Mukhina E The Diary of Lena Mukhina: A Girls Life in the Siege of Leningrad

In Dandelion Land, a young snail can't stop asking his friends awkward questions, such as: why are we so slow - and why can't we all have our own names? When he is finally banished from the snail community because of this, he is forced to travel the world alone. As he explores in his oh-so-slow way, the snail makes new friends and goes on a series of adventures, gaining wisdom from every new encounter. But when he finds out his friends are in danger, he decides to rush home to warn them. Will he get there in time to save them? • Luis Sepulveda's bestselling The Story of a Snail Who Discovered the Importance of Being Slow is a wonderful ode to diversity and unity, celebrating the importance of being slow in a world obsessed with speed

Sincerity is the end and the beginning of all things; without sincerity there would be nothing. - Inazo Nitobe, The Way of the Samurai • This beautiful jacketed hardback collection brings together five iconic works of Eastern philosophy. Full of timeless wisdom and invaluable advice, these classic Chinese and Japanese texts condense the spiritual teachings from thousands of years of history • Includes • The Art of War • Tao Te Ching • The Analects of Confucius • The Way of the Samurai • Mencius • Drawing upon military strategy, leadership, honor and spiritual philosophy, this collection offers penetrating insights which are still pertinent in the modern world

The long-awaited diary from Whitehall’s most scandalous MP… • From Brexit to Covid, parties to pig culling, the Conservative government has lurched from crisis to crisis. With a front-row seat on the, erm, backbenches, the Secret Tory MP has picked up on all the petty rivalries, bad decision-making and scandalous affairs that Whitehall has to offer. And he’s got no qualms about sharing it. All • Join the mystery MP as he drunk-texts Liz Truss after a crate of WKD, accompanies Jacob Rees-Mogg (and his kids) to picket a foodbank, takes on the French in the ‘Trawler Wars’, and euthanises Rishi Sunak’s dog – and that’s just October • The Diary of a Secret Tory MP is an outrageous spoof of the classic political journal that pulls back the Lulu Lytle curtains to expose extraordinary goings-on at Westminster across a tumultuous twelve months

In a dazzling, lively new literary biography, Daisy Dunn weaves together the lives of two Roman greats: Pliny the Elder, author of Natural History, and his nephew Pliny the Younger, who inherited his uncle’s notebooks and intellectual legacy • Breathing vivid life back into the Plinys, Daisy Dunn charts the extraordinary lives of two outstanding minds and their lasting legacy on the world

In May 1941 Lena Mukhina was an ordinary teenage girl, living in Leningrad, worrying about her homework and whether Vova - the boy she liked - liked her. Like a good Soviet schoolgirl, she was also diligently learning German, the language of Russia's Nazi ally. And she was keeping a diary, in which she recorded her hopes and dreams. Then, on 22 June 1941, Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and declared war on the Soviet Union • All too soon, Leningrad was besieged and life became a living hell. Lena and her family fought to stay alive; their city was starving and its citizens were dying in their hundreds of thousands. From day to dreadful day, Lena records her experiences: the desperate hunt for food, the bitter cold of the Russian winter and the cruel deaths of those she loved

An essential read for anyone who has encountered a crisis of confidence • Where does self-confidence come from? How does it work? Why are some people more confident than others? On the surface, these seem like simple questions – but answers can feel hard to come by when we need them most • In this bestselling book, Charles Pepin brings to light the strange alchemy that is self-confidence. Pepin examines the role confidence plays in the lives of our most respected public figures including the likes of Madonna, Mozart, Frieda Kahlo, Martin Luther King and Serena Williams, and argues that above all, to live a life of confidence is to live a life of action • Drawing on the collective wisdom of philosophers, psychologists and the lives of people we encounter on a daily basis, Pepin invites us to probe the mystery and mastery of self-confidence

This extraordinary re-creation of the life of a medieval Italian merchant, Francesco di Marco Datini, is one of the greatest historical portraits written in the twentieth century • Drawing on an astonishing cache of letters unearthed centuries after Datini's death, it reveals to us a shrewd, enterprising, anxious man, as he makes deals, furnishes his sumptuous house, buys silks for his outspoken young wife and broods on his legacy. It is an unequalled source of knowledge about the texture of daily life in the small, earthy, violent, striving world of fourteenth-century Tuscany

From the acclaimed historian of global empire, the dramatic story of how steam power reshaped our cities and our seas, and forged a new world order • Steam power transformed our world, initiating the complex, resource-devouring industrial system the consequences of which we live with today. It revolutionized work and production, but also the ease and cost of movement over land and water. The result was to throw open vast areas of the world to the rampaging expansion of Europeans and Americans on a scale previously unimaginable • Unlocking the World is the captivating history of the great port cities which emerged as the bridgeheads of this new steam-driven economy, reshaping not just the trade and industry of the regions around them but their culture and politics as well