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First published in 1824, Hogg’s masterpiece tells how Robert Wringhim, a Calvinist youth, is persuaded to commit a series of murders by the shadowy Gil-Martin. Robert’s self-justification – that our acts are predestined by God – forms a scathing critique of religion.

Whether an architect’s 1:1000 site model envisioning a mile-wide build site, a toy spaceship inspiring a career in astrophysics or a general’s relief map enabling measured tactical calculations, small-scale objects serve as a powerful tool to conceptualize their full-sized counterparts. This study explores how hobbyists and professionals use the miniature to celebrate and render comprehensible things that would otherwise be overwhelming.

In a world where busyness is often considered an accolade and exhaustion a norm, simple resting is a vital, albeit acquired, skill. This volume aims to teach that skill, illustrating the simple but highly effective benefits of activities such as daydreaming, nature walks, long hot baths, and the underappreciated art of doing nothing in particular.

When a whispering campaign links Dr James Simpson with a suspicious death, his protege Will Raven and former housemaid Sarah Fisher resolve to clear his name. As they turn detective amid the shadowy backstreets of Victorian Edinburgh, they slowly unravel the unspeakable truth.

In this Scandinavian thriller Eva takes revenge on her cheating husband and then meets a man who has been keeping patient vigil by his comatose girlfriend's bedside. In contrast to her husband he appears constant, but behind his devotion are more secrets and betrayals. Slightly off-mint.

Introduced and selected by the award-winning novelist Andrew O’Hagan, this anthology of Burns’s verse is arranged around the topics of love, drink and politics, and includes favourites such as ‘A Red, Red Rose’, 'The Silver Tassie’ and ‘To a Mouse’.

Addled by morphine, the dying Sigmund Freud is visited by the blind prophet Tiresias at his London home. Their conversation revisits the myth of Oedipus, leading the father of psychoanalysis to re-examine the foundations of his life’s work.

The original Secret Policeman’s Ball in 1976 revolutionized thinking about charity fundraising. Published to celebrate Amnesty International’s 50th anniversary, this illustrated collection includes scripts of the funniest moments from the 12 major shows, which have featured comedians including Python members, Peter Cook and Rowan Atkinson as well as stars such as Eddie Izzard, Dylan Moran and Victoria Wood.

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.

Tom Hazard looks like an ordinary 41-year-old history teacher, but he has lived for centuries, moving through Elizabethan England, gold-rush Arizona and jazz-age Paris, witnessing wars and witch hunts, and continually changing his identity. The one thing he must never do is fall in love.

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.

‘Technology is making everything faster, and because we know that things will become faster in the future, it follows that nothing is fast enough now.’ Surveying how, over the last 250 years, time has come to dominate our lives, Simon Garfield considers its practical applications rather than theoretical physics: the subjects of his ‘illuminating stories’ include – definitely not in chronological order – football, Beethoven’s Ninth, railway timetables, Roger Bannister, Swiss watchmakers, The Clock (Christian Marclay’s film) and the British Museum.

Jann Wenner created a new type of magazine with Rolling Stone in 1967, mixing politics with serious pop-music journalism. This biography was written with extensive access to the controversial editor as well as interviews with leading rock stars.

From the moment Columbus gazed on the land he mistook for India, the islands of the Caribbean have been the subject of daydreams and fantasy. The result of ten years’ travel, this book strips away the myths to reveal the real Caribbean, a region that has produced some of the world’s most influential artists, activists, writers, musicians and sportsmen, as its people speak for themselves about their home and its place in the world.

Jean Pratt was a trainee architect, journalist and publicist who lived in a Buckinghamshire cottage and ran a local bookshop. Though she was well-known in bookselling circles, none of her friends had any idea that, from the age of 16, she kept a diary, which ran to more than a million words by the time she died in 1986. It recounts, with aching honesty and infectious humour, love and loss, wartime privations, books read, indiscreet gossip – and her many feline companions.

War, especially modern war, involves soldiers and civilians alike, and nothing captures its terror, boredom and privations as vividly as a first-hand account. This absorbing anthology ranges from the 17th century to the 21st, from Davy Crockett at the Alamo to Anna Politkovskaya in Chechnya. The extracts - by such diverse figures as Tolstoy, Goebbels, Primo Levi, George Orwell and Virginia Woolf - capture the daily essence of life in wartime, by turns horrific and comic, epic and trivial.