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The beautiful Anglo-Italian artist Maria Cosway was one of the most talented and dynamic women active in Regency England, but one whose achievements have been largely overlooked. Born in Florence in 1760, she was acclaimed at an early age as both a painter and a musician. She exhibited forty-one paintings at the Royal Academy summer exhibition between 1781 and 1801, and hosted regular musical soirées at the Pall Mall house she shared with her husband, Richard Cosway. They were attended by the political and cultural elite of London.Maria’s extraordinary network of connections to the great and the good of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, included friendships with, among others, Thomas Jefferson, the Prince of Wales, Pasquale Paoli, the artist Jacques-Louis David, the opera singer Luigi Marchesi, the Duchess of Devonshire, the actress and writer Mary Robinson, and members of the Bonaparte family. Estranged from her husband by 1801, Maria Cosway largely gave up painting and reinvented herself as a progressive educator, founding schools for young women: first in Lyon, later in Lodi, Italy. In recognition of her achievements at Lodi, the Emperor of Austria made her a baroness.

From Market to Stock Market is the astonishing story of Bill Adderley who, from the humblest of beginnings, created one of the most successful retail chains in Britain today. Dunelm, Britain’s leading homeware group, has over 180 superstores and a market value on the London Stock Exchange of L2.2 billion.The son of poor Irish immigrants, Bill grew up in a council house in Leeds, sharing a bed with his three brothers. He got his first job at fifteen, working as a ‘Saturday Boy’ at the local Woolworth, and went on to become a Woolworth manager when he was twenty-one. In the 1970s however Woolworth’s went into steep decline and Bill left to start up his own business, selling seconds and reject goods on a stall in Leicester market. His first coup was a truckload of reject slippers, followed by reject Marks & Spencer curtains from which he made enough money to start a company that grew into the Dunelm homeware furnishings group.In 2006, Dunelm Group Plc listed on the stock market, since when the shares have increased six-fold. At the age of fifty-eight, Bill passed over the executive reins to his son Will and now lives a quiet life near Leicester with his wife Jean.

After the failure of Britain’s latest air-defence destroyers in the 1982 Falklands War, a public controversy began over an alternative: The S90 ‘Short Fat’ frigate designed and proposed by Peter Thornycroft and David Giles. This is the almost incredible but well-documented story of the author’s 40-year-long hard-fought battle with naval authorities and governments on both sides of the Atlantic, to prove the virtues of his designs which they had rejected on the basis of theory rather than fact, and then eventually to win substantialcompensation after they covertly infringed his patents in two new classes of warship. With a Foreword by the late Admiral Lord Hill-Norton, Former Chief of the Defence Staff; Technical Appendices; Glossary and Dramatis Personae.

This is a biography lightened with the intimate tone of a social memoir, about a woman who was both a bystander and protagonist through some fifty years of twentieth-century British history. Pamela Berry was the daughter of the buccaneering and brilliant politician and lawyer, FE Smith, the first Earl of Birkenhead, and married the son of another self-made man, William Berry from South Wales, who became Viscount Camrose and the owner of a group of national newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph. She had an unusually glamorous and precocious childhood, spoiled by her adoring father, and much photographed by Cecil Beaton. In her prime she used her position as a newspaper proprietor’s wife to become the most famous political and press hostess of her generation, harnessing her beauty and wit to influence successive governments, and was accused of wielding ‘petticoat power’ during the Suez crisis. She had a decade-long affair with Malcolm Muggeridge, became a vigorous promoter of British fashion, dragging it out of the dowdy fifties, and in later life was active in the museum world.Harriet Cullen has opened a window back into the remarkable story of her mother’s life from a rich cache of family diaries and letters, interweaving them with many other unpublished sources. It is revealing, in turns scathing and admiring, but always entertaining.

Euphemia Lamb was painted and sculpted by many renowned artists during the period before the First World War, such as Augustus John, Henry Lamb, Ambrose McEvoy, Jacob Epstein and James Dickson Innes. She was at the vanguard of modern British art. She was also a literary muse for many leading writers of the period, including Virginia Woolf, Henri-Pierre Roche and Aleister Crowley.Euphemia was the embodiment of the modern woman: sexually liberated, hard-working and ambitious. She used her connections in bohemian London and Paris to educate herself and advance the notion of what a woman could be in early twentieth-century British society. Euphemia was a pioneer who broke down barriers and her legacy survives in art and literature.

The Ghurids have their origins in the mountainous region of modern central Afghanistan, from where they established the first Islamic state in India. Some of their ghulams, primarily nomadic Turks from Central Asia, were to become independent rulers, leading to the foundation of the Delhi Sultanate. At its height, in the late-twelfth and early-thirteenth centuries, their domain extended from the shores of the Caspian Sea to the Bay of Bengal and from the Straits of Hormuz to the River Oxus. Mamluks, Conquest and Culture covers both the military and political history of the dynasty and the Persianate cultural world they inhabited and propagated on the subcontinent. The collapse of the Great Seljuk Empire allowed them to expand westwards into Iran. Extensive use of ghulams played a crucial role in their success, and this cavalry was to prove decisive in the campaigns against the Indian dynasties. Their conquests reunited territories to create a transregional empire for the first time in a millennium.

What does it mean to obsess about clothes and appearances? For some of us, deciding what to wear can involve tension and torment as well as delight. What do we mean by ‘looking classy’ or ‘power dressing’? What are the connections – or contradictions – between dress and desire, glamour and feminism? Do our choices reflect or challenge social values and constraints in women’s live? ppearances is both memoir and cultural history. It considers attitudes to personal appearance through four generations of women in the author’s family, weaving memory through a wide-ranging exploration of fashion, femininity and feminism in the recent past.

In Travels with Plotinus, Moin Mir follows Plotinus’s 1,780-year-old journey of personal discovery across India, Egypt, Italy, Greece and Turkey as he tries to understand the core concept of Plotinian thought, derived from studying the Upanishads – ‘Unity and Oneness’. He uses Plotinus’s philosophy to observe how the free will of intellect uses ‘Unity’ for good and evil. Intimate conversations with refugees escaping war, innocent boatmen drifting down the Nile, simple farmers and monks in Greece along with observations of ancient art and modern technological accomplishments inform his thoughts and writing on the concept of the oneness of humankind – its immense power to bring good and yet its vulnerability to the stealth of intellect to destroy and self-destruct.