Bodleian Library

Herbs have been used for centuries to cure all manner of ailments. In the Middle Ages, before the advent of affordable healthcare, monastery gardens were used to cultivate plants to treat both the monks’ own house and the surrounding secular community. Information about the medicinal properties of plants was gathered into books known as herbals, which gained a much-increased audience with the advent of printing. This beautiful book features 100 plants showing how herbs, as well as flowers, fruit and vegetables, have been used medicinally. Drawn from the writings of a range of herbalists, particularly John Gerard and Nicholas Culpeper, the text is accompanied by exquisite illustrations from the renowned Herball by Gerard, first published in 1597. Together with recipes from household books, these selections give a fascinating history of nature’s role in both formal and folk medicine.

Step into the kitchens, streets and chop houses of Georgian London – one day, one city, countless appetites. From dawn until past midnight, Londoners dined at taverns, coaching inns, oyster rooms, confectioners, coffee shops, chocolate houses, soup shops and dining rooms. For the poor, the streets bustled with vendors offering early versions of fast food: hot green peas, baked potatoes, suet puddings, curds and whey, rice milk, gingerbread, pastry ‘pigs,’ and the now-forgotten saloop, a warming drink made from orchid roots. After dark, sex workers and their clients indulged in a glass of jelly, then considered an aphrodisiac, as a precursor to a visit to the brothel. As the empire expanded, culinary influences poured in: London’s first Indian takeaway appeared in 1773, while the East End became home to Jewish fried fish, Italian boloney and German sausages. Through the course of a single day, this book takes readers on a journey through breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper in Georgian London, drawing on contemporary archives to follow hungry citizens from all walks of life as they navigate the city’s diverse food landscape. It reveals not only culinary pleasures and horrors, but also the social challenges and daily struggles that shaped life in the capital.

‘Cheerfulness is a matter which depends fully as much on the state of things within, as on the state of things without and around us.’From Jane Eyre to Lucy Snowe, Charlotte Brontë’s heroines think deeply on how to live a fulfilling life, often expressing passionate beliefs, heartfelt advice and pragmatic philosophy. This inspirational selection of short quotations, revealing their – and their author’s –  innermost thoughts on early Victorian times, remains surprisingly relevant to us today. Drawn from Jane Eyre, Villette, Shirley and The Professor, the quotations cover a wide range of themes including happiness, love, feminism, work, truth, feelings and prejudice. This thought-provoking book, first published in 1912, is a delightful gift for anyone who loves to read Brontë’s novels.

Sisterly relationships feature prominently in some of our best-loved classic literature. From Jane and Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice to Hasina and Nazneen in Brick Lane, they have provided inspiration for novelists over the centuries. Sisters can be best friends, mother figures, rivals, heroes, sounding boards or partners in crime, depending on literary genre, era, or the demands of plot. They can bring into focus the changing roles of women in society, especially in literature that predates the twentieth century, such as Middlemarch, The Woman in White and The Old Wives’ Tale. Their bonds with younger or older siblings, like those of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy in Little Women, are often complex and nuanced, and occasionally devastating. Covering childhood, adventure, affairs of the heart and mental health, this book explores the role of sisters in twenty individual entries, each one providing a synopsis and analysis of the work in question. Including writers as diverse as Charles Dickens, E.M. Forster, J.D. Salinger, Toni Morrison and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, it makes the perfect read for book-loving sisters whatever their connection.

How did a beautiful Georgian house inspire Agatha Christie’s Dead Man’s Folly? Or a stretch of the East Anglian coast become the place in which a murder victim is discovered in P.D. James’s Devices and Desire? ovel Crime Scenes explores the landscapes of twenty crime novels in forensic detail. Beginning with the Devon moorland of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1899) and ending with London’s Brick Lane as described in Ajay Chowdhury’s The Waiter (2021), it ranges from John Buchan’s Galloway Hills and Gwen Moffat’s Cape Wrath to Ellis Peters’s Shropshire, Margery Allingham’s Essex, Colin Dexter’s Oxford and Sam Llewellyn’s Isles of Scilly. Each chapter also delves into the author’s background and discovers what the setting of the book meant to them, often by following in the footsteps of Britain’s best-known crime writers. Whether you are an armchair detective or an intrepid investigator, this book will inspire you to appreciate old favourites with deeper insights and discover thrilling new literary destinations.

Nowadays, we take for granted the ready availability of maps of all kinds. In mid-Tudor England, they were rare. All this was to change in 1579 when Christopher Saxton, a farmer from the West Riding of Yorkshire, became the first cartographer to make a published atlas of all the counties of England and Wales. This book traces the story of Saxton’s life and legacy by reconstructing his extraordinary mapmaking project alongside the crucial nature of the support and encouragement he received from Queen Elizabeth I and her court. Saxton’s atlas became the template for most detailed maps of the country for almost two centuries: it is hard to exaggerate its importance. For many, his atlas provided the first detailed image of England and Wales they had ever seen, showing the Elizabethan kingdom as a whole and in its constituent parts. This lavishly illustrated book reproduces all Saxton’s county maps together with many other illustrations revealing the forebears and successors to this groundbreaking work. Today, Saxton’s maps give us an invaluable cartographic snapshot of late Tudor England.

We have been domesticating animals for over ten thousand years. Why do we want tame wolves in our homes, subdued wild cats on our laps and snakes draped like scarves around our necks? This great conversation between the wild and the tame is human history, human psychology, human politics and human sociology. Pets feature in art, poetry and some of our most popular stories. Is it because we ourselves are wild and so we want furry, feathered and scaly wildness in our lives? But on what terms? Have we tamed the wolves, or are wolves wilding us? Pets and their People looks at the strange rapport between humans and their pets – or pets and their humans – at each stage of our lives. It takes bearings from every era of human history, asking how the special bond between owners and their pets has evolved, and what that evolution tells us about our own changing identity.  Do we look to animals as moral – or other – role models? Do pets help us to communicate? Do they teach us about birth and death? Can they show us who we really are?

Remarkable Renaissance Books tells the story of eighteen extraordinary early printed volumes, from the very first titles printed in the fifteenth century to the groundbreaking scientific texts of the Enlightenment. Including Gutenberg’s watershed Bible, a maths book illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo’s observations of mountains on the Moon, Kepler’s treatise on a supernova, Robert Hooke’s discovery of microscopic honeycomb structures he coined cells, and Maria Sibylla Merian’s pioneering studies of metamorphosis, these beautiful books and their enthralling histories, prehistories and legacies chart the fascinating stories of readers, writers, printers, scientists, philosophers and artists, and the part they played in forging the modern world. In addition to highlighting their production and reception, the author traces each book’s journey into print, painting a vivid and enthralling picture of remarkable books authored by prodigious minds. This lavishly illustrated volume brings the early print culture of the Renaissance to life and will appeal to lovers of books and history alike.

Throughout history, cats and writers have bonded together in a magical combination of comfort, companionship and inspiration. The famous authors featured here range from Samuel Johnson, whose cat Hodge dined on oysters, and Edward Lear, whose charismatic cat Foss was missing half his tail, to Margaret Mitchell, L.M. Montgomery, and Dorothy L. Sayers, who rescued her kitten Blitz from a bombsite. Each chapter delves into the relationship between authors and the felines who condescended to share their homes and desks, revealing intriguing aspects of our much-loved writers’ lives and celebrating the ways in which cats – pure-bred and moggy, large and small, graceful and eccentric – have enriched the world of literature. Including fun additional features on cats in bookshops, libraries and hotels, and illustrated with charming line drawings, this is a perfect gift for cat-lovers everywhere.

Have you ever stopped to think about how your morning cappuccino came to be? From the coffee bush that yielded the beans, to the grass for the cattle – or perhaps the soya – that produced the milk, plants are an indispensable part of our everyday life. Beginning with some of the earliest uses of plants, Stephen Harris takes us on an exciting journey through history, identifying fifty plants that have been key to the development of the western world, discussing trade, imperialism, politics, medicine, travel and chemistry along the way. There are plants here that have changed landscapes, fomented wars and fuelled slavery. Others have been the trigger for technological advances, expanded medical knowledge or simply made our lives more pleasant. Plants have provided paper and ink, chemicals that could kill or cure, vital sustenance and stimulants. Some, such as barley, have been staples from earliest times; others, such as oil palm, are newcomers to western industry. We remain dependent on plants for our food, our fuel and our medicines. As the wide-ranging and engaging stories in this beautifully illustrated book demonstrate, their effects on our lives continue to be profound and often unpredictable.

Writers publish under other names for a variety of reasons. Some use literary aliases in order to fit in while others employ them to stand out from the crowd. This book traces the history of pen names from the nineteenth century to the present day through forty novelists, poets and playwrights. These include famous pseudonymous writers such as George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans), Currer Bell (Charlotte Brontë), Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) and George Orwell (Eric Blair), crime writers such as Josephine Tey and Nicci French, and those lesser-known writers whose real identities have been obscured behind their literary aliases. The book also explores the wide range of motivations for taking on new names, including gender, the use of noms de plume for different genres, or even when writing as a team. Collectively, the stories in this book give us unusual insights into authors, publishers and readers over the last 200 years.

In this riveting, gorgeously illustrated book, Sutherland... has identified 42 objects - one for each year of Austen's life . . . the great advantage of Sutherland's pick and mix approach is that it allows us the buried stories, side angles and overlooked corners that get squeezed out in more conventional treatments of Austen's life. - Kathryn Hughes, Sunday Times, March 2025 More than 200 years after Jane Austen’s death at the age of just forty-one, we are still looking for clues about this extraordinary writer’s life. What might we learn if we take a glimpse inside the biographies of objects that crossed her path in life and afterwards – things that she cherished or cast aside, or that furnished the world in which she moved, or that have themselves been inspired by her legac? mong objects described in this book are a teenage notebook, a muslin shawl, a wallpaper fragment, a tea caddy, the theatrical poster for a play she attended and the dining-room grate at Chawton Cottage where she lived. Poignantly, the last manuscript page of her unfinished novel and a lock of hair kept by her devoted sister, Cassandra, are also featured. Objects contributing to Jane Austen’s rich cultural legacy include a dinner plate decorated by Bloomsbury artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Grayson Perry’s commemorative pot from 2009 and Mr Darcy’s wet shirt, worn by Colin Firth in the 1995 BBC adaptation. This is a different kind of biography, in which objects with their own histories offer shifting entry points into Jane Austen’s life. Each object – illustrated in colour – invites us to meet Jane Austen at a particular moment when her life intersects with theirs, speaking eloquently of past lives and shedding new light on one of our best-loved authors.

Radio today can feel like a faithful old companion, but its early history was sensational. Between 1922 and 1939, British life was transformed by what was known as the ‘Radio Craze’. This narrative history shows what the arrival of radio meant at a personal level through the voices and experiences of individuals as they adopted the then radical form of communication technology, invested in their first-ever gadgets and tuned in by their own firesides to outside voices and music, SOS calls, the Pips, the News, sport, royalty and innovative radiogenic comedy. It traces how radio affected family life, exploring whether it shifted dynamics between children and adults and between women and men, as well as its impact on class and a wider sense of nationhood. Generously illustrated and drawing on contemporary journalism, fiction, diaries, cartoons and a remarkable cache of unpublished first-person testimonies discovered in the archives of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Listen In is packed with entertaining and thought-provoking stories. It comes at a timely moment when traditional linear radio is shifting in response to podcasting, and the entire experience of how we consume audio is once again undergoing transformation.