chatto windus random house london (79 results)

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Fair. Jacket by Jarrod Taylor (illustrator). 1st Edition. First edition, first impression with full number line. Sadly jacket quite marked with tea cup rings and splashes to front jacket and spine, some edge wear to top and bottom of jacket and spine, corners slightly rubbed, small closed tear to top of spine. Not price clipped (£20.00), no inscriptions, internally clean tight and square, overall a good reading copy only, although book itself looks almost unread. 983pp. This Faustian story with a terrifying twist is the fictional memoir of Dr. Max Aue, a former SS intelligence officer, who has reinvented himself as a family man and owner of a lace factory in post war France. Max is an intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature, and classical music. He is also a cold blooded assassin and the consummate bureaucrat, who speaks out now not in self justification but to set the record straight. He looks back at his life with cool eyed precision: from a disrupted childhood and a turning point in his student days, to his role as observer and then participant in Nazi atrocities on the Eastern Front, from Poland to the Caucasus, he is present at the siege of Stalingrad, at the death camps, and finally caught up in the rout of the Nazis and the nightmarish fall of Berlin. Although Max is a totally imagined character, his world is peopled by real historical figures such as Eichmann, Himmler, Goring, Speer, Heydrich, Hoss, and Hitler himself. Massive in scope, terrifying in subject matter, and shocking in its protagonist, Littell's masterpiece is intense, hallucinatory, and terrifyingly compelling. Described by Le Figaro as 'a monument of contemporary literature', this transgressive work has been compared to classics of world literature, including War and Peace. A huge novel about the seductive enormity of evil, the ineffable horror of war, man's inhumanity and the malevolence of the Furies, this is a book that every thinking person should read and to which no one can be indifferent. A huge heavy book, extra postage may be required.

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. Jacket and endpapers by Lizzy Stewart (illustrator). 1st Edition. First edition, subsequent impression with number line '4 6 8 10 9 7 5'. Some minuscule edge wear to top and bottom of jacket and spine, not price clipped (£14.99), no inscriptions, internally clean tight and square, overall a vg+ copy, looks unread. 264pp. Margaret Forster (1938-2016), was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, historian and critic, best known for the 1965 novel 'Georgy Girl', made into a successful film of the same name, which inspired a hit song by The Seekers. This memoir details Margaret Forster's journey through the houses she's lived in, from that sparkling new council house, to her beloved London home. This is not a book about bricks and mortar though. This is a book about what houses are to us, the effect they have on the way we live our lives and the changing nature of our homes, from blacking grates and outside privies to cities dominated by bedsits and lodgings, to the houses of today converted back into single dwellings. Finally, it is a gently insistent, personal inquiry into the meaning of home.

Hardcover. Condition: Poor. Dust Jacket Condition: Good. Jacket after Channel 4 of Olympia Dukakis as Mrs. Madrigal (illustrator). 1st Edition. First collected edition, first impression with full number line. Not ex library but a somewhat worn and much read volume. Some edge wear and creasing to top and bottom of jacket and spine, some overall wear and creasing to largely white jacket, corners bruised, grubby fingerprints to page fore edges, contents shaken, some lean, price clipped, gift inscription to ffep, internally clean, overall a good reading copy only. 755pp. Published to mark the first of the tv series, broadcast in the UK on Channel 4 in 1993, starring Laura Linney as Mary Ann Singleton, Olympia Dukakis as Anna Madrigal, and Barbara Garrick as DeDe Halcyon-Day. Quite scarce in this first impression, even in this worn condition.

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. Jacket after The Royal Photographic Society (illustrator). 1st Edition. First edition, first impression with full number line. Some edge wear, short closed tears and creasing to top and bottom of jacket and spine, corners rubbed and bruised, not price clipped (£25.00), no inscriptions, internally clean tight and square, overall a vg copy. 732pp, illustrated. A history of Ireland in the nineteenth century. The book traces the three causes of the halving of the Irish population in that century, the famine, the subsequent Irish emigrations to American and Canada, and the transportation of political activitists to Australia. A quest for Australian Irish author's Thomas Keneally (author of Schindler's Ark) ancestors.

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. Jacket by Martin Scott-Jupp (illustrator). 1st Edition. First UK edition, subsequent impression with number line '6 8 10 9 7'. Some slight edge wear to top and bottom of jacket and spine, some yellowing to page block, top corners very slightly bruised, price clipped, a signature to title page but not I think that of Hazel Rowley, internally clean tight and square, overall a vg copy. 429pp, illustrated. They are one of the world's legendary couples. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Startre, those passionate, free thinking Existentialist philosopher writers, had a committed but notoriously open union that generated no end of controversy. Through original interviews and access to new primary sources, Hazel Rowley portrays them up close. We witness Beauvoir and Sartre with their circle, holding court in Paris cafes. We learn the details of their infamous romantic entanglements with the young Olga Kosakiewicz and others, of their efforts to protest the wars in Algeria and Vietnam, and of Beauvoir's tempestuous love affair with Nelson Algren. We hear the anguished discussions that would lead to Sartre's refusal of the Nobel Prize, and listen in on the couple as they comment on each other's great works. The impact of their writings on modern thought can hardly be overestimated, but Beauvoir and Sartre are remembered just as much for the lives they led. Theirs is a great story, and a great story is precisely what Beauvoir and Sartre most wanted their lives to be. Hazel Joan Rowley (1951-2011), was a British born Australian author and biographer, she sadly died young from a stroke in New York.

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. Jacket and illustrations by James Munro (illustrator). 1st Edition. First edition, first impression with full number line. Some edge wear to top and bottom of jacket and spine, corners rubbed and bruised, tiny closed tear to top of spine, not price clipped (£16.99), no inscriptions, internally clean tight and square, overall a vg+ copy. 224pp, illustrated. Richard Mabey began experimenting with cooking as soon as he was big enough to clamber to the cupboard where the powdered chocolate was kept. At scout camp he learned how to cook a Sussex Pond Pudding in a billycan, and thirty years ago he permanently broadened the nation's palate with his guide to edible wild plants 'Food For Free'.This book is a joyous exploration of local ingredients, broadening your horizons by travelling, vernacular heritage, and making use of everything except, as the saying goes 'the pig's squeal'. It includes: Collecting Corsican chestnut receipes and American mushroom ideas, and meditating on what a forest food culture would have been like, Cooking eggs in nothing but the sun, Making bread the prehistoric way with old beer, Exploring the outer limits of apple cusine (i.e. the outer limit is making leather out of apples), 'Cooking against the grain', if we didn't have access to wheat, what could we make with nuts? How to deal with gluts, those autumn mountains of beans and courgettes, Making-do the wartime way, canny tricks his mother taught him, and re introducing his father's passion for offals.

Hardcover. Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Fine. Jacket by Annie Griffiths Belt (illustrator). 1st Edition. First edition, subsequent impression with number line '5 7 9 10 8 6 4'. Some minuscule edge wear to top of jacket and spine, not price clipped (£16.99), no inscriptions, internally clean tight and square, overall a vg++ copy, looks unread. 250pp. Tara Fraser leaves London to start a new life in a Cumbrian town selected at random. She plans to obliterate her past, which contains a shocking event that had serious consequences, by becoming a completely different personality from her previous volatile self. She is going to be quiet, even dull, and very private. But one of her new neighbours, Nancy, is intrigued by her. She wants to become her friend. Equally determined not to be discarded are three old friends who Tara feels let her down when she most needed them. Tara fights to keep herself to herself, but can she do it? And does she really want to? Slowly, reluctantly, she discovers the dangers of trying to suppress the past and reject other people.

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. Jacket by Graham Evenden (illustrator). 1st Edition. First edition, first impression with full number line. Some slight edge wear to top and bottom of jacket and spine, very slight lean, corners very slightly bruised, price clipped, small previous owner's sticker to bottom front pastedown, internally clean and tight, overall a vg++ copy. 284pp, illustrated. In 1831 John Dodgson Carr, son of a Quaker grocer, set off to walk from his home in Kendal to Carlisle, determined to launch a great enterprise. Within 15 years, Carr's of Carlisle had become one of the largest baking businesses in the world and is a byword for biscuits to this day. Following his trail to Carlisle (where she herself was born and grew up), Margaret Forster (1938-2016), brings 19th century daily life into vivid focus and charts the rise and rise of a middle class family like the Carrs, ambitious, innovative yet sternly religious. This is history as it was lived by the men and women both above and below stairs, from the shop floor to the comfortable bourgeois homes of the paternalistic Carrs. We see the conflict between religion and profit, the family feuds and the changing face of a city through this compelling historical narrative, told with Margaret Forster's characteristic blend of scholarship, readability and marvellous attention to the texture of everyday life.

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. 1st Edition. First UK edition, first impression with full number line. Some very slight edge wear to top and bottom of jacket and spine, not price clipped (£12.99), no inscriptions, internally clean tight and square, overall a vg++ copy. 178pp. This devastating dossier of savage stories takes us to the crimes that never reach the newspapers: small-town atrocities where the mundane lurches into the macabre and ordinary people find themselves at the heart of horrific crimes, all the more compelling on account of their truth. Opening with an attack on a waitress by a band of musicians in a beer tent, we are led through the rituals of the Illuminati by a violent schoolboy sect, and invited to look into a briefcase full of photographs of mutilated corpses. There is the saga of a bungled drug heist involving a stolen car and a dog full of laxatives; the jealous husband who almost bludgeons his wife's lover to death; and the final chilling story of an eccentric madman who cleverly turns the tables on his own defense lawyer.

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. 1st Edition. First edition, first impression with full number line. Some slight edge wear to top and bottom of jacket and spine, corners slightly bruised, slight lean. Not price clipped (£14.99), gift inscription on ffep, internally clean and tight overall a vg copy. 414pp. The story of three women, whose lives criss-cross between Paris in the 1890s, at the height of the Dreyfus affair, France again in 1941 and Canada today. The first-person narrator, a contemporary Canadian simultaneous translator, goes to Paris to research Proust and escape an unrequited love, and finds instead Mme Proust's 'unpublished diary' in the archives. Then there is Sarah, a Jewish French girl whose parents send her out of Paris in WWII to escape the round-ups; she ends up in Canada and never sees them again. She marries into an orthodox Jewish family and becomes more kosher than they are, constantly consoling herself with cooking - and we finally discover that it's her son with whom our narrator is unrequitedly in love.and he's gay. The third woman is Mme Proust herself, whose 'diaries' are fictionalised in a wonderful pastiche by Taylor, with irresistible and impecccably researched details of the mother's worries about Marcel, his late-night habits, his diet and his friends, and about the Dreyfus affair - being Jewish though completely assimilated she observes it with very different eyes from her husband's. Everything comes together poignantly and satisfyingly: the new world and the old, the Seine and the St Lawrence, mothers and sons, outsiders both Jewish and homosexual, and finally redemption through literature and cooking.

Hardcover. Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Fine. First Edition First Impression. Covers Blue Boards, interior, text, in bright clean condition. 'The village is callied Mount of Zeal. Its built on a bowl like an amphitheatre, with the winding gear where the stage would be. The pit lies below.'. Signed by Author(s).

Original Wraps. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket, as Issued. First Edition. First impression of the true first edition, with the complete number string on the printer's page: 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2. A paperback original (PBO) pamphlet. ***A very good copy in dark-blue stapled card covers with French-flaps, with gilt titles and decoration on the front and back covers. The covers are clean and unmarked, but with some rubbing at the edges and a little creasing at the spine. No tears. No bumps. Corners sharp. Internally near fine with no inscriptions. No marks, creases or tears. Paper stock clean - just slightly tanned. ***26 pages. 170 mm x 123 mm. ***'In this bold and resonant gathering of poems, Liz Berry turns her distinctive voice to the transformative experience of new motherhood. Her poems sing the body electric, from the joy and anguish of becoming a mother, through its darkest hours to its brightest days. With honesty and unabashed beauty, they bear witness to that most tender of times - when a new life arrives, and everything changes.' [Quote taken from the front flap. ***'Liz Berry (born 1980) is a British poet. She has published two pamphlets and one full-length poetry collection. Her poetry collection, "Black Country", was named poetry book of the year by several publications, including The Guardian.' [Wiki] ***'I crossed the border into the Republic of Motherhood and found it a queendom, a wild queendom.' ***A true first edition, first impression of this small pamphlet. Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. ***For all our books, postage is charged at cost, allowing for packaging: any shipping rates indicated on ABE are an average only: we will reduce the P & P charge where appropriate - please contact us for postal rates for heavier books and sets etc.

Hardcover. Condition: Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. Jacket by Corbis (illustrator). 1st Edition. First edition, subsequent impression with number line '6 8 10 9 7'. SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR, WITHOUT DEDICATION, IN BLUE PEN, ON TITLE PAGE. Some slight edge wear to top and bottom of jacket and spine, slight lean, contents shaken with first few pages loose, not price clipped (£16.99), no other inscriptions, internally clean, overall a reasonable copy. 368pp. In the wake of factory closings and his beloved wife's death, Lev is on his way from Eastern Europe to London, seeking work to support his mother and his little daughter. After a spell of homelessness, he finds a job in the kitchen of a posh restaurant, and a room in the house of an appealing Irishman who has also lost his family. Never mind that Lev must sleep in a bunk bed surrounded by plastic toys, he has found a friend and shelter. However constricted his life in England remains he compensates by daydreaming of home, by having an affair with a younger restaurant worker (and dodging the attentions of other women), and by trading gossip and ambitions via cell phone with his hilarious old friend Rudi who, dreaming of the wealthy West, lives largely for his battered Chevrolet. Homesickness dogs Lev, not only for nostalgic reasons, but because he doesn't belong, body or soul, to his new country but can he really go home again? Quite scarce signed. Signed by Author(s).

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. 1st Edition. First edition, first impression with full number line. Some slight edge wear to top and bottom of jacket and spine, corners very slightly rubbed and bruised, not price clipped (no published price), no inscriptions, internally clean tight and square, overall a vg+ copy. 852pp, illustrated. THE QUEENS OF HENRY V111. Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. CATHERINE OF ARAGON the Catholic Spanish Princess, who suffered years of miscarriages and still births and yet failed to produce a son. She was the mother of Mary Tudor. ANNE BOLEYN, the pretty, clever, French educated Protestant with whom Henry Vlll was madly in love for a brief period. She was the mother of Elizabeth I. JANE SEYMOUR the demure and submissive contrast to Anne Boleyn's vampish style. She died soon after giving birth to the longed for son Edward VI. ANNE OF CLEVES 'the Flanders mare' he was horrified because she was so plain and she was appalled because he was so fat. CATHERINE HOWARD the flirtatious teenager whose adulteries made a fool of the ageing king. CATHERINE PARR the shrewd Protestant bluestocking who outlived him. A huge heavy book, extra postage may be required.

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. 1st Edition. First edition, first impression with full number line. With scarce publishers' band. Some slight edge wear to top and bottom of jacket and spine, very slight lean, not price clipped (£16.99), no inscriptions, internally clean tight and square, overall a vg+ copy. 431pp. Egg stealing in the Scottish highlands, fraud and felony on the streets of London, and strange goings on in the fens. Captivating and ingenious, full of suspense and teeming with life, 'Kept' is a Victorian mystery about the extreme and curious things men do to get what they want. August 1863. Henry Ireland, a failed landowner, dies unexpectedly in a riding accident, leaving a highly strung young widow. Not far away lives Ireland's friend James Dixey, a celebrated naturalist who collects strange trophies, a stuffed bear, a pet mouse, and a wolf that he keeps caged in the grounds of his decaying house, lost in the fog on the edge of the fens. The poachers, Dewar and Dunbar, with their cargo of pilfered eggs, Esther the observant kitchen maid, pining to be reunited with her vanished admirer; the ancient lawyer Mr Crabbe made careless by snobbery; John Carstairs, in search of his cousin, the elusive widow; an enigmatic debt collector, busily plotting an audacious robbery; various lowlife henchmen; and Captain McTurk of Scotland Yard, patiently investigating the circumstances of the Mr Ireland's death and many other things besides, all are drawn into a net of intrigue with wide and sinister implications. Ranging from the loch sides of Scotland to the slums of Clerkenwell, and from the gentlemen's clubs of St James's to the Yukon wilds, 'Kept' is a gorgeously intricate novel about the urge to possess, at once a gripping investigation of some of the secret chambers of the human heart and a dazzling re invention of Victorian life and passions.

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. 1st Edition. First edition, subsequent impression with number line '6 8 10 9 7'. Some slight edge wear to top and bottom of jacket and spine, corners slightly bumped, very slight lean. Not price clipped (£16.99), no inscriptions, internally clean and tight, overall a vg+ copy. 448pp. Forever after, there were for them only two sorts of men: the men who were on the Line, and the rest of humanity, who were not. In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Burma Death Railway, surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle¿s young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever. Hailed as a masterpiece, Richard Flanagan¿s epic novel tells the unforgettable story of one man¿s reckoning with the truth. Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2014.

Hardcover. Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Fine. Jacket by Chris Wormell (illustrator). 1st Edition. First collected edition, first impression with full number line. Some very very slight edge wear to top and bottom of jacket and spine, corners very slightly bruised, not price clipped (£18.99), no inscriptions, internally clean tight and square, overall a vg++ copy, looks unopened, unread. 981pp. Bella Wallis is a glamorous widow with a secret identity. In an office buried deep within the seedy back streets of Victorian London, she writes sensationalist novels exposing the scoundrels that litter high society under the pen name Henry Ellis Margam. With dodgy deals, scheming aristocrats and stolen kisses behind closed doors, prize winning author Brian Thompson conjures up an irresistible quartet filled top to toe with Dickensian glamour. We start with The Widow's Secret, an effervescent romp to Paris on the trail of the owner of a mysterious cigar case, then The Sailor's Ransom, a tale of pearls and swine, set on the Cornish coast and the high seas, and The Player's Curse, where kidnap, cricket and cross dressing coincide in a riotous mystery. We end with the previously unpublished The Whole Story, in which Bella is caught up in an anarchist bomb attack at her favourite restaurant, Fracatelli's on the Strand, and only just survives to tell the tale.

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. 1st Edition. First edition, subsequent impression with number line '4 6 8 10 9 7 5'. Some very slight edge wear to top of jacket and spine, not price clipped (£18.99), no inscriptions, internally clean tight and square, overall a vg++ copy, looks unread. 289pp. Mary Wesley published her first novel when she was 70, and went on to write 9 more bestsellers before her death in 2002 at the age of 89. Wesley was a pen name, derived from the family name of Wellesley. She was born Mary Farmar, descended from the Duke of Wellington, and grew up a rebel who believed that she was her mother's least favourite child. Like many girls of her background, she married for escape, but her first marriage to Lord Swinfen was conventional. Her second husband, Eric Siepmann, a writer who never managed to make any money at all, was feckless and bohemian. In between Swinfen and Siepmann, she had a love affair with Czech war hero, Heinz Ziegler, and possibly with his brother at the same time, and in her later years enjoyed a torrid relationship with Robert Bolt. At the outbreak of the Second World War she was, as she put it, 'roped into intelligence', where she worked on breaking codes. Her experiences in MI5 and her many wartime love affairs, which form the core of this biography, also formed the cores of her novels. She wrote about the atmosphere of the home front, and how war dislocates families, and how a sense of the imminence of death loosens the inhibitions, her novels are sexy and witty. She also drew on her love and knowledge of Cornwall.

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. Jacket photo from Raymond Chandler's Estate (illustrator). 1st Edition. First edition, first impression with full number line. Some slight edge wear to top and bottom of jacket and spine, not price clipped (£16.99), no inscriptions, internally clean tight and square, overall a vg+ copy. 310pp, illustrated. For this biography of Raymond Chandler, journalist Tom Hiney had access to previously unseen personal papers and also to unrecorded reminiscences by those who knew the writer well. In the light of new discoveries, a more raw, complex, twisted and brilliant Chandler emerges. Quite a scarce book.

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. Jacket by Eleni Kalorkoti (illustrator). 1st Edition. First edition, first impression with full number line. SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR, WITHOUT DEDICATION, IN BLACK PEN, ON TITLE PAGE. Top of page block dyed maroon as issued. Some edge wear to top and bottom of jacket and spine, corners rubbed and bruised, slight lean, 'Signed by the Author' sticker on front jacket, not price clipped (£12.99), no other inscriptions, internally clean and tight, overall a vg copy. 293pp. Judith and her father don't have much, their house is full of dusty relics, reminders of the mother she's never known. But Judith sees the world with the clear Eyes of Faith, and where others might see rubbish, Judith sees possibility. Bullied at school, she finds solace in making a model of the Promised Land, little people made from pipe cleaners, a sliver of moon, luminous stars and a mirror sea, a world of wonder that Judith calls 'The Land of Decoration'. Perhaps, she thinks, if she makes it snow indoors (using shaving foam and cotton wool and cellophane) there will be no school on Monday. Sure enough, when Judith opens her curtains the next day, the world beyond her window has turned white. She has performed her first miracle. And that's when her troubles begin. The author's debut novel, quite scarce signed. Signed by Author(s).

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. Jacket by Andrea Pinnington (illustrator). 1st Edition. First edition, first impression with full number line. SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR, WITHOUT DEDICATION, IN BLACK PEN, ON TITLE PAGE. Some slight edge wear to top and bottom of jacket and spine, corners very slightly bruised, not price clipped (£16.99), no other inscriptions, internally clean tight and square, overall a vg++ copy. 353pp. These memoirs of the literary life and theatrical times of Giles Gordon, agent to the Royals, ex publisher and theatre critic. They recount his life from priggish adolescence in Edinburgh to the wider shores of publishing, agenting and theatre criticism in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. He pricks egos and literary pretensions, brings theatre to life, and paints pen portraits of the great, the good, the brilliant and the monstrous, from Prince Charles and Andrew to Fay Weldon, David Godwin, Stevie Smith, Peter Ackroyd, Barry Unsworth, Robert Maxwell, Gielgud, Orton, Amis pere et fils and many more. Quite scarce signed. Signed by Author(s).

Hardcover. Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Fine. Jacket after Gustave Dore (illustrator). 1st Edition. First edition, first impression with full number line. Very minor creasing to top of spine, not price clipped (£18.99), no other inscriptions, internally clean tight and square, looks unopened, unread. 324pp. A Cotswold vicarage, a former girls' boarding school in Surrey and a Jacobean house now buried in inner London, these three houses represent the changing face of England over four centuries through the lives of the many people who lived in them. Many lives indeed, from the wealthiest to the poorest. The pages of Gillian Tindall's fascinating new book teem with pen portraits, from Eugenia Stanhope who sold Lord Chesterfield's scandalous letters, to the autocratic vicar who held the same parish from age 28 to 82, from the just literate wife of a parish clerk who wrote riddles in his registers, to the cow keeper who farmed 226 acres in Hornsey till he sold them profitably when the railways came through. The railways bypassed the Cotswold village, famous for its stonemasons, which remains rural to this day; whereas some Surrey inhabitants were, like the Jane Austen characters they resembled, already commuting to London in coaching days. Each house has gone through a series of physical transformations, most of all the seventeenth century merchant's house which eventually became the Conservative Club and then a drinking club for lorry drivers. Gillian Tindall is a master of miniaturist history, making a particular place, person or situation stand for a much larger picture, and it is with the skill of an accomplished researcher and elegant writer that she paints this panorama, from the Reformation to the Oxford Movement, from poor relief run by church vestries to the age of the blogger.

Hardcover. Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Fine. Jacket after Stefano Fittipaldi (illustrator). 1st Edition. First edition, first impression with full number line. SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR, WITHOUT DEDICATION, IN BLACK PEN, ON TITLE PAGE. Some very slight edge wear to top and bottom of jacket and spine, not price clipped (£12.99), no other inscriptions, internally clean tight and square, overall a vg++ copy. 139pp. Plato, the orator, summons the citizens of London on ritual occasions to impart the ancient history of their city. He dwells particulary on the unhappy era of Mouldwarp (AD 1500-2300), which existed before the dimming of the stars and the burning of the machines. But then he is put on trial. Signed by Author(s).

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. Jacket photo by Ogawa Kazuma (illustrator). 1st Edition. First edition, first impression with full number line. Some slight edge wear to top and bottom of jacket and spine, corners slightly bruised, small dent to front jacket, not price clipped (£20.00), no inscriptions, internally clean tight and square, overall a vg++ copy. 338pp, illustrated. The Lotus is the world's most iconic flower. Galvanised by receiving seeds from a three thousand year old lotus, which flowered without difficulty in an English summer, Mark Griffiths set out to track the path of this sublime plant to its home in the Lotus Lands of Japan. His quest, from the basement of Burlington House in Piccadilly to a mountain top in northern Japan, involved many adventures and revealed extraordinary new material. The Lotus Quest touches on the lotus in ancient Egypt and India and on the plant's medicinal uses, as well as the inspiration it has provided to Western artists. Most of all, it unveils a stunning vision of Japan's feudal era, as Griffiths visits shrines, ruins, gardens and wild landscapes, and meets priests and archaeologists, philosophers and anthropologists, gardeners and botanists, poets and artists, and even dines on the lotus in a Tokyo café. By the end, when we reach the hauntingly beautiful Japanese temple of Chuson ji, we understand why this flower has been so intimately involved with human history at so many levels, over so vast an expanse of time. Beautifully illustrated, intensely atmospheric and full of suspense, The Lotus Quest shows how the deep crimson of the lotus runs like a tracer dye, tracking the spread, fusion and fission of the world's great civilizations.

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. 1st Edition. First edition, first impression with full number line. Some very slight edge wear to top of jacket and spine, not price clipped (£20.00), no inscriptions, internally clean tight and square, overall a vg+ copy. 306pp, illustrated. Crossrail, the 'Elizabeth' line, with its spacious, light filled stations, is simply the latest way of traversing a very old east west route through what was once countryside to the old City core and out again. Visiting Stepney, Liverpool Street, Farringdon, Tottenham Court Road (alias St Giles in the Fields) and the route along Oxford Street (alias the Way to Oxford and also Tyburn) this richly descriptive book traces the course of many of these historical journeys across time as well as space. Archaeology disinters layers of actual matter, one may also disinter the lives that walked where many of our streets, however altered in appearance, still run today. These people spoke the names of ancient farms, manors and slums that now belong to our squares and tube stations. They endured the cycle of the seasons as we do, they ate, drank, laughed, worked, prayed, despaired and hoped in what are essentially the same spaces we occupy today. As 'The Tunnel Through Time' expertly shows, destruction and renewal are a constant rhythm in London's story.

Hardcover. Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Fine. 1st Edition. First edition, first impression with full number line. Some very very minor creasing to top of spine, very slight lean, not price clipped (£12.99), no inscriptions, internally clean and tight, overall an excellent copy. 375pp. At the heart of this sweeping, panoramic novel, set in Regency London and Spain during the Peninsular War, stands the lively, outspoken Harriet, poised on the threshold of the adult world. Her new husband, James, is setting off to join the Duke of Wellington's troops in Spain. Left in London, she is taken under the wing of Kitty, Lady Wellington. While the women plunge into new worlds of politics, finance and science, the men face the bloody reality of the battlefield, testing their endurance to the hilt. There are betrayals on both sides, and at times it seems their love cannot endure. Their dramatic stories whirl us through the tumult of the Regency at home and abroad. Tides of War is drenched in an unforgettable atmosphere, from the mantillas and palms of Seville to gas lamps in foggy London. It carries us deep into the anguish of men at war, the taste of freedom offered to the women left behind, the passions of scientists, doctors and inventors and the burning drive of émigrés in a society on the cusp of change. As Harriet and James pursue their destinies, facing hope and heartache in equal measure, this stunning novel returns us all to the vivid, lost world of the past.

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. Jacket after Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne) (illustrator). 1st Edition. First edition, subsequent impression with number line '4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3'. Some minuscule edge wear to top and bottom of jacket and spine, not price clipped (£20.00), no inscriptions, internally clean tight and square, overall a vg+ copy, looks almost unread. 269pp, illustrated. 'Phiz', Hablot Knight Browne (1815-82), was the great illustrator of Dickens' fiction. For over twenty three years they worked together, and Phiz's drawings brought to life a galaxy of much loved characters, from Mr Pickwick, Nicholas Nickelby and Mr Micawber, to Little Nell and David Copperfield. But from the mystery of his birth onwards, Phiz himself led a life as rich as any novel. He came from an old Huguenot Spitalfields family, ostensibly the fourteenth child of debt ridden parents, but his eldest sister Kate had been engaged to a Captain of Napoleon's Imperial Guard, who disappeared, presumed dead, at Waterloo. In late 1815, Phiz arrived. Soon his official father too vanished without trace. The Browne children struggled on. In this vivid, lively memoir, the first full biography, long awaited by Victorian scholars, his great great granddaughter Valerie Browne Lester tracks Phiz's path to marriage and fame, his travels around England and Ireland and work with Dickens, Trollope and the Irish best selling novelist Charles Lever, and his packed private life. He was hopeless with money and had far too many children yet remained an eternal, sunny optimist until his death in 1882, marked by a poetic obituary in Punch. In his inimitable way, Phiz was a memorable artist and his story bustles with character and adventure, celebrations and arguments, laughter and tears. Hunting for her ancestor, the author pursued a quest that took her around the world, unearthing a hoard of unpublished material. Her enchanting book, packed with surprising and delicious illustrations, is a perfect present for all who love Dickens, art and the hidden byways of Victorian life, rich as a round plum pudding. Quite a scarce book.

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. First Edition. First impression of the true first edition with full number-string sequence including the no. "1" on the publisher's copyright prelims-page: 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1. Although not marked as such, this copy is from the library of leading feminist writer Germaine Greer, and includes a loosely inserted card with a handwritten note from Becky Hardie at Random House to Germaine Greer (please see scans). ***Near fine in cream cloth-covered boards, with black titles on the spine. The boards are clean and unmarked. Head and tail of spine slightly creased. Corners sharp. Binding straight with no reading lean. Spine tight. Internally also near fine with no inscriptions. No creases or tears. Paper slightly tanned. ***In a near fine colour illustrated dustwrapper, which retains the original publisher's printed price of £16.99. The dustwrapper is just slightly rubbed at the edges. No tears. No chips. No fading. Dustwrapper clean and bright. ***264 pages, including a Postscript, detailed Bibliography, Acknowledgements and a detailed Index at the back of the book. 222 mm x 142 mm. ***'Cathy Earnshaw or Jane Eyre? Petrova or Osy? Scarlett or Melanie? "Lace" or "Valley of the Dolls"? On a pilgrimage to "Wuthering Heights", Samantha Ellis found herself arguing with her best friend about which heroine was best: Jane Eyre or Cathy Earnshaw. She was all for wild, free, passionate Cathy, but her friend found Cathy silly, a snob who betrays Heathcliff for Edgar and makes them all unhappy -- while courageous Jane makes her own way. And that's when Samantha realised that all her life she'd been trying to be Cathy when she should have been trying to be Jane. "How to be a Heroine" is a funny, touching, inspiring exploration of the role of heroines, and our favourite books, in all our lives -- and how they change over time, for better or worse, just as we do.' [Quote taken from the front flap of the dustwrapper]. ***A near fine copy of this interesting study of the role of heroines in literature - from the library of eminent feminist and professor Germaine Greer. ***For all our books, postage is charged at cost, allowing for packaging: any shipping rates indicated on ABE are an average only: we will reduce the P & P charge where appropriate - please contact us for postal rates for heavier books and sets etc.

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. Jacket after Abraham Wuchters (illustrator). 1st Edition. First edition, first impression with full number line. SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR, WITHOUT DEDICATION, IN BLACK PEN ON TITLE PAGE. Some edge wear to top and bottom of jacket and spine, corners bruised, some faint spotting to page fore edges, price clipped, no other inscriptions, internally clean tight and square, overall a vg copy. 454pp. In the year 1629, a young English lutenist named Peter Claire arrives at the Danish Court to join King Christian IV's Royal Orchestra. From the moment when he realises that the musicians have to perform in a freezing cellar underneath the Royal apartments, he understands that he's come to a place where the opposing states of Good and Evil, Light and Dark are waging a war to the death. Designated the 'King's Angel' because of his blond good looks, he finds himself falling in love with a young woman who is the companion of the King's adulterous and estranged wife, Kirsten. Quite scarce signed. Signed by Author(s).

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. Jacket after Gustave Courbet (illustrator). 1st Edition. First edition, first impression with full number line. Some slight edge wear to top and bottom of jacket and spine, some yellowing to page block, not price clipped (£15.99), gift inscription on half title page, internally clean tight and square, overall a vg+ copy. 310pp. 'Martin Nadaud' tells the true story of an itinerant stone mason from the Creuse region, at the georgraphical heart of France, who became a builder and architect in Paris and who would eventually return to his birthplace as Prefect of the entire department. Self taught, Nadaud (1815-98), was a republican who warmed to the emerging theories of socialism that would liberate so many of his class. After the failure of the 1848 revolution, he was forced to flee to a long and lonely political exile in London, returning again to Paris at the time of the Commune in 1871 to regain his public life.