Böcker av Glyn Hughes

There's a set of books which you're just supposed to know about, at least if you live in The West and fancy the idea of being thought 'educated'. There's the Bible, Shakespeare, James Joyce, Walter Scott and Machiavelli. Dr Jekyll, Tiny Tim, Starbuck, Socrates, Mr. Scrooge, Raskolnikov, Einstein and Enkidu. The Brontes and Boswell, Wordsworth, Newton Confucius and Don Quixote. Here they all are. 100 of the most quoted, most known, works of all time, in the original author's own words, but squashed up into nice little abridgements you can read in an hour or so. Little versions which smell and sound just like the originals. And ... with The Hundred Books it becomes possible to read the whole thing as a single narrative, to discover a Pisgah View of the written history of the great grand thing of how We got where We are now, in way that's just impossible for ordinary mortals. Read the lot, you'll love it, and you'll never, ever, be bored in an airport again.

Europe eh? Curved bananas made illegal! 11 inch pizzas banned! Acres outlawed! Ambulances turn yellow for Europe! Army's gun salute banned as too noisy! Bagpipes to be made illegal! Brandy Butter Banned! British lav to be replaced with Euro-loo! British rhubarb to be straight! Brussels threatens walnuts! Carved horns to be banned! Chocolate to be 'vegelate'! ... these important observations on Euro-interference all appeared in British newspapers as 'news'. Find out how true they, and hundreds more, really are...

Food historian Glyn Hughes rediscovers the Old English Christmas, and the Older English Yule. Here are Kings and Puritans, Yule Babies, Christmas Pottage, Queen Victoria's mincemeat recipe, Christmas Cheese and Salmagundi. Here is Durham Fluffin, Pepper Cake, the shape for mince pies and nearly one hundred actual, original, dishes gleaned from from half-a-thousand years of English cookery books. Here you can rediscover the Spirit of Christmas Past and, I hope, make it part of Christmas yet to come. (You're excused putting tripe in the mincemeat, but if you really want to, you'll find the 1764 recipe here) Part of the Foods of England project.

45 Classics of Philosophy, in their own words, abridged into readable little epitomes. Including: The Ancient Greeks, Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Aristotle, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, St Augustine, Severinus Boethius, Thomas More, Niccolò Machiavelli, Nicolaus Copernicus, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Isaac Newton, John Locke, Gottfried Leibniz, George Berkeley, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraf, Auguste Comte, G.W.F Hegel, Marx And Engels, Arthur Schopenhauer, Henry D Thoreau, John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, A.J. Ayer, Jean-Paul Sartre.