Vintage books What Mental Illness Really Is… (and what it isn’t) Foulkes Lucy

Pleasure is one of the most fascinating aspects of being human. But what is it? • Exploring child development, philosophy, neuroscience and behavioural economics, Paul Bloom uncovers how universal habits explain what we like and why we like it • The average Briton spends over a day a week watching television. People slow their cars to look at gory accidents and go to sentimental movies that make them cry. Some men pay good money to be spanked by prostitutes • In this revealing and witty account, Paul Bloom examines the science behind these curious desires, attractions and tastes, exploring one of the most fascinating and fundamental engines of human behaviour

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

In The Day of the Locust a young artist, Tod Hackett, arrives in LA full of dreams. But celebrity and artifice rule and he soon joins the ranks of the disenchanted that drift around the fringes of Hollywood. When he meets Faye Greener, an aspiring actress, he is intoxicated and his desperate passion explodes into rage • Miss Lonelyhearts is a decidedly off-kilter, darkly comic tale set in New York in the early 30s. A nameless man is assigned to produce a newspaper advice column. It was meant to be a joke. But as endless letters from the Desperate, Sick-of-it-All and Disillusioned pile up for Miss Lonelyhearts's attention the joke begins to escape him

'As good as anything Tolstoy ever wrote... Self-assured, vital, unforgettable' Guardian • The title story of this collection is about a man battling a mysterious illness. His family visit his bedside, their faces masks of concern. His colleagues pay their respects but only think of the advantages created by his death. This intensely moving story of Ivan Ilyich's lonely end is one of the masterpieces of Tolstoy's late fiction

These interlocking essays uncover art as an active force in the world - neither elitist or remote, present to those who want it, affecting even those who don't. Winterson's own passionate vision of art is presented here, provocatively and personally, in pieces on Modernism, autobiography, style, painting, the future of fiction, in two essays on Virginia Woolf, and more intimately in pieces where she describes her relationship to her work and the books that she loves

On 11 March 2011, a massive earthquake sent a 120-foot-high tsunami smashing into the coast of north-east Japan. It was Japan’s greatest single loss of life since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki • Richard Lloyd Parry, an award-winning foreign correspondent, lived through the earthquake in Tokyo, and spent six years reporting from the epicentre. Learning about the lives of those affected through their own personal accounts, he paints a rich picture of the impact the tsunami had on day to day Japanese life • Heart-breaking and hopeful, this intimate account of a tragedy unveils the unique nuances of Japanese culture, the tsunami’s impact on Japan’s stunning and majestic landscape and the psychology of its people • Ghosts of the Tsunami is an award-winning classic of literary non-fiction

We are living in the anthropocene – an epoch where everything is being determined by the activities of just one soft-skinned, warm-blooded, short-lived, pedestrian species • How do we make our way through the ruins that we have made? • This anthology tries to answer this as it explores new and enduring cultural landscapes, in a celebration of local distinctiveness that includes new work from some of our finest writers. We have memories of childhood homes from Adam Thorpe, Marina Warner and Sean O’Brien; we journey with John Burnside to the Arizona desert, with Hugh Brody to the Canadian Arctic; going from Tessa Hadley’s hymn to her London garden to caving in the Mendips with Sean Borodale to shell-collecting on a Suffolk beach with Julia Blackburn

Discover Henry James's most famous and terrifying story in an edition which also includes a unique selection of his best loved ghost stories • A young governess is sent to a great country house to care for two orphaned children. To begin with Flora and Miles seem to be model pupils but gradually the governess starts to suspect that something is very wrong with them. As she sets out to uncover the corrupt secrets of the house she becomes more and more convinced that something evil is watching her

Uncovering the mystery of her mother's disappearance as a child: Laura Cumming, prize-winning author and art critic, takes a closer look at her family story • Autumn 1929 - a young girl is kidnapped from a beach. Five agonising days go by before she is discovered safe and well in a nearby village. The child remembers nothing of these events and at home, nobody ever speaks of them again • Decades later, Laura Cumming delves into the mystery surrounding her mother's disappearance. Examining everything from old family photos to letters, tickets and recipes, she uncovers a series of secrets and lies perpetuated not just by her family but by the whole community and in doing so unlocks a mystery almost a century old

In August 1914 the two greatest navies in the world confronted each other across the North Sea. At first there were skirmishes, then battles off the coasts of England and Germany and in the far corners of the world, including the Falklands. The British attempted to force the Dardanelles with battleships - which led to the Gallipoli catastrophe. As the stalemate on the ground on the Western Front continued, the German Navy released a last strike against the British 'ring of steel'. The result was Jutland, a titanic and brutal battle between dreadnoughts. The knowledge, understanding and literary power Robert K. Massie brings to this story is unparalleled. There will never again be a war like this in which seagoing monsters hurl shells at each other until one side is destroyed

A powerful, personal agenda-changing exploration of poverty in today's Britain • 'When every day of your life you have been told you have nothing of value to offer, that you are worth nothing to society, can you ever escape that sense of being 'lowborn' no matter how far you've come?' • Kerry Hudson is proudly working class but she was never proudly poor. The poverty she grew up in was all-encompassing, grinding and often dehumanising. Always on the move with her single mother, Kerry attended nine primary schools and five secondaries, living in B&Bs and council flats. She scores eight out of ten on the Adverse Childhood Experiences measure of childhood trauma • Twenty years later, Kerry's life is unrecognisable. She's a prizewinning novelist who has travelled the world

In his eightieth year, Colin Thubron takes a dramatic and often treacherous journey from the Amur's secret source to its giant mouth, covering almost 3,000 miles • Rising in the Mongolian mountains and flowing through Siberia to the Pacific, the Amur River forms the tense border between Russia and China. This is the most densely fortified frontier on Earth • Harassed by injury and by arrest from the local police, Thubron makes his way along both the Russian and Chinese shores. By the time he reaches the river's desolate end, a whole, pivotal world has come alive