Mike Grady

"Daisy Dunn's vivid narrative rediscovers the life and poetry of Gaius Valerius Catullus, Rome's first "modern" poet, a dandy who fell in love with another man's wife and made it known to the world through his timeless verse"--

1915. A young British boy and his father take in a lost girl, who the villagers suspect may be German. May, 1915. Alfie and his fisherman father find a girl on an uninhabited island in the Scillies-- injured, thirsty, lost-- and with absolutely no memory of who she is, or how she came to be there. She can say only one word: Lucy. Is she a mermaid, the victim of a German U-boat, or even, as some islanders suggest, a German spy? Only one thing is for...

Orchards are so rich in biodiversity, they eclipse most recognised conservation areas. Spend a year in one orchard, and celebrate this imperilled, overlooked abundance of life. As rotting windfall apples and frost lie thick on the ground, and the oldest of fruit trees bend under the weight of mistletoe, the orchard begins a new year. A chattering blanket of starlings descend on the bounty of last year's fruit, joining bramblings, blackbirds, angry-faced...

1914 dawned with Britain at peace, albeit troubled by faultlines within and threats without…Nigel Jones depicts every facet of a year that changed Britain forever. From gun-running in Ulster, to an attack by suffragettes on a Velasquez painting in the National Gallery; from the opening of London's first nightclub, to the embarking for Belgium of the British Expeditionary Force, he traces the events of a momentous year from its benign domestic beginnings...

Pussy is the story of Prince Fracassus, heir presumptive to the Duchy of Origen, famed for its golden-gated skyscrapers and casinos, who passes his boyhood watching reality shows on TV, imagining himself to be the Roman Emperor Nero, and fantasizing about hookers. He is idle, boastful, thin-skinned and egotistic. He has no manners, no curiosity, no knowledge, no idea and no words in which to express them. Could he, in that case, be the very leader...

Fresh from finishing the Marathon des Sables, Ranulph Fiennes has become the oldest Briton to complete this ultimate endurance test. The world's greatest living explorer, has travelled to some of the most remote, dangerous parts of the globe. Well-known for his experiences at the poles and climbing Everest, he has also endured some of the hottest conditions on the planet, where temperatures regularly exceed 40 degrees and, without water and shelter,...

When you are an inoffensive retired librarian with bitter personal experience of Evil Talking Cats, do you rescue a kitten from the cold on a December night? Do you follow up news items about cats digging in graveyards? Do you inquire into long-ago cats who voyaged around the world with Captain Cook? Well, yes. If you are Alec Charlesworth that is precisely what you do - with unexpected and terrifying consequences.

The Hon. Sir Harry Ognall is a retired judge of the High Court, Queen's Bench Division. For many years, he enjoyed a formidable reputation as an advocate at the criminal Bar. As counsel, and later as judge, he was involved in numerous high-profile trials, both here and abroad. Among many cases as a QC, he prosecuted Peter Sutcliffe, the so-called 'Yorkshire Ripper'. He successfully defended six officers of the Air Force of Zimbabwe at their trial...

Perilous Question features an eventful, violent often overlooked period of British history. On 7th June 1832, William IV reluctantly assented to pass the Great Reform Bill, under the double threat of the creation of 60 new peers in the House of Lords and of revolution throughout the country. This led to a total change in the way Britain was governed, a riotous two-year revolution that Antonia Fraser brings dramatically to life. Perilous Question is...

The story of the catastrophic British mishandling of the Middle East – told through the career of Sir Mark Sykes – Edwardian aristocrat, traveler, writer, politician, and co-author of the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement, a shady deal between Entente powers to carve up the Middle East that lies at the heart of many of region's problems today. At the age of only 36, Sir Mark Sykes was signatory to a notorious treaty, drawn up in 1916, between the...