Alan Titchmarsh
Nobbut a Lad: A Yorkshire Childhood

Growing up in the beautiful landscape that surrounds Ilkley in Wharfedale inspired Alan Titchmarsh's early passion for nature. It was his Grandpa Hardisty who, with his allotment, encouraged Alan's first gardening skills. In a time of post-war austerity, hard work and `making do' was not just the lot of grown-ups, but for young Alan it was also the simplest pleasures that were the best, whether it was climbing trees, fishing in streams, or riding wooden carts fitted with old pram wheels. His was not a deprived childhood, yet neither was the garden eternally rosy. But then - as Alan's Grandpa was wont to say - 'never let it be said that your mother bred a gibber.' With the sharpest eye for detail and vivid recall, Alan brings to life the various family members, school friends and foes - teachers and local characters who formed the background and became the powerful early influences of Alan's life. A joy from beginning to end, this is a classic childhood memoir.

Jeremy Clarkson
And Another Thing

Despite the appearance of the bestselling The World According to Clarkson, the world doesn't seem to have changed much. So Jeremy Clarkson is having another go. In And Another Thing, our exasperated hero discovers that:

I ) We're all going to explode at the age of 62.

2) Russians look bad in Speedos - but not as bad as Brits.

3) Cooking a Sunday roast is one thing. Gravy is quite another.

4) He should probably be nicer about David Beckham.

But while these things play on his mind, the world remains Jeremy's favourite place to be. On the whole, it's brilliant. It's just the idiots, meddlers and do-gooders who spoil it for the rest of us. Straight-talking as ever, Clarkson bursts their pointless little bubble, while celebrating the special things that we should hold dear.

Shortly before his death in 2004, Alistair Cooke's personal secretary discovered what Cooke had long believed was a lost manuscript: an unpublished and extraordinary account of his travels through America during the Second World War. In 1941 America had entered a war that many Americans had hoped might be avoidable. Alistair Cooke, then a correspondent for the Guardian, recognised a great story to be told in reviewing first-hand the effects of the abrupt transition from peacetime to war. He set off on a circuit of the entire country `to see what the war had done to people'. This unique travelogue celebrates an essential American character and the indomitable spirit of a nation that was to inspire Cook's reports and broadcasts for some sixty years.

`No one else succeeded in explaining to the English-speaking world the idiosyncrasies o f a country at once so familiar, and yet so utterly foreign'- Independent