught up in a slow, strange, almost ritualized dance of deceit and desire.

The End of Me, a successor to Hayes’s In Love and My Face for the World to See, can be seen as the final panel of a triptych in which Alfred Hayes anatomizes, with a cool precision and laconic lyricism that are all his own, the failure of modern love. The last scene is the starkest of all.

Richard of Bordeaux and Henry Bolingbroke were first cousins, born just three months apart. Their lives were from the beginning entwined. When they were still children, Richard was crowned King Richard II with Henry at his side, carrying the sword of state: a ten-year-old lord in the service of his ten-year-old king.

Yet, as the animals on their heraldic badges showed, they grew up to be opposites: Richard was the white hart, a thin-skinned narcissist, and Henry the eagle, a chivalric hero, a leader who inspired loyalty where Richard inspired only fear. Henry had all the qualities Richard lacked, all the qualities a sovereign needed, bar one: birth right. Increasingly threatened by his charismatic cousin, Richard became consumed by the need for total power, in a time of constant conflict, rebellions and reprisals. When he banished Henry into exile, the stage was set for a final confrontation, as the hart became the tyrant and the eagle his usurper.

Helen Castor tells this story of one of the strangest and most fateful relationships in English history. It is a story about power, and masculinity in crisis, and a nation brought to the brink of catastrophe. At its heart, it is the story of two men whose lives were played out in extraordinary parallel, to devastating effect.

Caleb Carr lived with cats ever since he was a young boy. He grew up in a turbulent household – where famous Beat poets, artists and addicts came and went – and his steadiest companions were pets. Since then he had many feline companions, with relationships that have outlasted most of his human ones. But only after building a three-story home in rural, upstate New York did he encounter someone extraordinary: Masha, a Siberian Forest cat who had been abandoned as a kitten and was languishing in a shelter. She had hissed and fought off all previous carers and potential adopters, but somehow, she chose him.

For the seventeen years that followed, Caleb and Masha were inseparable. Masha ruled the house and the dangerous wilderness surrounding it. When she was hurt, only Caleb could help her. When he suffered long-standing physical ailments, Masha knew what to do. Caleb learned to decode much of Masha’s inner life but their bond went far beyond owner and pet. Inspiring, heart-breaking and life-affirming, this is a love story like no other.

Twenty-one-year-old Brat Farrar is an orphan, alone in the world without friends or family. So when he is offered the unexpected chance to impersonate Patrick Ashby, the long-lost heir to a vast fortune on a country estate, he agrees. Brat is the spitting image of Patrick, who disappeared years ago. At first it seems Brat can pull off this incredible deception, until he starts to realise that he is in far greater peril than he ever imagined.

Can you remember the first time you fell in love with a book?

The stories we read as children matter. The best ones are indelible in our memories; reaching far beyond our childhoods, they are a window into our deepest hopes, joys and anxieties. They reveal our past – collective and individual, remembered and imagined – and invite us to dream up different futures.

In a pioneering history of the children’s literary canon, The Haunted Wood reveals the magic of childhood reading, from the ancient tales of Aesop, through the Victorian and Edwardian golden age to new classics. Excavating the complex lives of our most beloved writers, Sam Leith offers a humane portrait of a genre and celebrates the power of books to inspire and console entire generations.

Henry V reigned over England for only nine years and four months, and died at the age of just 35, but he looms over the landscape of the late Middle Ages and beyond.

The victor of Agincourt was a model king for his successors. Shakespeare's version of Henry V saw his youthful folly redirected to sober statesmanship, and in the dark days of World War II, Henry's victories in France were recounted in British propaganda. Churchill called Henry 'a gleam of splendour in the dark, troubled story of medieval England', while for one modern medievalist, Henry was, quite simply, 'the greatest man who ever ruled England'.
Dan Jones's life of Henry V provides unprecedented insight into the critical first 26 years of his life before he became king. Both a standalone biography and a completion of Dan's sequence of English medieval histories that began with The Plantagenets and The Hollow Crown, Henry V is a thrilling and unmissable life of England's greatest king from our best-selling medieval historian.

Lady Jane Grey, the nine-day queen is considered to be one of the most tragic characters in English history. In July 1553 when King Edward VI died at the age of just 15 years old, the Tudor dynasty fell into chaos. The king had no legitimate male heirs and was determined his half-sisters Mary and Elizabeth would not inherit his throne, despite his father Henry VIII stating in his will that they should. We are led to believe that on Edward's instructions his cousin Lady Jane Grey was to be proclaimed queen. But who was she? Was she the innocent young girl that our history books tell us she was, or a religious fanatic with the aim of keeping Mary off the throne and England Protestant? Or was she nothing but a pawn to men in the game of power and politics, abused by her parents to marry against her will all for a crown she did not want? This book looks into her life from her early years in relative seclusion at the family home at Bradgate through to her tragic end on the scaffold at the Tower of London, executed on the orders of her cousin Queen Mary. What was her place within the Tudor royal family, was she ever entitled to claim the throne of England, and do we even recognise her as a true queen today?

For centuries, Hampton Court has been a place of power, scandal and intrigue: a stage for events that shaped the nation. The Palace raises the curtain on 500 years of British history with royals, politicians, criminals, and geniuses all playing their parts.

Hampton Court has been an arc of monarchy, revolution, religious fundamentalism, sexual scandals, and military coups. In this rich and vivid history, Gareth Russell moves through the rooms and the decades, each time focusing on a different person who called Hampton Court their home.

Beginning with the Tudors, Russell takes the reader from the kitchens of Henry VII and the dreams of Anne Boleyn to Elizabeth I’s brush with death and the staging of Shakespeare’s plays. To the commissioning of the King James Bible, the republican victories of Oliver Cromwell, the many mistresses of Charles II and their laxative-laced attempts to embarrass one another. The gossip and feuds of Georgian aristocrats lead into the era of the Windsors when Hampton Court becomes the place to host Elizabeth II’s coronation ball and hide the last Tsar’s sister.

Fascinating and engaging, The Palace is as atmospheric as it is gossipy and through the many sovereigns and servants that lived and worked in its halls reveals the personal tragedy and political importance of this extraordinary place.

The New York stories, most of which take place around the year 2000, consider the fateful consequences that can spring from brief encounters and the delicate mechanics of compromise that operate at the heart of modern marriages.

In the novella, ‘Eve in Hollywood’, Towles returns to one of the characters at the heart of his debut novel Rules of Civility: the indomitable Evelyn Ross, who leaves New York City in September 1938 with the intention of returning home to Indiana. But as her train pulls into Chicago, where her parents are waiting, she instead extends her ticket to Los Angeles. Told from multiple points of view, ‘Eve in Hollywood’ describes how Towles’ heroine crafts a new future for herself and others in a noirish tale that takes us through the movie sets, bungalows and dive bars of Los Angeles.

The life of Sy Baumgartner – noted author, and soon-to-be retired philosophy professor – has been defined by his deep, abiding love for his wife, Anna. Now Anna is gone, and Baumgartner is embarking on his seventies whilst trying to live with her absence. But Anna’s voice is everywhere still, in every spiral of memory and reminiscence, in each recalled episode of the passionate forty years they shared.

For the very first time, Judi opens up about every Shakespearean role she has played throughout her seven-decade career, from Lady Macbeth and Titania to Ophelia and Cleopatra.

Here she reveals her behind the scenes secrets; inviting us to share in her triumphs, disasters, and backstage shenanigans, all brightened by her mischievous sense of humour and striking honesty.

This biography sets out to reveal the true identity of the novelist Thomas Mann. His bisexuality, obsession with preserving appearances and the deep guilt which plagued him for much of his life is exposed. These revelations are drawn from Mann's diaries and interviews with his children.

Har hatt stor glede av å lese tidligere bøker av Lena Anderesson, men denne satiren over etterforskningen av Palmemordet synes jeg var direkte kjedelig. La den derfor fra meg etter å ha lest halve.

Veldig godt skrevet. Liker strukturen på boka. Kunstig intelligens er komplekst og vanskelig å forstå, men jeg klarte å følge resonnementene sånn noenlunde. Skal lese den igjen om en stund. Det eneste jeg savner er et stikkordregister. Det hadde vært til stor hjelp for meg, siden jeg ikke leste den i ett og dermed ikke alltid hadde present definisjonene av de mest sentrale begrepene.