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What do a weak lion king, a grief-stricken rooster and a dim-witted bear have in common? They’ve all been fooled by crafty Reynard the Fox. Unscrupulous, cunning and cynical as Machiavelli, the hero – or antihero – of these popular medieval tales steals and swindles with impunity, cocking a snook at authority along the way. This lively modern translation of Caxton’s Middle English version captures all the dark humour, biting satire and irreverent verve of the original.

Historians trawl through documentary records to reveal how people lived in the past, but few actually experience it first-hand. Ruth Goodman, presenter of the BBC TV series Tudor Monastery Farm, has done just that, eating, sleeping, working, dressing and dancing like a Tudor. Drawing on these adventures with characteristic wit and humour, she describes a day in the life of an ordinary person, from dawn to dusk, during one of the most vibrant periods of English history.

Comprising updated versions of 31 essays published over the past two decades, this volume takes the reader on 'a provocative tour of what is happening now in Classics'. Professor Beard reassesses old answers in scholarly debates concerning Greco-Roman antiquity; offers fresh interpretations of heroes and antiheroes, from the Greek poet Sappho to the emperor Hadrian; explores the evidence for ordinary Romans' worries and ambitions; and asks what our modern responses to the ancient world say about us.

Few writers have chronicled the effects of technology and the media on the human psyche as prophetically as JG Ballard. Written in the last few years of his life, this memoir charts his journey from a Shanghai childhood, through his family’s wartime internment by the Japanese, to post-war English suburbia. As he narrates his experiences, the classic tropes of his fiction – desolate landscapes, empty swimming pools, low-flying aircraft, car accidents and celebrity death – take on new resonance.

From his schooldays to his early death, George Orwell chronicled the dramatic events of his turbulent life in a profusion of powerful letters. This chronological selection, featuring many previously unpublished letters, forms the autobiography he never wrote. In missives to family, friends and fellow writers such as TS Eliot, Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender and Cyril Connolly, he reports from war-ravaged Barcelona, Morocco, and the Isle of Jura, where he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, with characteristic insight, precision and dry humour.