Jeremy Neville

While 'Lark Rise to Candleford', Flora Thompson's much-loved portrait of life in the English countryside, has inspired a hit television series, relatively little is known about the author herself. Here, Richard Mabey retraces her life and her transformation from a post-office clerk who left school at fourteen to a sophisticated professional writer.

The music of the medieval, Renaissance, and baroque periods have been repeatedly discarded and rediscovered ever since they were new. An interest in music of the past has been characteristic of a part of the musical world since the early 19th century.

In recent years this interest has taken on particular meaning, representing two specific trends: first, a rediscovery of little-known underappreciated repertories, and second, an effort to recover lost performing styles. Much has been gained in the 20th century from the study and revival of instruments, playing techniques, and repertories.

In this Very Short Introduction, Thomas Forrest Kelly frames chapters on the forms, techniques, and repertories practices of the medieval, Renaissance, and baroque periods with discussion of why old music has been and should be revived, as well as a short history of early music revivals. 

Gavin Francis fulfilled a lifetime's ambition when he spent fourteen months as the base-camp doctor at Halley, an isolated British research station on the Caird Coast of Antarctica. He explores a world of beauty and hardship, living at 50°C below zero, and the unexpected comfort that the penguin community bring.

It is 140 years since England first played Test match cricket and, for much of that time, it has struggled to perform to the best of its capabilities. It was only in the 1990s that Team England began to receive the best possible support from an ever-increasing backroom team. As England play their 1000th Test, this is an insight into the ups and downs of their story.

A concise overview of Verdi, the man and the artist, tracing his ascent from humble beginnings to the status of a cultural patriarch of the new Italy, whose cause he had done much to promote, and the operatic world in which he worked.

It is ninety years since the BBC made its first broadcast and the British love affair with radio began. This is a journey through that fascinating history and a celebration of the many wonderful voices that were part of it: The Goons and Kenneth Horne, comedy greats of the 1950s; John Peel, Alan Freeman and other heroes of the pirate stations; all the way up to some of the much-loved voices of today.

Charismatic, insatiable and cruel, Henry VIII was a king who became mesmerized by his own legend - and in the process destroyed and remade England. In this revealing account, John Guy looks behind the mask into Henry's mind to explore how he understood the world and his place in it.

The Strauss name and their music are forever intertwined with Vienna. This remarkable family transformed and popularised the waltz, delighting all of Viennese society with their prolific compositions. But behind the melody lay a darker discord, as the Strausses tore themselves apart while Vienna itself struggled to secure its place in a rapidly changing world.

Over the last 100 years the Imperial War Museum has been gathering together a collection of tens of thousands of letters and archives from British and Commonwealth troops serving on the front line, in conflicts from the First World War through to the ongoing war in Afghanistan. This is a selection of some of the most emotive of these letters.

In 1895, George Whitehouse arrived at the east African post of Mombasa to perform an engineering miracle: the building of the Mombasa-Nairobi-Lake Victoria Railway – a 600-mile route that was largely unmapped and barely explored. This book explores the building of this great railway but above all, it is the story of the white intruders whose combination of avarice, honour and tenacious courage made them a breed apart.

Though rarely remembered today, the Nazis occupied the British Channel Islands for much of the Second World War. In piecing together the fragments left behind – from the love affairs between island women and German soldiers, to the individual acts of resistance – Madeleine Bunting has brought this uncomfortable episode of British history into full view with spellbinding clarity.

The story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's life is well known. But in this comprehensive biography, John Suchet examines the many myths and misunderstandings surrounding the world's best-loved composer.

Brian Kay has spent his entire working life in a career that is both successful and rewarding. He was the founder bass of the internationally renowned vocal group The King's Singers, and spent 25 years writing and presenting thousands of programmes for BBC Radio. His fascinating collection of memories and anecdotes throws a hugely entertaining light on a life entirely devoted to the joy of music and music-making.

Days before the birth of his first son, writer and academic John Hull started to go blind. He would lose his sight entirely, plunged into darkness, unable to distinguish any sense of light or shadow. With astonishing lucidity of thought and no self-pity, he finds a new way of experiencing the world and of seeing the light despite the darkness.

The Inklings were an influential group of writers, centred on C S Lewis and J R Tolkien, who met regularly in the pubs of Oxford, to read and discuss their latest writings. Colin Duriez explores their lives, their writings, their ideas and crucially the influence they had on each other.

This is the heart-warming story of Juan Salvador the penguin, rescued by young teacher, Tom Michell, from an oil slick in Uruguay, just days before a new term starts at his prestigious Argentine boarding school. When the bird refuses to leave Tom's side, he has no choice but to smuggle it across the border, through customs, and back to school.

Rageh Omaar reported from Iraq for six years prior to the conflict in 2003. When war came, instead of retreating he chose to stay in Baghdad, to see first hand the country he loved crumble beneath the Allied onslaught. His shocking account is a heartbreaking testament to a people enduring deprivation and destruction.

A fascinating tour through the curious history of Western civilization told through its most emblematic invention - the book. As well as leafing through the well-known titles that have helped shape the world in which we live, Oliver Tearle also dusts off some of the more neglected items to be found hidden among the bookshelves of the past.

Writer, explorer and adventurer Rick Ridgeway offers an account of his journey, on foot for a month, from the summit of Mount Kilamanjaro, through the plains of Tsavo, to the sea, providing a ground-level view of East Africa as it is today and how it once was before the incursion of European civilization.

Quantum physics is strange. It tells us that a particle can be in two places at once. Indeed, that particle is also a wave, and everything in the quantum world can be described entirely in terms of waves, or entirely in terms of particles, whichever you prefer. 

All of this was clear by the end of the 1920s. But to the great distress of many physicists, let alone ordinary mortals, nobody has ever been able to come up with a common sense explanation of what is going on. Physicists have sought 'quanta of solace' in a variety of more or less convincing interpretations. Popular science master John Gribbin takes us on a delightfully mind-bending tour through the 'big six', from the Copenhagen interpretation via the pilot wave and many worlds approaches.

All of them are crazy, and some are more crazy than others, but in this world crazy does not necessarily mean wrong, and being more crazy does not necessarily mean more wrong.

Eric Newby and Wanda, his life-long travel companion and wife, set out on an incredible journey: to travel the 1,200-mile length of India's holy river, the Ganges. Their plan is to begin in the great plain of Hardwar and finish in the Bay of Bengal, but the journey almost immediately becomes markedly slower and more treacherous than either had imagined!

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was one of the most successful composers that Russia has ever produced, but his path to success was not an easy one. John Suchet examines the complex and contradictory character of this great artist, long hidden behind sanitised depictions by the Russian authorities, and how he came to take his rightful place among the world’s greatest composers.

A century after his death, Gustav Mahler is the most important composer of modern times. Displacing Beethoven as a box-office draw, heard in Hollywood films and on state occasions, his music inspires particular devotion. Some believe it helps heal emotional wounds, others find intellectual fascination in its contradictory meanings, and many feel that the music captures the yearnings and anxieties of our post-industrial society. In this highly original account of the composer's life and work, Norman Lebrecht explores the Mahler Effect, asking why Mahler's music has become the soundtrack to our twenty-first-century lives.