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Michael Palin embarked on filming Around the World in 80 Days with some trepidation – it did not seem like a good time to step away from the career he had spent over two decades cultivating. Travelling to Work reveals his doubts and struggles as he worked on a novel, continued to act, and failed to resist the lure of filming Pole to Pole and Full Circle.

Thomas De Quincey's powerful autobiographical study describes his addiction to opium and its psychological effects: childhood experience is turned into dreams that are at first euphoric, but become horrific as his dependence on the drug deepens. Published in 1822, the book brought De Quincey literary fame and became an important influence on later writers.

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The successful children’s author Anthony McGowan describes his misadventures in everyday life, as he seeks a suitable London coffee shop or museum in which to write in comfort. The resulting memoir resembles a more geeky, modern version of Pepys.

Martin Bell has seen war from both sides, first as a soldier and then as a journalist, reporting from some of the worst conflicts of recent decades. In this personal account he describes his experiences in Vietnam, Bosnia and Northern Ireland, and reflects on the way that journalism has changed. In the face of ‘embedded’ reporting, ‘infotainment’, social media and ‘post-truth’, he issues an impassioned call to put substance back into the news.

As the daughter of an American citizen, Mary Berg belonged to a tiny minority of those held in the Warsaw ghetto during the Second World War who were given some privileges. The diary she started on her fifteenth birthday is a compassionate account of the day-to-day suffering she witnessed there.

As Director of the National Portrait Gallery and the V&A, Sir Roy Strong was a leading figure in Britain’s cultural life. His second volume of diaries begins as he leaves the public stage to devote himself to writing and his love of gardening. With a rich and diverse cast of characters including Tony Blair, Judi Dench, Elton John, Laurence Olivier, Harold Pinter, Margaret Thatcher and the Queen, it casts a wryly humorous eye over the turn of the millennium.

Co-star of one of the worst movies of all time, Greg Sestero tells the story of how oddball writer-director-actor, Tommy Wiseau made his turkey, The Room, in 2004 and how it has since become a cult classic.

In this wryly self-deprecating memoir, the former punk musician and TV director turns the spotlight on her family, probing her dysfunctional relationships with parents and siblings, and the secrets and rivalries that made her a lifelong rebel.

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More interested in basketball than cricket when growing up in Antigua, Curtly Ambrose quickly rose through the ranks when he started to take the game seriously, establishing himself as the world’s leading fast bowler in the 1990s. His biography charts his meteoric rise and achievements in international cricket and reveals his opinions on the game, on his teammates and on Caribbean and sporting politics.

Josephine Reynolds was 12 when her family home in west Wales burned down. In 1981, aged 17, she joined the fire service. This memoir tells how she coped in this all-male environment, while dealing with forest fires, escaped zoo animals and unexploded bombs.

James Herriot’s classic tales of veterinary life in Yorkshire have recently inspired a new television adaptation. This second volume continues the stories of eccentric brothers Tristan and Siegfried, and Herriot’s early romantic encounters with Helen in the late 1930s.

Moeen Ali has been one of England’s most popular cricketers of recent years, with high points including wrapping up a 2017 test against South Africa with a hat-trick, and being named Player of the Series. This autobiography discusses his street cricket roots and his journey from county level to international scene, while also giving an extended insight into his family background and personal faith.

Spanning four decades, from an interview with Rock (US) magazine in 1973, less than a month after the release of Springsteen’s first album, to his keynote speech at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Music Festival in 2012, this is The Boss speaking to journalists or directly to his audience. Slightly off-mint.

The celebrated performance poet recalls the racism he faced growing up in 1980s Birmingham, how music and poetry rescued him from a life of crime, and how his tribute to Nelson Mandela led to friendship with the man himself.

In his final book, Primo Levi turned once again to his time in Auschwitz, and the lessons to be drawn from it. He reflects on the necessity of bearing witness to the truth, on survivor guilt, his feelings towards the Germans and the futility of hatred, and delivers a sobering reminder that, with would-be dictators waiting in the wings, the unimaginable could happen again.

In a long career working for the BBC, ITN and Sky News, award-winning journalist Jeremy Thompson travelled the world to report on events including the Tiananmen Square massacre and the release of Nelson Mandela. His autobiography offers a glimpse behind the scenes in the newsroom and shares both poignant and amusing moments during assignments, from the Miners’ Strike to the election of Donald Trump.

Chris Adams played a handful of Tests and One Day Internationals for England in 1989 and 1990 but it was on the county scene where he distinguished himself: as a leading run-scorer and championship-winning captain of Sussex in the 2000s. This autobiography reflects on his experiences in domestic and international cricket and his thoughts about coaching and captaincy.

Much of Mikhail Bulgakov’s career was a struggle with Soviet censorship, and his greatest novel, The Master and Margarita, remained unpublished in his lifetime. These chronological extracts from his diaries and letters – their recipients included Stalin himself – run from 1921 to 1940, and record his initial success and subsequent fall from favour, including his interrogation by the secret police.

Drawing on his own youthful friendship with the novelist and hundreds of interviews with those who knew him, Andrew Turnbull recreates Fitzgerald’s itinerant childhood as his father sought work, his studies at Princeton, literary success, marriage to the troubled Zelda, and his struggle with alcoholism.

From the author of Bombsites and Lollipops, this is a memoir of the Swinging Sixties, recounting how Jacky grew up as a free-spirited, hedonistic girl in search of adventure and independence. The decade’s music, fashion and culture has become iconic, but this is a more personal look at a world of souped-up Minis, conmen, typewriters, bed-hopping, tragic romances, flat-sharing, Soviet spies and the smoke-filled pubs of Fleet Street. Slightly off-mint.

First published in 1946 Wladyslaw Szpilman’s account of his survival in the Warsaw Ghetto inspired the Oscar-winning film The Pianist. Reprinted here with diary extracts by the German officer who saved him, it offers a picture of the claustrophobia and terror of ghetto life.

First published in 1967, this book follows the GP John Sassall as he goes about his rounds in rural Gloucestershire. What emerges, in the words of John Berger and the photographs of Jean Mohr, is a portrait of a community, and of a remarkable man who combined breadth of vision with a deep appreciation of the minutiae of everyday life.

Alfred Rosenberg was the principal ideologue behind the Nazi Party, whose ideas formed the theoretical basis for the Third Reich and the Holocaust. This book chronicles his rise to power, his relations with other leading Nazis, and his trial and execution. Its sources include Rosenberg’s own diary, which disappeared after his trial at Nuremberg and was only rediscovered 75 years later.

The flamboyant director of the National Portrait Gallery and the V&A has been at the heart of Britain’s high society for half a century. Amusing and often acerbic, his diaries chronicle two decades of parties, meetings and tussles over funding, with a cast of characters including Margaret Thatcher, the Royal Family, David Hockney, Mick Jagger and Rudolph Nureyev. This new edition includes entries omitted when the diaries were first published.

Born to sharecroppers in Georgia, Martin Luther King, Sr. (1899–1984) was a prominent Baptist preacher. This memoir, first published in 1980, recounts his struggles against racism, and his fatherly pride and anxiety as his son became the leading light of the Civil Rights movement.

Since receiving a terminal diagnosis of leukaemia in 2010, Clive James has produced an extraordinary late harvest of poetry and prose. In this collection of essays, he looks back with characteristic wit, humour and perception on a lifetime’s reading, offering his unique insights into writers from Conrad, Hemingway and Larkin to VS Naipaul and WG Sebald. Woven throughout these literary ruminations, moreover, is a thoughtful and moving reflection on life and death.

‘Why is this lying bastard lying to me?’ With this question in mind, Britain’s most incisive interviewer has skewered politicians from John Major to Theresa May on national television. Now, in this long-awaited memoir, he reflects on a career that has taken him to many of the world’s trouble spots, from Beirut to Belfast. Funny and poignant, it is packed with revealing anecdotes about the great, the good and the rotters he has met.

Once the all-conquering bad boy of tennis, John McEnroe is increasingly better known for his insightful commentaries and opinions on the game. In this memoir he reflects on his playing years but also on his life since, developing new careers in broadcasting and art dealing, and bringing up a large family. Still competing in senior tournaments and recently coach to Milos Raonic, he also has plenty to say on the state of modern tennis.

First published in 1929, Robert Graves’s classic account of his experiences in the First World War recreates the horror of trench warfare and the shell shock that followed, while reflecting on the irony of his own German ancestry.

Challenges in Matt Lucas's childhood included losing his hair and his father going to prison before he was 11. This autobiography describes how his experiences shaped him and how he has built his career through hit shows such as Little Britain and Shooting Stars.

First published in 1948, this Second World War reportage relates the experiences of Anita Leslie, the daughter of a baronet and a distant cousin of Winston Churchill. Her account includes descriptions of working for the Mechanised Transport Corps, driving an ambulance for the Free French Forces, writing letters home from Hitler’s office in the Reich Chancellery, and marching in the Victory Parade in Berlin.

Wainwright’s Pictorial Guides made him a household name among fellwalkers. Here, he looks back in old age to his Blackburn boyhood, his work in local government and his discovery of the Lake District. Illustrated with his own drawings and photographs.

‘I’d like to get one thing straight. I am not old. I know what old is, and I’m not it.’ This light-hearted guide to retirement discusses the amusing and exasperating points of ageing, from what to do with your spare time and coping with the changing attitudes and manners of younger generations to worrying about declining physical fitness and the perils of social media.

The case of Oklahoma death-row inmate Richard Glossip has caused an international outcry, since even those who prosecuted him for murder admit he killed no one. The British reporter who became his close friend tells the story of Glossip’s campaign against three scheduled executions. Slightly off-mint.

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This classic of American nature writing records the author’s time as a ranger in the canyons of Utah. A rallying-cry for the protection of wilderness, it describes the stark beauty of the landscape: its terracotta earth, arching rock formations, wild horses and Pueblo Indian petroglyphs. First published half a century ago, this new edition includes an introduction by the writer and wildlife campaigner Robert Macfarlane.

In 2013 Benedict XVI became the only Pope to resign from office in modern times. In these conversations with the religious journalist Peter Seewald, he discusses the reasons for his resignation and his admiration for his successor, speaking frankly about the controversies that have dogged the Church, including ‘Vatileaks’ and the child abuse scandal, and revealing his thoughts about his life, his philosophy, his mistakes, and the future of Christianity.

In 1939 Polish Army lieutenant Slavomir Rawicz was sentenced to 25 years forced labour in a Siberian prison camp. In this controversial story of endurance, Rawicz describes his imprisonment and alleged escape to India across the Himalayas and Gobi Desert.

Rudolf Hoess was Commandant of Auschwitz from its construction in 1940 until late 1943, and supervised the murder of over three million Jews as part of the Nazis’ ‘final solution’. He was an expert in the administration of concentration camps and mass exterminations. Hoess wrote this autobiography in 1947 while in prison in Poland. He was tried, sentenced and hanged later that year. The autobiography and other documents are translated here by Constantine Fitzgibbon, with an introduction by Primo Levi.

Using his mother’s diary and letters, the novelist Christopher Isherwood relates the story of his parents’ marriage: how Kathleen, the lively daughter of a successful wine merchant, fell in love with Frank, the shy, artistic son of a country squire. This family history evokes an Edwardian world of amateur music-making, rising hemlines and social change – a world brought to an end by the Great War during which Frank Isherwood was killed.

The author of The Long View and the much-loved Cazalet Chronicles, Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923–2014) lived, worked and loved in literary circles. Her candid autobiography describes her marriages – to Peter Scott and Kingsley Amis – love affairs with Arthur Koestler and Laurie Lee (among others), other much-valued friendships and her years alone after leaving Amis. Slightly off-mint.

While a junior reporter, Michael Parkinson played cricket for Barnsley and counted Geoffrey Boycott and Dickie Bird amongst his team mates. Detailing his rise from local journalist to national broadcaster, this memoir relates his experiences in the television industry over a 40-year period, including the infamous TV-am launch, and his thoughts about the many famous and influential people he interviewed on his long-running chat show and Desert Island Discs.

William Waldegrave was a key figure in Margaret Thatcher’s government. His elegantly written memoir recalls the quintessentially English upbringing that would shape his life and career. With unusual frankness and dark humour, Waldegrave charts the rise and fall of Mrs Thatcher, offering a rare glimpse of the narcotic effect of politics, and a unique insight into one of the most tumultuous eras of modern British history.

On 10 February 1962, on Glienicke Bridge between East Germany and West Berlin, the American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers was exchanged for Rudolf Abel, Soviet head of espionage in the USA. James Donovan was the American lawyer who defended Abel in court and negotiated his release to the USSR and the return of Powers. First published in 1964, this is the first-hand, inside story of a tense episode at the height of the Cold War. Felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge and slightly off-mint.

Tony Benn (1925–2014) was not only a prominent, charismatic and principled politician, but also the pre-eminent diarist of his generation. This volume brings together a selection of his journalism, speeches and diary entries to highlight key moments in his career and to illustrate the range of issues on which he campaigned, such as workers' rights and the abolition of the death penalty, as well as his interest in the connections between Christianity and socialism.

As a revolutionary players' union rep, innovative manager and pioneering presenter and pundit, Jimmy Hill had a profound effect on football. This new edition of his autobiography, first published in 1998, contains an additional chapter reflecting on his remarkable career.

Escaping the British weather to Corfu, the Durrell family find themselves sharing a ramshackle villa with young Gerald’s menagerie of scorpions, geckoes, bats and butterflies in this captivating account of human and animal eccentricities.

From joining the ‘train boys’ en route to boarding school, aged eight, to ‘Cambridge Scholar Elect’ signing up for temporary teaching work, aged twenty, Stephen Fry narrates his progress through adolescent misery and love affairs, expulsion, prison and criminal conviction. Disarmingly honest and full of engrossing digressions, Fry’s gay coming-of-age autobiography has been described as ‘a pleasure to read, mixing the outrageous acts with sensible opinions in bewildering confusion’ (Financial Times). Felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge.

Diana Athill had read Waguih Ghali’s novel, Beer in the Snooker Club, long before she met and fell in love with him. Love turned to friendship, and Ghali, or ‘Didi’, carried on living in her flat, where he ultimately took his own life. Published 13 years later, this is Athill’s honest account of the three years they spent together.

The writer and broadcaster Kenneth Allsop was one of Britain’s first television celebrities, but while he enjoyed the high life of fast cars and smart parties, he was also an accomplished naturalist and passionate conservationist. Drawing on his unpublished diaries and papers, this biography charts his last years, his struggles with constant pain after a form of tuberculosis, and his despair at the environmental challenges facing the world.

In this candid and moving memoir, one of America’s most acclaimed novelists recounts her tough rural upbringing in upstate New York. Through the eyes of her younger self, the book evokes the emotions of childhood and adolescence, from early friendships to her first encounters with death. Recalling her burgeoning desire to tell stories about the world and the people she meets, Oates reveals how those experiences coloured her later writing.

Mikey Walsh was born into a family of Romany gypsies and brought up, with no formal education, in the isolated and fiercely loyal culture of the traditional gypsy community. This acclaimed autobiography tells the story of his childhood with a cruel and abusive father and how coming out as gay forced him to abandon his roots, educate himself and seek a new life.

Much loved as the Spanish waiter Manuel in Fawlty Towers, Andrew Sachs (1930-2016) was born in Berlin rather than Barcelona and fled to England in 1938 after his father was arrested by the Gestapo. In this compelling and often hilarious memoir he tells of his early years in showbiz, the success of the infamous Torquay hotel, and his acting career beyond Fawlty, which included Shakespeare, Dustin Hoffman's Quartet, a stint as Father Brown, and Snowy in BBC Radio 5's Tintin.

Born in a Gypsy wagon in 1938, Rosemary Penfold grew up amid the fields of Somerset. In this memoir, she recounts the love and losses, hopes and struggles, traditions and prejudices of a close-knit community faced with a rapidly changing world. This moving testament to a disappearing way of life took her to the finals of Alan Titchmarsh’s People’s Author competition.

Chef, television presenter and award-winning businesswoman Prue Leith (b.1940) is one of Britain’s foremost culinary authorities and has helped to revolutionize the country’s eating habits. In this candid and witty autobiography she describes her childhood in apartheid South Africa, her arrival in London in the 1960s and her rapid ascent to restaurant owner, Daily Mail columnist and cookery book author.

Edward Windsor, the former king, and Wallis Simpson were already an embarrassment to the establishment, and their connections to leading Nazis during the 1930s were too damaging to the crown to be allowed to surface after the war. This investigative report reveals their links to Nazi sympathizers and examines Hitler's plan to install Edward as a puppet king. The title refers to flowers apparently sent by German diplomat von Ribbentrop to Simpson to commemorate their love affair.

Born in 1917, Dame Vera Lynn was 92 when she realized that her great age gave a better perspective (she wrote her first autobiography in her fifties) and she had to 'get everything down on paper in a final account'. Here then is the life of 'an ordinary girl from an ordinary family with a voice that you could recognize' – but also an embodiment of British spirit during the Second World War.

Giving up her job as a junior reporter in favour of becoming secretary to pathologist Keith Simpson, Molly Lefebure spent the war years attending autopsies and crime scenes and consorting with policemen and criminal lawyers. Against the backdrop of the London blitz, this memoir, dramatized in the 2013 ITV drama of the same title, recounts the stories of dozens of mysteries and crimes unravelled by the work of forensic pathology.

Aristocrat, socialite, actress and wife of Duff Cooper, Churchill's wartime Minister for Information, later Ambassador to France and Viscount Norwich, Diana Cooper was also an inveterate letter-writer. Gathered here, her missives to her only son John Julius Norwich during the Second World War and its aftermath provide a vivid picture of the age and its personalities, and a woman of great intelligence, happiest on her country smallholding but able to cope with the demands on a politician's wife.

Joanna Lumley is not only a star of stage and screen but a national treasure. Luckily her magpie instincts have preserved a hoard of memorabilia that make this illustrated memoir a visual feast, with photos from her Indian childhood to the present. There are souvenirs of her early modelling career, her celebrated roles in The New Avengers, The Pink Panther and Absolutely Fabulous and, of course, the causes about which she feels passionate. Slightly off-mint.

One of the most charismatic and outspoken politicians of the past 50 years, Ken Livingstone has never fought shy of controversy. In this frank and engaging memoir, he recalls his tough South London childhood, his formative political experiences, the demise of the GLC, and his comeback as Mayor of London. It offers an eye-opening insight into his battles with Thatcher and Blair, the committee-room intrigues of civic politics, and the seismic shift in social attitudes in recent decades.Slightly off-mint.

In the late 19th century, a young Welsh tearaway boarded ship for America, where he lived as a hobo, jumping freight trains and living in doss-houses. After losing a leg in a railway accident, he returned to Britain, determined to make his living as a writer. His autobiography, reprinted here with a new introduction, became an instant classic. Its vivid picture of life on the road and understated account of his own adventures still make gripping reading today.

Kidnappers, murderers and conmen, pretenders to the throne and even an ex-Postmaster General (the infamous John Stonehouse)... Ian Graham presents a collection of impostors who were mostly up to no good, but some had good reason to pretend to be somebody else – warehouseman Marvin Hewitt stole a scientist's identity in order to teach physics, and ME Clifton James became Montgomery's double to fool Nazi intelligence officers.

In August 1939 a Surrey housewife began a war journal in which she recorded daily life on the home front. She tells of bombers overhead day and night, ration queues and the influx of evacuees. In 1947 she sent the diary to the Imperial War Museum with a letter describing herself as a housewife and a professional journalist; she was a naturally gifted writer whose diary gives a compelling account of wartime Britain. Slightly off-mint.

Spanning October 1932 to November 1934, this is the unexpurgated diary of Anaïs Nin in which she deals openly with her various sexual relationships and their complex psychological consequences. A remarkable record of erotic freedom, the Journal describes Nin's incestuous relationship (now disputed by scholars) with her father, the pianist Joachin Nin, affairs with the writer Antonin Artaud and two analysts, and serious infatuations with her cousins, one of them a girl.