Profile Books Smut. Two Unseemly Stories Bennett Alan

A concise collection of Alan Bennett's latest diaries - and more • Following the phenomenally successful Writing Home and Untold Stories, Keeping On Keeping On contains Bennett's diaries 2005 to 2015, reflecting on a decade that saw four premieres at the National Theatre, a West End double-bill transfer, and the films of The History Boys and The Lady in the Van. There's a provocative sermon against private education, a passionate defence of the public library, a radio play and a screenplay, introductions and eulogies • An unforgettable record of life according to the inimitable Alan Bennett

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

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

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

Murder is best served ... ice cold • It's only the afternoon, but dusk is already falling and a log fire burning in the grate. Outside, frost coats the tree branches and snow sparkles on the ground. And somewhere in the darkness, a murderer is making plans • Here are ten classic crime stories for the winter months, from the greatest minds of the mystery genre. So bundle up, grab a glass of mulled wine, and get ready to be puzzled, astonished and entertained by these festive stories of murder and mayhem

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

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

A rich collection of classic Christmas mysteries • Christmas is a season of overindulgence. For most of us, that means an extra mince pie, a second helping of turkey, or perhaps a third glass of mulled wine. But for some, the festive season is a time to settle old scores, dispatch new enemies and indulge ... in murder • Here, ten masters of the genre serve up mystery and mayhem aplenty. From a dowager's missing jewels to a festive dinner gone horribly wrong, these classic crime stories will delight, puzzle and satisfy long after the last strands of tinsel have been cleared away

Take the holiday of a lifetime with history's greatest mystery writers • It's the height of summer. As the heat shimmers on the streets and ice cream melts onto sticky fingers, tempers begin to rise and old grudges surface. From Cornish beaches to the French Riviera, it's not just a holiday that's on people's minds ... it's murder • In these ten classic stories from writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Cyril Hare and Gladys Mitchell, you'll find mayhem and mysteries aplenty. So grab the suncream and head down to the beach - if you dare

A quirky language-lovers tour of the twenty most-spoken languages in the world - what puts them a cut above the other six thousand? • If you were to master the twenty languages discussed in Babel, you could talk with three quarters of the world's population. But what makes these languages stand out amid the world's estimated 6,500 tongues? • Gaston Dorren delves deep into the linguistic oddities and extraordinary stories of these diverse lingua francas, tracing their origins and their sometimes bloody rise to greatness. He deciphers their bewildering array of scripts, presents the gems and gaps in their vocabularies and charts their coinages and loans. He even explains how their grammars order their speakers' worldview • Combining linguistics and cultural history, Babel takes us on an intriguing tour of the world, addressing such questions as how tiny Portugal spawned a major world language and Holland didn't, why Japanese women talk differently from men, what it means for Russian to be 'related' to English, and how non-alphabetic scripts, such as those of India and China, do the same job as our 26 letters