Following on from the bestselling Lost London 1870–1945, this astonishing book presents some 280 photographs originally commissioned by the London County Council to record streets and neighbourhoods on the threshold of redevelopment. Enlarged and cropped, the photographs reveal the built environment and life within it in extraordinary detail. They are, as Dan Cruickshank writes in his foreword, 'photographs which record not just the appearance of the building but also, in some uncanny way, its atmosphere, its grand but crumbling soul'.

In this generously illustrated guide to the Dutch Golden Age of painting, genre works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Steen and many others are fêted for their power to transform the everyday – artisanship, domesticity, intellectual curiosity – into the extraordinary. Covering themes of patronage, trade, meaning and motif, the book shows how a rich array of subject matter, including still life, landscape and domestic interiors, reflects the blossoming of Dutch society in a time of economic prosperity and artistic freedom.

Following the Norman Conquest, the Anglo-Welsh border region of the Marcher lords became a classic frontier society, its difference from the rest of England marked by language and ethnicity and by the often violent military nature of its local rulers. This study traces the history of the main lordships, from pre-1066 Norman involvement in the region to the role of the Mortimers of Ludlow in late medieval politics and the beginnings of the Tudor dynasty.

The wallpaper and fabric designs of William Morris (1834–1896), created in the 19th century, have remained popular into the 21st. This lavishly illustrated volume reveals the breadth of his achievement beyond designing pattern – as poet, painter, typographer, manufacturer and socialist. The authors first trace Morris’s life, then survey the development of his work, from the botanical designs of the 1860s to The Adoration of the Magi (1890), the tapestry made in collaboration with Edward Burne-Jones and John Henry Dearle.

‘Sir, It has all been a terrible mistake. We thought we were voting to leave Eurovision.’ In a year dominated by the EU Referendum, the Telegraph’s letter-writers were in full spate – and not just on the momentous vote. Here, in sections such a ‘The Use and Abuse of Language’, ‘Box Gogglers’ and ‘Royal Blushes’ are readers’ opinions – frankly stated – on everything from family life to ‘Benito Trump’.

Derek Trotter moved into Nelson Mandela House in Peckham with his family in 1960 and the BBC began broadcasting his adventures with his brother Rodney in 1981, attracting record audiences over the next two decades. This celebration of the sitcom contains stills and behind-the-scenes photographs from the series, profiles of the many supporting characters, spoof correspondence and ephemera and excerpts from John Sullivan's original scripts. Off-mint.

From historical milestones, such as the Barton Aqueduct of 1761, to modern engineering marvels, such as the Falkirk Wheel, the canal network has much of interest to enhance the pleasures of boating through picturesque countryside. This exploration of Britain's waterways includes maps, facts and figures, historical notes on the navigations, hundreds of contemporary photographs and detailed information on places of interest along each route.

The history and culture of Europe have been shaped by monasticism, which has left a rich legacy of religious art and architecture. This magnificent volume charts the history of monasticism from late antiquity through its peak in the Middle Ages to the present day. Lavishly illustrated with colour photographs, paintings and illuminated manuscripts, the book describes the traditions, regulations and daily life of the different orders, profiles famous abbots and abbesses, and celebrates the continuing appeal of the contemplative life.

Throughout the First World War, in the village of Vignacourt near the Somme battlefields, a French couple dedicated themselves to photographing soldiers on leave from the front. But their collection languished forgotten in boxes in an attic until it was recently discovered by researchers, Coulthart among them. This handsome volume presents the most interesting of the 4,000 high-quality glass negatives and identifies the British and Commonwealth troops depicted, many of whom were gathering for the Battle of the Somme.

Covering winners, losers, has-beens and hopefuls in a great range of races and championships, from Grand Prix to stock car racing, this is the definitive reference to the lives and achievements of some 2,500 international racing drivers. Arranged alphabetically, from Rauno Aaltonen (a rare cross-over from rallying to racing) to the 2005 Formula Atlantic winner, Charles Zwolsman Jr, the Encyclopaedia lists each driver’s principal race wins and gives a concise account of his or her life and career. Slipcased.

From Amy Adams to Catherine Zeta-Jones, this book profiles over 330 of the most famous names in cinema. Including idols of the silent era as well as today's biggest box-office draws, each biography provides an appraisal of the actor's career, including television and directorial credits, with film stills and a colour-coded timeline charting key performances and awards. The alphabetical listings are interspersed with feature articles on significant themes and picture spreads celebrating some of the best-known stars.

Fans will know that Pooh is a bear of very small brain, Piglet is kind, Eeyore is gloomy and Tigger is bouncy. Now young readers can get to know their favourite characters even better in these colourful picture books. Each title includes a story, a rhyme and interesting facts about four of AA Milne’s most memorable creations. Age 3+

A bestseller and former BBC Countryfile Book of the Year, this is the ultimate guide to what the land, the sun, moon and stars, plants and animals, sky and clouds can reveal – when you know what to look for. Drawing on two decades of outdoor experience, Tristan Gooley explains how to focus our powers of deduction and prediction on the natural world and provides over 850 clues and signs to get us started.

From the remains of primitive boats of uncertain date to 18th-century trading ships and vessels of the Second World War, there are hundreds of wrecks around England's coast bearing testament to the importance of shipping in the nation's history. This illustrated study assesses the factors that have led to maritime disasters over the centuries and provides an insight into naval archaeology and the role of English Heritage in the protection of historic wreck sites.

Two decades before he abdicated the throne of England for the love of Mrs Simpson, Prince Edward was, in the words of Andrew Rose, 'embroiled – along with a "Princess" and an Egyptian multi-millionaire – in a scandal which has been superbly airbrushed from history'. In this book Rose tells the full, previously hidden story of Edward's liaison with Marguerite Alibert in Paris during the First World War, and her subsequent trial for the murder of her Egyptian husband in the Savoy Hotel in London.

Since the Renaissance, the characters of the Commedia dell'Arte - Harlequin, Columbine, Scaramouche and the rest - have inspired plays, paintings, engravings and porcelain. Based on some of the world's most important collections, including Toronto's Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, this engaging, magnificently illustrated survey showcases 150 exquisite figures from leading manufacturers including the celebrated works at Meissen. It explains the hidden meaning of these mysterious characters, and how a bawdy form of street theatre became an elegant courtly entertainment.

Graham Greene called him ‘the greatest novelist of my generation’; Hilaire Belloc thought he was possessed by the devil. Written with the family’s support and drawing on unpublished letters, diaries and memoirs, the compelling new biography reassesses the life and career of the author of Brideshead Revisited: his troubled relationship with his father, his early homosexual affairs, his conversion to Catholicism, his wartime service, his happy second marriage, his drug-induced madness, and his sharp tongue and devastating wit.

The first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, was published in America in 1926, offering adventures that involved imagined but plausible technology. By the 1940s writers such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke were proposing fascinating futures that would inspire iconic films in the 1950s and 1960s. This highly illustrated celebration of the genre charts its milestones from the novels of Jules Verne and HG Wells to Star Wars through pulp fiction, comic books, novels and movies.

Brilliant classical scholar Alfred Dillwyn Knox was recruited by the Admiralty as a codebreaker in 1915 and by the outbreak of the Second World War was a leading cryptographer for the Government Code and Cypher School, breaking the Abwehr Enigma at Bletchley Park in 1941. This biography of the eccentric genius is written by one of 'Dilly's girls' - his codebreaking assistants at Bletchley - and describes his life and work, including detailed explanations of his decryption methods.

Alfred Edmeades Bestall (1892–1986) is best known as the illustrator of Rupert Bear's adventures from 1935 to 1965. This biography, written by his god-daughter, who inherited his early work, diaries and journals, reveals the true breadth of Bestall's work and reproduces artworks for Tatler and other magazines, book illustrations and watercolours as well as Rupert pictures. The second half of the book comprises Bestall's sketchbooks and journals from Wales, Egypt, the Middle East and Europe. Foreword by Sir Paul McCartney. Off-mint.

Growing up in the Kremlin, Svetlana Stalin knew nothing of her father’s tyranny, but could not escape tragedy: her mother’s suicide, the loss of two brothers, and the exile of her lover to Siberia. With access to FBI, CIA and Russian state archives, this biography charts her growing awareness of Stalin’s crimes, her defection to the West, her struggle to escape his terrible legacy – and her horrified realization, with the rise of Putin, that ‘they haven’t changed a bit’. American cut pages with a felt-tip mark on the lower trimmed edge.

When it comes to punctuation, many experts leave it to the writer’s judgement – but what use is that if you’ve never been taught the difference between a colon and a semicolon, or where those pesky apostrophes go? This accessible, light-hearted guide clarifies the rules, shows how punctuation can help you get your meaning across clearly, and explains what you can get away with and what simply won’t do.

The British offensive at Passchendaele, also known as the Third Battle of Ypres, was launched at 3.30am on 31 July 1917; led by Sir Douglas Haig, this ‘big push’ was to achieve a breakthrough, but it became a four-month-long stalemate of constant shelling, torrential rain, mud and filth. Parker chronicles the operation, describes the conditions on the battlefield and the increasingly industrialized warfare of tanks, gas and mines that added to the carnage; and he questions the necessity of the sacrifice.

The Paris of the Impressionists was the fashion capital of the world. Featuring paintings by Degas, Manet, Monet and Morisot, this book follows in the footsteps of stylish Parisians – at home, in cafés, in the park and on holiday; and it uses vintage photographs and prints to explore the worlds of dressmaking, millinery and the department store, while providing fresh insight into some of the most popular paintings of the 19th century.

In one of the most significant archaeological discoveries of recent times, the grave of King Richard III was located in a Leicester car park in 2012. This book contains a diary of the dig and its aftermath by the screenwriter Philippa Langley, whose intuition and perseverance brought the project to fruition despite numerous setbacks. Her account of that remarkable quest is interspersed with historical chapters on the life, reign, death and posthumous reputation of the last Plantagenet monarch.

Bernard Cornwell is renowned for his historical fiction, particularly the Sharpe series set in the Napoleonic Wars. In this book he combines those storytelling skills with a meticulously researched history of the days leading up to Waterloo and the battle itself. Cornwell's aim is to give an impression of what it was like to be on the field on 18 June 1815, and he agrees with Wellington's judgment: Waterloo – no matter how many accounts you read – 'is a cliffhanger'.

Discovered after the death of the distinguished American historian Page Smith (1917–1995), and published posthumously, this volume was intended as the final part of Smith's People's History of America. The narrative traces the Native American story from the first encounter with Europeans to the end of the Indian Wars at Wounded Knee in 1890, but rather than a comprehensive history, Smith aims to explore the nature of the interchange between white settlers and the indigenous peoples of North America.

In 1893, Alfred Monson, a scion of the aristocracy, was charged with the murder of Cecil Hambrough, a young army officer, on the Ardlamont estate in Scotland. The case gripped the nation, but few realized that the two expert witnesses, Joseph Bell and Henry Littlejohn, had been solving crimes together for 20 years. This book charts their adventures, which inspired Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Holmes, and probes the mystery that would challenge even their genius for detection.

Originally an Alpine perennial with medicinal uses, auricula flowers were so colourful and fragrant that people began cultivating the plant purely for pleasure. Easy to propagate and maintain, over the centuries increasing numbers of varieties were produced, 200 of which are listed here with many accompanying photographs. Including advice on exhibiting, dealing with pests and diseases and a fascinating history of the plant, this is a useful reference for casual readers and enthusiasts alike.

Howard Hodgkin's prints represent an extraordinary body of work, a parallel and very different achievement from his paintings. They have been internationally celebrated and passionately collected, yet this is the first comprehensive survey and catalogue raisonné of the prints. The book includes a major essay by Nan Rosenthal of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and an interview with Hodgkin, along with 83 colour and 126 duotone reproductions. Plus a chronology and bibliography.

Beginning with Shepton Mallet prison, which had been in use for 400 years when it closed in 2013, Michael Portillo investigates the stories hidden within the walls of twelve buildings that illuminate aspects of Britain’s modern history. Through structures including Brighton’s sewer system, Imber village in Wiltshire, a nuclear bunker in Cambridge and the New Victoria cinema in Bradford, he explores four themes: crime and emergency, life and death, defence, and ‘People’s Pleasure Domes’.

From the 1880s to around 1914, a group of young painters based in Glasgow challenged the traditional art of the Scottish Academy, favouring instead the naturalistic ideas of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, and en plein-air painting. The realism and freedom of their portraits, informal scenes and landscapes was to revolutionize Scottish art. This book introduces the Glasgow Boys – among them James Guthrie, John Lavery, Arthur Melville, George Henry and David Gauld – and presents over 85 reproductions of their work.

Klop ('Bedbug') Ustinov (1892–1962) was an MI5 secret agent tasked, not with killing, but with bemusing and beguiling his enemies into revealing their deepest, darkest secrets. Through the Russian revolution, two World Wars and the Cold War, Klop bluffed and tricked his way into the confidence of everyone from Soviet commissars to a Gestapo Gruppenführer. Journalist Peter Day tells the epic tale of an agent whose missions remained obscured by his socializing and womanizing.

Research Professor Dominic Lieven writes from the premise that ‘World War I was the source and origin of most of the catastrophes that subsequently afflicted twentieth-century Russia’. Drawing on unprecedented study of Russian and other foreign archives, this powerful investigation explores the mindset of those who made the decision to go to war, and sheds new light on the origins of a conflict that would determine the course of world history for a century. (Previously published as Towards the Flame.) Slightly off-mint and felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge.

Finding Woozles, meeting the Heffalump, solving the problem of Eeyore’s tail: Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends in the 100 Aker Wood set off on their adventures – some of them as dangerous as looking for the North Pole – in this collection of 17 stories from Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. The book is illustrated with EH Shepard’s original drawings in full colour and ends with ‘The End’ from Now We Are Six.

Partly thanks to their potentially bomb-resistant solidity, The Ritz, the Savoy, Claridges and the Dorchester became central to the cultural and political life of the country during the Second World War. This colourful history explores a remarkable period when cabinet ministers, military officials, exiled foreign dignitaries, journalists, spies, artists and chancers all used the hotels as meeting places, makeshift offices, temporary embassies and social centres.

Earth is a desert planet. Nearly half its land area is either cold or hot desert, but these areas are rarely seen by residents of the outside world. Documentary photographer Michael Martin has ridden his motorbike across the Sahara and Atacama deserts, and traversed the ice-fields of Greenland and Spitsbergen by dog sledge. This volume charts his travels through more than 400 photographs, gripping reportage, scientifically exact maps and environmental analysis from contributing experts.

While the First World War raged in Europe, the devastating ‘Spanish flu’ suddenly overwhelmed the world; in three successive waves it would kill around 100 million people. This history of the pandemic traces its origins and progress, using information from official documents and the personal accounts of those, such as David Lloyd George and Vera Brittain, who lived through it. The book also follows today’s scientists as they investigate the virus and draw lessons for our response to future pandemics.

Adventurer, seductress and spy, the Russian baroness Moura Budberg embarked on a passionate affair in 1918 with Robert Bruce Lockhart, a British agent plotting Lenin’s downfall. Based on previously unexamined letters, diaries and documents, and narrated with the pace of a thriller, this first-ever biography tells the incredible story of a woman whose lovers included Maxim Gorky and HG Wells, and who became embroiled in the web of scandal surrounding the Cambridge Five.

Beaten to the pole by Amundsen and expiring in the frozen wastes of Antarctica, Scott's ill-fated expedition of 1911–12 is chiefly known from the adventurer's diaries and the remarkable photographs of Herbert Ponting. Less well known, and until recently forgotten and unconsidered in the vault of a photo agency, are the pictures taken by Scott himself. This unique book reproduces all 109 of these images with comprehensive explanatory text and contextual material including maps and additional photographs by Ponting.

Odette Sansom, one of the best-known female agents of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), was recruited when she responded to a request for photographs of the French coast. The snaps she sent included notes that showed her knowledge of France, alerting the department to her potential as a spy. Drawing on recently declassified documents, memoirs and mission reports, this book profiles 38 women sent out by the French section of the SOE between 1942 and 1944, detailing their recruitment, training and active service.

Andrew Morton, author of Diana: Her True Story, turns his attention to Wallis Simpson, the twice-married divorcée who claimed the heart of Edward VIII, causing his abdication. Drawing on interviews, secret letters, diaries and previously unseen primary sources, Morton charts Wallis’s life, from falling in love with a female teacher as a teenager to ignoring the cries of her husband as he lay dying. While Morton makes plain Wallis’s disdain for the duke, it seems his devotion to her never wavered.

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. Felt tip mark on upper trimmed edge.

Dr James Barry was, among other things, Inspector of General Hospitals, an army surgeon, and the first British Empire doctor to successfully perform a caesarean. Only at the end of his colourful life, in 1865, was the truth revealed: Dr Barry was in fact a woman – the UK’s first female doctor. Following ten years of detailed research, the authors have produced a fascinating biography – incorporating colour portraits – that dispels some of the myths surrounding this mysterious individual.

Alan Bennett's sharp, funny, humane observations have made him one of the foremost chroniclers of modern British life. This collection includes his diaries from 2005 to 2015, the decade that saw his civil partnership, four premieres at the National Theatre, and the filming of The Lady in the Van. It also contains his provocative sermon on private education; his darkly comic radio play Denmark Hill; and his reflections on his 25-year collaboration with the director Nicholas Hytner.

Lavishly illustrated with around 170 reproductions, this celebration of Art Nouveau is in three parts, looking first at the movement as a whole – a design ethos that swept across Europe and America between the late 19th century and the First World War. Part two deals with the graphic arts, including the posters of Toulouse-Lautrec and Alphonse Mucha, while the final section explores the impact of Art Nouveau in the fine arts, discussing artists from Paul Gauguin to Gustav Klimt.

Phyll Macdonald-Ross was a trainee nurse at Hackney Hospital in London’s East End when war was declared in September 1939. Her memoir recalls the rigid discipline and hard work of nursing, and the harrowing experience of tending the injured and dying during the Blitz in London, but also friendship and mischief, and the beginning of a lifelong love affair. The story was presented in 2015, Phyll’s 95th year, by her grandson ID Roberts.

Philip Shenon's book pieces together the compelling story of the most important, and most misunderstood, homicide investigation in 20th-century America: the Warren Commission inquiry and its conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone to assassinate the President. Drawing on unprecedented access to surviving Commission staff and other key witnesses, Shenon reveals how much of the truth about the Kennedy assassination has not been told and how much evidence was 'shredded, incinerated or erased' before it reached the Commission. Off-mint.