A Certain Style  Tricia Guild  £40.00

For almost 40 years, Tricia Guild has been setting the pace with her collections of fabrics, wallpapers and furnishings for interiors. Her extraordinary gift for colour, her brilliance at mixing pattern and her elegant view of the world make her collections and the rooms in which they are applied uniquely stylish and beautiful. Over the years her collections have varied from vibrant hot colours to cool shades of white, from floral prints in every shape and size to elegant stripes and plaids, yet in every case they are instantly recognisable. To celebrate these four decades at the forefront of interior design, Tricia now presents a collection of international locations decorated with her latest and arguably most beautiful designs. Not retrospective but a confident statement encapsulating everything that is memorable about her style. Each of the fourteen locations featured in the book is viewed throughout, to show how to enhance different types of room and connects spaces effortlessly and elegantly.

Tolstoy: A Russian Life Rosamund Bartlett £25.00

A hundred years ago in November 1910, Count Leo Tolstoy died on a remote Russian railway station, attended by the world's media, taken ill as he was finally attempting to escape his decadent (as he saw it), aristocratic family life. Tolstoy has been universally recognised as a colossus of world literature whether by his contemporaries or critics as diverse as Nabokov or F.R. Leavis. This exceptional biography draws extensively on the many fascinating new sources which have been published about Tolstoy since the collapse of Communism to write about one of the most compelling, maddening, brilliant and contrary people who has ever lived. We discover a remarkable and long life in one of the most fascinating and turbulent periods of Russian history, straddling the 19th and early 20th centuries. Tolstoy spent that life rebelling - not only against conventional ideas about literature and art but against traditional education and eventually against family life, organised religion and the state.

Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary of Modern Life  £9.99

In 2009 Dr Samuel Johnson made a surprise re-emergence from eighteenth century retirement and began Twittering. It proved the perfect vehicle for his acerbic, aphoristic wit and he has quickly become the darling of the site. "The Guardian" calls him the 'greatest' thing on Twitter and the Telegraph dubs him its 'star'. Our gouty man of letters finds the modern world in a parlous state. It is peopled with fools like 'Raisin-ey'd Tyrant Mister Nick Griffin' and "Baboon-Slayer, Fop, Macaroni, Dandy & Folderol, Mister AA Gill'. His attempts to negotiate a path through the vagaries of modern life do not fare well either - for instance, on a trip to "Mister Liberty's blast'd Haberdashery', upon finding 'all else clad as Lumber-Jacks, I left thwart'd & alone...unwilling to dress as an unmanly Pastiche of Mister Cobain'. In his "Dictionary of Modern Life", our gouty man of letters takes a wickedly funny look at all things modern. From "Top Gear" and the "Daily Mail" to "Dubstep" and "Celebrity Big Brother", nothing escapes his sardonic gaze.

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The Blitz  Juliet Gardiner   £20.00

Leon: Naturally Fast Food   Dimbleby & Vincent   £20.00

The follow up to the first Leon cookbook, which was hugely successful, is again a book of two halves. The first half is 'Fast Food', which contains recipes for every occasion that take a maximum of 20 minutes to prepare: from a work day breakfast and children's meals to simple suppers and party food. The second half is 'Slow Fast Food' which contains things that can be made in advance when you have time, to enjoy when you don't have time - perfect for entertaining after work or at the weekend. There is plenty in both halves for both the experienced cook and the culinary adventurer in search of inspiration.