Profile Books Keeping On Keeping On Bennett Alan

Here are Alan Bennett's four hugely admired, triumphantly reviewed and bestselling stories, brought together in one book for the first time • Like everything Bennett does, these stories are playful, witty and painfully observant of ordinary people's foibles. They all have brilliant twists, are immensely entertaining and highly moral. And all are modern classics • The Laying on of Hands • The painfully observant account of a memorial service for a masseur to the famous • The Clothes They Stood Up In • The comic tale of an elderly couple's trials after their flat is stripped completely bare • Father! Father! Burning Bright • The savage satire on the family of a dying man who rules over them from his hospital bed • The Lady in the Van • The true story of the eccentric old woman who is invited to live in a homeowner's front garden

In the bleak midwinter ... murder awaits • The halls might be decked, and the mistletoe hung, but in these ten classic crime stories you're more likely to come across a corpse under the Christmas tree than a present. From a Santa Claus with a secret to a violent theft that snowballs into something quite unexpected, pull up a chair, throw another log on the fire ... and let history's greatest crime writers surprise, delight and chill you to the bone

Alan Bennett's classic story about Queen Elizabeth II • What would happen if the Queen became a reader of taste and discernment rather than of Dick Francis? The answer is a perfect story • The Uncommon Reader is none other than HM the Queen who drifts accidentally into reading when her corgis stray into a mobile library parked at Buckingham Palace. She reads widely (JR Ackerley, Jean Genet, Ivy Compton Burnett and the classics) and intelligently. Her reading naturally changes her world view and her relationship with people like the oleaginous prime minister and his repellent advisers. She comes to question the prescribed order of the world and loses patience with much that she has to do. In short, her reading is subversive. The consequence is, of course, surprising, mildly shocking and very funny

In 1974, the homeless Miss Shepherd moved her broken down van into Alan Bennett's garden. Deeply eccentric and stubborn to her bones, Miss Shepherd was not an easy tenant. And Bennett, despite inviting her in the first place, was a reluctant landlord. And yet she lived there for fifteen years • This account of those years was first published in 1989 in the London Review of Books. The play premiered in 1999, directed by Nicholas Hytner and starring Dame Maggie Smith, who reprise their roles in this new film adaptation. Shot on location at Bennett's house, Alex Jennings plays the author, alongside household names including Frances de la Tour, Jim Broadbent and Dominic Cooper

Unexpected tales from the master of short fiction • The Shielding of Mrs Forbes • Graham Forbes is a disappointment to his mother, who thinks that if he must have a wife, he should have done better. Though her own husband isn't all that satisfactory either. Still, this is Alan Bennett, so what is happening in the bedroom (and in lots of other places too) is altogether more startling, perhaps shocking, and ultimately more true to people's predilections • The Greening of Mrs Donaldson • Mrs Donaldson is a conventional middle-class woman beached on the shores of widowhood after a marriage that had been much like many others: happy to begin with, then satisfactory and finally dull. But when she decides to take in two lodgers, her mundane life becomes much more stimulating

Over two decades ago we set up Sort of Books to help our friend, the some-time Genesis drummer Chris Stewart, bring his sunlit stories of life on a Spanish mountain farm to print. Ever the optimist, Chris hoped to earn enough money to buy a second-hand tractor for his farm. He got his tractor, as the book spent a year on the Sunday Times Top 10 charts and went on to sell a million and a half copies • His story is a classic. A dreamer and an itinerant sheep shearer, he moves with his wife Ana to a mountain farm in Las Alpujarras, an oddball region in the south of Spain. Misadventures gleefully unfold as Chris discovers that the owner had no intention of leaving. He meets their neighbours, an engaging mix of farmers, shepherds and New Age travellers, and their daughter Chloe is born, linking them irrevocably to their new life

Winner of the Autism Society of America's Dr. Temple Grandin Award Autism is a different way of being human: it offers possibilities and opportunities, not disabilities. By understanding autistic behaviours as responses based on an individual's experiences and as strategies to cope with a chaotic world, Barry Prizant seeks to enhance a child's abilities, to teach new skills, help individuals build on their strengths and develop coping strategies that could aid the fulfilment of every child's promise. Uniquely Human debunks many of the false and outdated stereotypes that surround autism. It is a first step towards a greater understanding of people with autism and an essential part of their successful participation in and contribution to society

Marx's Capital explained by its greatest expositor in simple, understandable terms • Marx's Capital is one of the most important texts of the modern era. The three volumes, published between 1867 and 1883, changed the destiny of countries, politics and people across the world - and continue to resonate today. In this book, David Harvey lays out their key arguments • In clear and concise language, Harvey describes the architecture of capital according to Marx, placing his observations in the context of capitalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. He considers the degree to which technological, economic and industrial change during the last 150 years means Marx's analysis and its application may need to be modified • Marx's trilogy concerns the circulation of capital: volume I, how labour increases the value of capital, which he called valorisation; volume II, on the realisation of this value, by selling it and turning it into money or credit; volume III, on what happens to the value next in processes of distribution

A unique history of humanity told through its seventeen defining equations; from Pythagoras to Calculus • From Newton's Law of Gravity to the Black-Scholes model used by bankers to predict the markets, equations, are everywhere - and they are fundamental to everyday life.Seventeen Equations that Changed the World examines seventeen ground-breaking equations that have altered the course of human history. He explores how Pythagoras's Theorem led to GPS and Satnav; how logarithms are applied in architecture; why imaginary numbers were important in the development of the digital camera, and what is really going on with Schrodinger's cat • Entertaining, surprising and vastly informative, Seventeen Equations that Changed the World is a highly original exploration - and explanation - of life on earth

Ten years on from first publication, a new edition of this invaluable and entertaining guide that shows just what effect everything has on carbon emissions, from a Google search to a plastic bag, from a flight to a volcano • How Bad Are Bananas? was a groundbreaking book when first published in 2009, when most of us were hearing the phrase 'carbon footprint' for the first time. Mike Berners-Lee set out to inform us what was important (aviation, heating, swimming pools) and what made very little difference (bananas, naturally packaged, are good!) • This new edition updates all the figures (from data centres to hosting a World Cup) and introduces many areas that have become a regular part of modern life - Twitter, the Cloud, Bitcoin, electric bikes and cars, even space tourism

Previously uncollected and unpublished short stories from a master of psychological suspense. Introduction from Sophie Hannah • New and uncollected tales of murder, mischief, magic and madness • Ruth Rendell was an acknowledged master of psychological suspense: these are ten (and a quarter) of her most chillingly compelling short stories, collected here together for the first time • In these tales, a businessman boasts about cheating on his wife, only to find the tables turned. A beautiful country rectory reverberates to the echo of a historical murder. A compulsive liar acts on impulse, only to be lead inexorably to disaster. And a wealthy man finds there is more to his wife's kidnapping than meets the eye • Atmospheric, gripping and never predictable, this is Ruth Rendell at her inimitable best

However far you travel, trouble has a way of finding you out • The summer holidays are a chance to escape from it all, to shrug off the troubles and cares of everyday life, and lounge on warm sands or sip a cool drink in the shade of a city square. But, as the characters in this murderously good collection of classic crime stories discover to their cost ... sometimes it's not that easy to escape your fate • An impossible murder on a Cornish beach. A honeymoon in the Italian lakes that becomes a desperate search for the truth. An African safari that ends with the tables being turned. Even in a heatwave, these tales of murder and malice will chill you like a shadow sliding across the sun