Vintage books The Weather Experiment. The Pioneers who Sought to see the Future Moore Peter

Much more than just another field guide or a natural history of butterflies Rainbow Dust explores the ways in which butterflies delight and inspire us all, naturalists and non-naturalists alike • Beginning with the author's own experience of hunting and rearing butterflies as a boy, Peter Marren considers the special place of the butterfly in art, literature, advertising and science, and, latterly, our attempts to conserve them • Rainbow Dust takes in the controversy over collecting, the women who studied them and the curious details that lead to butterflies being feared as well as loved. This is a celebration of butterflies; one shot through with a sense of wonder but also of sorrow at what we are losing

A neurologist explores the very real world of psychosomatic illness • Pauline first became ill when she was fifteen. What seemed to be a urinary infection became joint pain, then life-threatening appendicitis. After a routine operation Pauline lost all the strength in her legs. Shortly afterwards, convulsions started. But Pauline’s tests are normal: her symptoms seem to have no physical cause whatsoever • This may be an extreme case, but Pauline is not alone. As many as a third of people visiting their GP have symptoms that are medically unexplained. In most, an emotional root is suspected which is often the last thing a patient wants to hear and a doctor to say • We accept our hearts can flutter with excitement and our brows can sweat with nerves, but on this journey into the very real world of psychosomatic illness, Suzanne O'Sullivan finds the secrets we are all capable of keeping from ourselves

At the age of sixteen, Marc Hamer left home with only a rucksack and started walking. By day, he observed the animals and birds. By night, he slept under hedges, in woodlands and on riverbanks. It was the beginning of a life in nature • Years later, now working as a gardener and mole-catcher in the Welsh countryside, Marc tells of the experiences that have shaped him and of the wonders that he encounters each day. He considers, too, the fascinating ways of the mole and the myths that surround this curious creature • This beautiful, meditative book explores what nature can teach us about ourselves and our search for contentment. It is a celebration of living peacefully and finding joy in the world around us

The truth behind Richard the Lionheart and Bad King John - brilliantly readable, scrupulously researched and full of powerful story-telling • Anyone who has seen The Lion in Winter will remember the vicious, compelling world of the Plantagenets and readers of the romance of Robin Hood will be familiar with the typecasting of Good King Richard, defending Christendom in the Holy Land, and Bad King John who usurps the kingdom in his absence. But do these popular stereotypes correspond with reality? • In this sweeping narrative, celebrated historian Frank McLynn turns the tables on modern revisionist historians and shows these larger-than-life characters as they really were - crusading, fighting vicious wars in France, negotiating with the papacy, engaging in ruthless dynastic intrigue, often against each other: in Richard's case, even holding the kingdom together when fighting in the Holy Land; and in John's, losing Normandy, catastrophically agonising the barons over Magna Carta and losing the Crown Jewels in the Wash

A lieutenant writes of digging through bodies that have the consistency of Camembert cheese; a mother sends flower seeds to her son at the Front, hoping that one day someone may see them grow; a nurse tends a man back to health knowing he will be court-martialled and shot as soon as he is fit. Edited by the bestselling author of Birdsong and Dr Hope Wolf, this is an original and illuminating non-fiction anthology of writing on the First World War • Diaries, letters and memories, testaments from ordinary people whose lives were transformed, are set alongside extracts from names that have become synonymous with the war, such as Siegfried Sassoon and T.E. Lawrence. A Broken World is an original collection of personal and defining moments that offer an unprecedented insight into the Great War as it was experienced and as it was remembered

World-renowned future forecaster, game designer, and New York Times bestselling author Jane McGonigal gives us the tools to imagine the future without fear • How can we be confident about making plans? • How might we feel secure despite the future being unknown? • How do we learn to feel at peace with the unexpected? • Today it feels more challenging than ever to feel unafraid, hopeful, and equipped to face the future with optimism. How do we map out our lives when it seems impossible to predict what the world will be like next week, let alone next year or next decade? What we need now are strategies to help us recover our confidence and creativity in facing uncertain futures • By learning to think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable you can better plan for a future you'd like to see

For the millions moved by Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, here is Miep Gies's own astonishing story. For more than two years, Miep and her husband helped hide the Franks from the Nazis. Like thousands of unsung heroes of the Holocaust, they risked their lives every day to bring food, news, and emotional support to its victims • From her remarkable childhood as a World War I refugee to the moment she places a small, red-orange-checkered diary - Anne's legacy - into Otto Frank's hands, Miep Gies remembers her days with simple honesty and shattering clarity. Each page rings with courage and heartbreaking beauty

In 1982, East Germany’s fearsome secret police – convinced that writers were embedding subversive messages in their work – decided to train their own writers, weaponising poetry in the struggle against the class enemy. Once a month, a group of soldiers and border guards gathered in a heavily guarded military compound in East Berlin for meetings to learn how to write lyrical verse • Journalist Philip Oltermann spent five years rifling through Stasi files, digging out lost volumes of poetry and tracking down surviving members of this Red poet’s society, to illustrate the little known story in which spies turned poets and poets spies

Raising kids can sometimes feel like society has ended, so why not go one further, and actually plan for it? • From James Breakwell, who BuzzFeed called ‘the funniest dad on Twitter’, this hilarious book will help you through the rise of the undead, with helpful hints and tips on raising healthy, entirely human, offspring • So, hunker down, stock up on supplies (alcohol, primarily) and get ready for the long haul. Or alternatively, take the more proactive approach. Ransack your kid’s toy chest/weapons locker for zombie lacerating objects, bear arms with a terrorising lightweight buggy, or (not recommended) use your baby as a human missile. With kids and with zombies, the possibilities are truly endless. And with parenting in a zombie apocalypse, the rules change

Three generations. More than a century of famine, war, violence and love • At sixteen Nancy, the only member of her family to survive the Great Famine, leaves her small island for the mainland. Finding work in a grand house on the edge of Cork City, she feels irrepressibly drawn to the charismatic gardener Michael Egan, sparking a love affair that soon throws her into a fight for her life • In 1920, Nancy's son Jer has lived through battles of his own as a soldier in the Great War. Now drunk in a jail cell, he struggles to piece together where he has come from, and who he wants to be • And in the early 1980s, Jer's youngest child Nellie is nearing the end of her life in a council house, moments away from her childhood home; remembering the night when she and her family stole back something that was rightfully theirs, she imagines what lies in store for those who will survive her

Discover Pulitzer Prize-winning, Sunday Times bestselling author Anne Tyler's deeply personal American historical epic • Duncan Peck is a restless man, always on the move. His wife, Justine, is a fortune teller who can't remember the past. Her grandfather, Daniel, longs to find the brother who walked out of his life in 1912 never to be seen again. All three are taking journeys that lead back to the family's deepest roots, to a place where rebellion and acceptance have the haunting power to merge into one

Forever after, there were for them only two sorts of men: the men who were on the Line, and the rest of humanity, who were not • In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Burma Death Railway, surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever • This is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost