For eight years Xinran presented a radio programme in China during which she invited women to call in and talk about themselves. This is the story of how Xinran negotiated the minefield of restrictions imposed on Chinese journalists to reach out to women across the country.

Provides documentation, containing over 10,000 researched source notes, as well as the cumulative index to the first three volumes of this work on George Bernard Shaw. This text also includes Holroyd's epilogue, Volume 4, The Last Laugh 1950-1991 .

When Dorothy came back from the dead, Aaron noticed that some people simply ignored the fact; some seemed to have forgotten she'd died in the first place; and, others just walked straight on by. The accident that killed Dorothy - involving an oak tree, a sun porch and some elusive biscuits - leaves Aaron bereft and the house a wreck.

From the slums of Cape Town to the palaces of Algiers, through Pygmy villages where pineapples grow wild, to the Gulf of Guinea where the sea blazes with oil flares, this book presents a journey through the modern world to the tune of an ancient rhythm. It is also a story of old empires and modern tribes.

Byron and Shelley lived in the stormy age of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and the post-Napoleon reaction. They became close friends, and though they are usually thought to have been very different from each other, Gilmour shows that they had more in common than is usually recognized.

With an entry for every day of a leap year, this book contains tips that are designed to be inspirational, useful, humorous, provocative and insightful. From poets, philosophers, businessmen, novelists and Members of Parliament, the contributions take various forms.

Art critic David Sylvester, who died in June 2001, achieved fame with his work on Cezanne but also because of studies of personal artist friends: Giacometti, Henry Moore and Francis Bacon. In the weeks before his death, he wrote this brief but revealing account of his childhood in the 1920s.

Written in short chapters, each the definition of a word, this book pokes fun at England and China and explores the endless possibilities for misunderstanding between East and West, men and women.

This is an enchanting and evocative memoir of Anny Thackeray, daughter of the author of 'Vanity Fair' and step-aunt of Virginia Woolf.

'Food can never just be about the bald story of the recipe: the meals we eat say something fundamental about who we are and how we want to live. Whenever an occasion matters to us, we mark this with food, from a birthday cake to a wedding breakfast.

Edgar Allan Poe served as a soldier and began his literary career composing verses modelled on Byron. This biography of Poe opens with his end, his final days - no one knows what happened between the time when friends saw him off on the steam-boat to Baltimore and his discovery six days later dying in a tavern.

Frederica is the spirited heroine of three earlier Byatt novels. In this, the concluding volume of the quartet, she falls almost by accident into a career in television in London, while tumultuous events in her home county of Yorkshire threaten to change her life, and those of the people she loves.

A collection of verse by the author of Summer Show and Angel . Poems on British activity in Ireland through the ages punctuate a series of love poems.

Cavafy was a Greek poet, who died in 1933, whose work deals explicitly with homosexuality. His poems, all fairly short, are both lyrical and colloquial, ranging from the personal confession to the dramatic monologue.