Showing titles in Essays

Drawing on more than 30 years of therapeutic encounters with people facing hurdles in their love lives, former chair of the British Psychoanalytic Council Susanna Abse takes us deep inside one of the most fascinating realms there is: other people's relationships. From dealing with infidelity to navigating our changing role within a single relationship over the course of a lifetime, Tell Me the Truth About Love sheds vivid light on the human heart and its struggle to both embrace life's greatest gift and protect itself from pain.

In On the Genealogy of Morals, subtitled "A Polemic", Nietzsche furthers his pursuit of a clarity that is less tainted by imposed prejudices. He looks at the way attitudes towards 'morality' evolved and the way congenital ideas of morality were heavily colored by the Judaic and Christian traditions.

Known as the ‘four horsemen’ of New Atheism, these four big thinkers of the 21st century met only once. Their electrifying examination of ideas on this remarkable occasion was intense and wide-ranging. Everything that was said as they agreed and disagreed with one another, interrogated ideas and exchanged insights - about religion and atheism, science and sense - speaks with urgency to our present age.

Picking up where Things I Don't Want to Know left off, this short, exhilarating memoir shows a writer in radical flux, facing separation and bereavement and emerging renewed from the ashes of a former life. Faced with the restrictions of conventional living, she dismantles her life, expands it and puts it back together in a new shape. Writing as brilliantly as ever about mothers and daughters, about social pressures and the female experience, Deborah Levy confronts a world not designed to accommodate difficult women and ultimately remakes herself in her own image.

There is no more dramatic scene in literary history than the stormy night by Lake Geneva when Byron, Claire Clairmont, Polidori and the Shelleys met to talk of horror and the unexplained. From that emerged Frankenstein, a monster who has haunted imaginations for 200 years. Miranda Seymour illustrates the rich and unexplored life of Mary Shelley. Everything from her childhood to her tempestuous relationship with Percy Shelley; Seymour brings to life the brilliant mind that created Frankenstein through unexplored and intriguing sources.

Kate Humble has a knack for sharing her own journey towards a more pleasing and purposeful life in a way that inspires listeners, enables them to reassess their own lives and helps them achieve their personal goals. Having encouraged listeners to reconnect with nature in Thinking on My Feet and simplify their lifestyles in A Year of Living Simply, she turns now to reimagining the ideal home.

The inspirational wisdom of Oprah Winfrey, collected for the first time in a beautiful book. After film critic Gene Siskel asked her, 'What do you know for sure?' Oprah Winfrey began writing the 'What I Know For Sure' column in O, The Oprah Magazine. Saying that the question offered her a way to take 'stock of her life', Oprah has penned one column a month over the last 14 years.

From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Charlie Chaplin, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record - and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now.

Sarah Polley's work as an actor, screenwriter and director is celebrated for its honesty, complexity and deep humanity. She brings all those qualities, along with her exquisite storytelling chops, to these six essays. Each one captures a piece of Polley's life as she remembers it, while at the same time examining the fallibility of memory, the mutability of reality in the mind, and the possibility of experiencing the past anew, as the person she is now but was not then. As Polley writes, the past and present are in a “reciprocal pressure dance”.

A View from the Stars features a range of short works from the past three decades of New York Times bestselling author Cixin Liu's prolific career, putting his nonfiction essays and short stories side-by-side for the first time. This collection includes essays and interviews that shed light on Liu's experiences as a reader, writer, and lover of science fiction throughout his life, as well as short fiction that gives glimpses into the evolution of his imaginative voice over the years.

Novelist, cultural observer and social satirist Lionel Shriver is among the sharpest talents of our age. A writer who embraces ‘under-expressed, unpopular or downright dangerous’ points of view, she regularly deplores the conformity of thought and attitude that has overtaken society. Bringing together thirty-five works curated from her many columns, features, essays and op-eds for the likes of the Spectator and Guardian, speeches and reviews, and some unpublished pieces, Abominations reveals Shriver at her most iconoclastic and personal.

Between 1821 and 1826, the prolific writer and journalist William Cobbett travelled the countryside of the South of England on foot and horseback. Rural Rides is a fascinating account of his journeys, and depicts a way of life in transition, juxtaposing lyrical descriptions of the countryside with criticism of the poverty of agricultural workers. A man of radical politics who encouraged the rural rising of 1830, Cobbett went on to become MP for Oldham and sought to represent the interests of both industrial and agricultural workers. Above all, Rural Rides celebrates agrarian England.

La cocaina: la merce più usata, trafficata, desiderata del nostro tempo. Le infinite vie del narcotraffico, dal Messico alle spiagge di Miami, dalla Colombia alla Russia, dall'Africa alle strade di Milano, New York, Parigi. Il viaggio di un grande scrittore nei gironi infernali del mondo contemporaneo, dove la ferocia dilaga incontrastata ma i boss hanno imparato tutte le regole più sofisticate del business. Uno straordinario romanzo-verità.

With a foreword by Neil Gaiman Terry Pratchett has earned a place in the hearts of readers the world over with his bestselling Discworld series – but in recent years he has become equally well-known and respected as an outspoken campaigner for causes including Alzheimer’s research and animal rights.

Lane Moore is a rare performer who is as impressive onstage - whether hosting her iconic show Tinder Live or being the enigmatic front woman of It Was Romance - as she is on the page, as both a former writer for The Onion and an award-winning sex and relationships editor for Cosmopolitan. But her story has had its obstacles, including being her own parent, living in her car as a teenager, and moving to New York City to pursue her dreams. Through it all, she looked to movies, TV, and music as the family and support systems she never had.

Oliver Sacks’ compassionate tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have fundamentally changed the way we think of our own minds. In Musicophilia, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians and everyday people - those struck by affliction, by unusual talent and even, in one case, by lightning - to show not only that music occupies more areas of our brain than language does but also that it can torment, calm, organise and heal.

I Strongly Believe in Incredible Things is a book of poetic prose, musings, short stories and biro drawings detailing a selection of the Earth’s incredible things by award-winning writer, comedian, artist and podcaster Rob Auton. Unique, enchanting and utterly life-affirming, this is a collection that comes together to create the opposite of the news, becoming the tonic for the complicated gin that is the world we find ourselves in today.

Every memoir is a battle between reality and invention - but in her follow up to Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys., Viv Albertine has reinvented the genre with her unflinching honesty. To Throw Away Unopened is a fearless dissection of one woman's obsession with the truth - the truth about family, power and her identity as a rebel and outsider. It is a gaping wound of a book, both an exercise in bloodletting and psychological archaeology, excavating what lies beneath: the fear, the loneliness, the anger.

George Orwell's moving reflections on the English character and his passionate belief in the need for political change. 'The Lion and the Unicorn' was written in London during the worst period of the Blitz. It is vintage Orwell, a dynamic outline of his belief in socialism, patriotism and an English revolution. His fullest political statement, it has been described as 'one of the most moving and incisive portraits of the English character' and is as relevant now as it ever has been.

When it comes to how societies commemorate their own distant dreams and catastrophes, we often think of books, archives, or memorials carved from stone. But in Time's Echo, Jeremy Eichler makes a revelatory case for the power of music as culture's memory, an art form uniquely capable of carrying forward meaning from the past. Eichler shows how four towering composers - Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich - lived through the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust and later transformed their experiences into deeply moving works of music.