Collection: Adult Non Fiction - Languages and Literature

In my case, reading has always served a dual purpose. In a positive sense, it offers sustenance, enlightenment, the bliss of fascination. In a negative sense, it is a means of withdrawal, of inhabiting a reality quarantined from one that often comes across painful, alarming or downright distastef...

Autumn begins with a letter Karl Ove Knausgaard writes to his unborn daughter. He adds one short piece per day, describing the material and natural world with the precision and mesmerising intensity that have become his trademark.

This boundary-shifting fusion of thinking, storytelling, and meditation takes as its starting point five axioms: 'Give Me a Child Before the Age of 7 and I'll Give You the (Wo)Man' ; 'History Repeats Itself.' ; 'Those Who Forget the Past are Condemned to Repeat It' ; 'You Can't Enter The Same Riv...

If you were to master the 20 languages discussed in Babel you could chat to more than half the world's population. Actually, you could talk to another quarter of the world, who speak them as second languages. As he did in Lingo, Gaston Dorren delves deep into the linguistic oddities and extraordi...

A thrilling journey deep into the heart of language, from a rather unexpected starting point. Keith Kahn-Harris is a man obsessed with something seemingly trivial - the warning message found inside Kinder Surprise eggs: WARNING, read and keep: Toy not suitable for children under 3 years. Small pa...

With his typical wit and keen analysis, O'Rourke looks at the way the post-war generation somehow came of age by never quite growing up and somehow created a better society by turning society upside down.

Over the past three decades, Daniel Mendelsohn's essays and reviews have earned him a reputation as ̀our most irresistible literary critic' (New York Times). This striking new collection exemplifies the way in which Mendelsohn - a classicist by training - uses the classics as a lens to think abou...

Describes how a group of Timbuktu librarians enacted a daring plan to smuggle the city's great collection of rare Islamic manuscripts away from the threat of destruction at the hands of Al Quaeda militants to the safety of southern Mali.