Want to know more about history and politics? Then you should probably go and read a proper book. Fancy a laugh at some smutty jokes? Then go and read Viz. But if you fancy a combination of the two, this is the book for you. In Off The Record, bitter and twisted leftie news reporter Jonathan Pie picks ten of the world's worst wankers and tears them apart. Here you'll find the answers to some difficult questions. Was Blair just a Tory in disguise? Did Cameron really have sexual relations with that pig? Just how the fuck did we end up with President Donald Trump? It's the ultimate guide to political arseholery. With extra swearing.

A fun, illustrated history of the umbrella's surprising place in life and literature Humans have been making, using, perfecting, and decorating umbrellas for millennia--holding them over the heads of rulers, signalling class distinctions, and exploring their full imaginative potential in folk tales and novels. In the spirit of the best literary gift books, Brolliology is a beautifully designed and illustrated tour through literature and history. It surprises us with the crucial role that the oft-overlooked umbrella has played over centuries--and not just in keeping us dry. Marion Rankine elevates umbrellas to their rightful place as an object worthy of philosophical inquiry. As Rankine points out, many others have tried. Derrida sought to find the meaning (or lack thereof) behind an umbrella mentioned in Nietzsche's notes, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote essays on the handy object, and Dickens used umbrellas as a narrative device for just about everything. She tackles the gender, class, and social connotations of carrying an umbrella and helps us realize our deep connection to this most forgettable everyday object--which we only think of when we don't have one.

'I devoured A Manual for Heartache in one sitting . . . a kind, honest and wise book about how to make a friend of sadness.' - Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. When Cathy Rentzenbrink was still a teenager, her happy family was torn apart by an unthinkable tragedy. In A Manual for Heartache she describes how she learnt to live with grief and loss and find joy in the world again. She explores how to cope with life at its most difficult and overwhelming and how we can emerge from suffering forever changed, but filled with hope. This is a moving, warm and uplifting book that offers solidarity and comfort to anyone going through a painful time, whatever it might be. It's a book that will help to soothe an aching heart and assure its readers that they're not alone.

With a new introduction for the paperback. London is a supreme achievement of civilization. It offers fulfilments of body and soul, encourages discovery and invention. It is a place of freedom, multiplicity and co-existence. It is a Liberal city, which means it stands for values now in peril. London has also become its own worst enemy, testing to destruction the idea that the free market alone can build a city, a fantastical wealth machine that denies too many of its citizens a decent home or living. In this thought-provoking, fearless, funny and subversive book, Rowan Moore shows how London’s strength depends on the creative and mutual interplay of three forces: people, business and state. To find responses to the challenges of the twenty-first century, London must rediscover its genius for popular action and bold public intervention. The global city above all others, London is the best place to understand the way the world’s cities are changing. It could also be, in the shape of a living, churning city of more than eight million people, the most powerful counter-argument to the extremist politics of the present.

“A cunning, often hilarious mystery for the Mensa set and fans of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.” —Heller McAlpin, NPR Paris, 1980. The literary critic Roland Barthes dies—struck by a laundry van—after lunch with the presidential candidate François Mitterand. The world of letters mourns a tragic accident. But what if it wasn’t an accident at all? What if Barthes was . . . murdered? In The Seventh Function of Language, Laurent Binet spins a madcap secret history of the French intelligentsia, starring such luminaries as Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Julia Kristeva—as well as the hapless police detective Jacques Bayard, whose new case will plunge him into the depths of literary theory (starting with the French version of Roland Barthes for Dummies). Soon Bayard finds himself in search of a lost manuscript by the linguist Roman Jakobson on the mysterious “seventh function of language.” A brilliantly erudite comedy, The Seventh Function of Language takes us from the cafés of Saint-Germain to the corridors of Cornell University, and into the duels and orgies of the Logos Club, a secret philosophical society that dates to the Roman Empire. Binet has written both a send-up and a wildly exuberant celebration of the French intellectual tradition. “Binet juxtaposes car chases with highbrow in-jokes and ruminations. The book is a love letter to the power of language—the most dangerous weapon is the tongue.” —The New Yorker “An affectionate send-up of an Umberto Eco–style intellectual thriller that doubles as an exemplar of the genre, filled with suspense, elaborate conspiracies, and exotic locales.” —Esquire

The residents of Lake Eden, Minnesota, are planning to paint the town red, white, and blue to celebrate the Fourth of July—but the fireworks are already going off at Hannah Swensen’s bake shop, The Cookie Jar. . . Lemon Meringue Pie Murder Hannah Swensen thought she’d finally discovered the recipe for a perfect life. But her sometime beau Norman Rhodes tosses a surprise ingredient into the mix when he phones to tell her he’s just bought a house from local drugstore clerk Rhonda Scharf—which he plans to tear down in order to build the dream home he and Hannah designed. It seems the plan has been cooking for quite some time, and Hannah’s shocked. Especially since her ring finger is still very much bare. . . The good news is that the soon-to-be-torn-down house is full of antiques—and Norman has given Hannah and her mother first dibs. They uncover some gorgeous old furniture, a patchwork quilt . . . and Rhonda Scharf’s dead body. A little more sleuthing turns up the half-eaten remains of a very special dinner for two—and one of The Cookie Jar’s famous lemon meringue pies. Now it’s up to Hannah to turn up the heat—and get busy tracking down clues. Starting in her very own kitchen. Includes nine original cookie and dessert recipes for you to try! “Tasty . . . Hannah is irresistible as a cookie fresh from the oven.” —Publishers Weekly

The hilarious feminist account of the female body by the award-winning comedian **BUY SARA PASCOE'S LATEST BOOK SEX POWER MONEY NOW** 'HILARIOUS' Daily Telegraph 'Brilliant' Frankie Boyle Sometimes Sara Pascoe confuses herself. She gets wildly and pointlessly jealous. She spends too much time hating her bum. And you know what she hates more than her bum? Her preoccupation with her bum. She's had sexual experiences with boys she wasn't really into, but still got a post-coital crush on them. She's ruined brand-new relationships by immediately imagining them going into reverse. There was so much about her behaviour that Pascoe wanted to understand. So she started researching what makes us - women - tick. And what she read made her eyes fall out of her face. Reader, here is everything science has to tell us about love, sexuality, infidelity, boobs, periods, pubes, broodiness, and clever old fat. Merry Christmas and Hallelujah! Suddenly being a woman doesn't look like such a minefield after all. 'Fresh and honest.' GUARDIAN 'Timely and intelligent.' THE TIMES 'Funny, sad, angry, affronted, engaging and enlightening.' STYLIST

One of NPR’s Best Books of the Year: “Humorous, surprising, disarmingly human” essays and comic pieces from one of England’s national treasures (The Washington Post Book World). A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Best Book of the Year A Lambda Literary Award finalist Bringing together the hilarious, revealing, and lucidly intelligent writing of one of England’s best-known literary figures, Keeping On Keeping On contains Tony Award–winning playwright, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, and actor Alan Bennett’s diaries from 2005 to 2015—with everything from his much celebrated essays to his irreverent comic pieces and reviews—reflecting on a decade that saw four major theater premieres and the films of The History Boys and The Lady in the Van. This entertaining chronicle of a life in letters comes from a “singular voice [with] a highly tuned ironic wit—his special brand of gentleness laced with arsenic” (The New York Times Book Review). “Part of the pleasure of his diaries is the sense that [Bennett] tells them things he would never say out loud.” —The New York Review of Books “Consistently funny and touching.” —The Telegraph

In this groundbreaking book on one of the world's greatest economic crises, Hacker and Pierson explain why the richest of the rich are getting richer while the rest of the world isn't.

From bestselling author Ben Macintyre, the true untold story of history's most famous traitor