In Britain we have lost touch with the Great War. Our overriding sense now is of a meaningless, futile bloodbath in the mud of Flanders -- of young men whose lives were cut off in their prime for no evident purpose. But by reducing the conflict to personal tragedies, however moving, we have lost the big picture: the history has been distilled into poetry. In The Long Shadow, critically acclaimed author David Reynolds seeks to redress the balance by exploring the true impact of 1914-18 on the 20th century. Some of the Great War`s legacies were negative & pernicious but others proved transformative in a positive sense. Exploring big themes such as democracy & empire, nationalism & capitalism & re-examining the differing impacts of the War on Britain, Ireland & the United States, The Long Shadow throws light on the whole of the last century & demonstrates that 1914-18 is a conflict that Britain, more than any other nation, is still struggling to comprehend. Stunningly broad in its historical perspective, The Long Shadow is a magisterial & seismic re-presentation of the Great War. ...

When Ingi Friedlander travels to Yearsonend in the rugged interior of South Africa to purchase a statue, its eccentric sculptor, Jonty Jack, does not want to sell
- he says it was not his creation, but simply appeared miraculously. Ingi decides to stay & try to win Jonty`s trust, but soon realises that the townspeople suspect she has come to seek a different treasure
- the legendary wagon of gold brought in by defeated Boer soldiers. Gradually she prises open the secrets of the past, secrets of greed, racism & vaulting ambition, whose key lies with the Italian POW Mario Salviati
- deaf, dumb & now blind. Watched over by a very earthy angel & long dead humans, Ingi forces a resolution with the past & faces up to her own future.


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Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize & longlisted for the Orange Prize, The Long Song is breathtaking, hauntingly beautiful, heartbreaking & unputdownable You do not know me yet.” My son Thomas, who is publishing this book, tells me, it is customary at this place in a novel to give the reader a little taste of the story that is held within these pages. As your storyteller, I am to convey that this tale is set in Jamaica during the last turbulent years of slavery & the early years of freedom that followed.” ...

The Earth's climate has always been in flux: glacial periods & warm ones have slowly & relentlessly alternated for millennia. But the period of global warming of the last 15, 000 years is without precedent, & it set the conditions which enabled civilization to arise. It is our 'long summer'. From the almost unimaginably hostile climate of the late Ice to the onset of ' Little Ice Age', which began in 1315 & lasted half a millennium, this book tells the remarkable story of how human history has been influenced by the planet's ever-changing climate. Confronted with such challenges as severe droughts in southwestern Asia & the ripple effects of the Medieval Warm Period, our ancestors have proved themselves to be at their most resilient & adaptable. Deploying all the resources of new climatology from the past century, from tree rings to deep cores from glaciers, Fagan provides us, for the first time, with an historical context in which to understand the unprecedented global warming of today, as we try to anticipate an uncertain climatic future. ...

Winner of The Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018 A noir narrative written with the intensity & power of poetry, The Long Take is one of the most remarkable
- & unclassifiable
- books of recent years. Walker is a D-Day veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder; he can`t return home to rural Nova Scotia, & looks instead to the city for freedom, anonymity & repair. As he moves from New York to Los Angeles & San Francisco we witness a crucial period of fracture in American history, one that also allowed film noir to flourish. The Dream had gone sour but
- as those dark, classic movies made clear
- the country needed outsiders to study & dramatise its new anxieties. While Walker tries to piece his life together, America is beginning to come apart: deeply paranoid, doubting its own certainties, riven by social & racial division, spiralling corruption & the collapse of the inner cities. The Long Take is about a good man, brutalised by war, haunted by violence & apparently doomed to return to it
- yet resolved to find kindness again, in the world & in himself. Watching beauty & disintegration through the lens of the film camera & the eye of the poet, Robin Robertson`s The Long Take is a work of thrilling originality.




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When Rosemary Harper joins the crew of the Wayfarer, she isn`t expecting much. The Wayfarer, a patched-up ship that`s seen better days, offers her everything she could possibly want: a small, quiet spot to call home for a while, adventure in far-off corners of the galaxy, & distance from her troubled past. But Rosemary gets more than she bargained for with the Wayfarer. The crew is a mishmash of species & personalities, from Sissix, the friendly reptillian pilot, to Kizzy & Jenks, the constantly sparring engineers who keep the ship running. Life on board is chaotic, but more or less peaceful
- exactly what Rosemary wants. Until the crew are offered the job of a lifetime: the chance to build a hyperspace tunnel to a distant planet. They`ll earn enough money to live comfortably for years...if they survive the long trip through war-torn interstellar space without endangering any of the fragile alliances that keep the galaxy peaceful. But Rosemary isn`t the only person on board with secrets to hide, & the crew will soon discover that space may be vast, but spaceships are very small indeed.
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There is nothing quite as beautiful as an English country house in summer. & there has never been a summer quite like that Indian summer between the two world wars, a period of gentle decline in which the sun set slowly on the British Empire & the shadows lengthened on the lawns of a thousand stately homes. Real life in the country house during the 1920s & 1930s was not always so sunny. By turns opulent & ordinary, noble & vicious, its shadows were darker. In The Long Weekend, Adrian Tinniswood uncovers the truth about a world half-forgotten, draped in myth & hidden behind stiff upper lips & film-star smiles. Drawing on hundreds of memoirs, on unpublished letters & diaries, on the eye-witness testimonies of belted earls & unhappy heiresses & bullying butlers, The Long Weekend gives a voice to the people who inhabited this world. In a definitive social history which combines anecdote & narrative with scholarship, it brings the stately homes of England to life, giving readers an insight into the guilt & the gingerbread, & showing how the image of the country house was carefully protected by its occupants above & below stairs, & how the reality was so much more interesting than the dream. ...

Since the beginnings of history trees have served humankind in countless useful ways, but our relationship with trees has many



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Exclusive to Stanfords.` The Long, Long Night`, Ernest Shackleton’s ship the Endurance stuck fast in Antarctic ice photographed by Frank Hurley, 1915. This photograph was taken during the ‘ Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition 1914-16’. In his diary Mc Nish reported that ‘ Hurley has been taking flashlight pictures – he has secured some of the best’. For this image Frank Hurley used 20 flashlights to create his ‘spectre ship’ effect. Printed on matte archival quality photographic paper & cardboard mounted.* About this range: Exclusive to Stanfords, the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) has selected a range of vintage photographs of travel & exploration. The images are from the Society’s prestigious archive collection. As they are printed from the original negative, there is only a limited amount available. ...

The true story, told minute by minute, of the soldiers who defeated Napoleon
- from Brendan Simms, acclaimed author of Europe:
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