A selection of spellings and usages, covering capitalization, plurals, abbreviations and foreign names and phrases. This book also helps the readers with the difference between British and American usages, and includes information such as the names of all the Oxford colleges, or the new name for the Department of Trade and Industry.

After tales from the USA and Britain, Bill Bryson turns his roving eye to Australia, the only island that is also a continent and the only continent that is also a country. He tries to find out why Aussies are so cool, digging up a past that reveals convicts, explorers, gold diggers and outlaws.

Australia has more things that can kill you than anywhere else. Nevertheless, Bill Bryson journeyed to the country and promptly fell in love with it. The people are cheerful, their cities are clean, the beer is cold and the sun nearly always shines.

From the author of Notes from a Small Island and The Lost Continent comes this humorous report on his walk along the Appalachian Trail. The Trail is the longest continuous footpath in the world, and it snakes through some of the wildest and most spectacular landscapes in America.

An entertaining, anecdotal look at the origins of language and ideas in the USA. Bryson explains why two bicycle repairmen from Ohio succeeded in mastering manned flight, why the assassination of President Garfield led to the invention of air conditioning, and many other improbable but true facts.

Bill Bryson shoulders his backpack, keeps a tight hold on his wallet and heads for Europe. He retraces his travels as a student twenty years earlier with caustic hilarity and his own unique brand of humour. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, Bill Bryson lived in North Yorkshire for many years. First published in 1991 by Secker & Warburg.

Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller, but even when he stays safely in his own study at home, he can't contain his curiosity about the world around him. This book is his quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization.

Some say that the first hint that Bill Bryson was not of Planet Earth came when his mother sent him to school in lime-green Capri pants. Others think it all started with his discovery, at the age of six, of a woollen jersey of rare fineness. In this memoir, he explores the ordinary kid he once was, and the curious world of 1950s America.

This short biography of William Shakespeare by world famous writer Bill Bryson brims with the author's inimitable wit and intelligence.

This BBC Radio 4 series is written and presented by Bill Bryson and based on his best-selling book Mother Tongue . In it he romps through the history of Britain to reveal how English became such an infuriatingly complex - but ultimately world-beating - language.

Hardly anyone ever leaves Des Moines, Iowa. But Bill Bryson did, and after ten years in England he decided to go home - to a foreign country. In an ageing Chevrolet, he drove nearly 14,000 miles through 38 states to compile this hilarious state-of-the-nation report on small-town America.

Born in 1951 in the middle of the United States - Des Moines, Iowa - Bill Bryson is perfectly positioned to mine his memories of a totally all-American childhood for twenty-four carat memoir gold. This is Bill Bryson's memoir of growing up in middle America in the Fifties.

An audio cassette featuring some of Bill Bryson's Mail on Sunday columns about that strange phenomena, the American way of life, in which he brings his bemused wit to bear on one of the world's craziest countries.