Mary Beard is one of Britain's most prominent classical scholars and public intellectuals. She’s one of those rare people who seems as much at home in academia as she is in front of a television camera. She's a rigorous scholar who has a real talent for public engagement and is never afraid to challenge received wisdom whether it is about the ancient world or about the modern one.

Richard Mabey is one of Britain's most celebrated and influential nature writers. He was born in Hertfordshire in 1941. He grew up with a deep connection to the English countryside, particularly the chalk hills and mixed woodlands of the Chilterns, which would become a recurring landscape in his writing. Here’s a look at some of his books...

This is a nature diary, compiled from the Nature Notebook Column that the author used to write for The Times. This book is divided into two sections, city and country. It begins in August, 2014 when Harrison was living in London...

This is a book about building and architecture. It's also a book about an idea, the notion of a room of one's own, a cosy private space that we can withdraw into, a place in which to think, read, reflect, and just be for a while, away from the endless demands of a busy world...

Tom Chesshyre is one of my favourite writers. He's a travel writer who's been all over the world. He writes about his experiences with warmth, humour and spirit. There are two main themes in his books, travel by train and travel on foot...

In The Garden Against Time, Olivia Laing writes about the unique and wonderful place that gardens occupy in our lives. She writes about the soul satisfying experience of being in green spaces made all the more meaningful when we take a hand at creating them. She examines the notion of a garden as a personal paradise, and shares how the time she spent working in her garden has transformed her, and enhanced her own experience of life...

This is about books and reading, writing and language, and some of the eccentricities and foibles of passionate readers and collectors of books. There’s something about book love that makes us cast an indulgent eye on the kind of behaviour that people not afflicted by the passion would view as downright crazy, like the author’s description of a trip to a second-hand bookshop that her husband surprised her with, as a birthday gift. They spent seven hours in that shop and they came away with nineteen pounds worth of books

This book was published in 1987, when the writer and critic was 52 years old. The focus of this memoir is her tempestuous relationship with her mother, something that morphed and shifted as Gornick herself grew older, but always remained intense and challenging...

Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the World Wide Web. This is a memoir in which he shares the story of his remarkable life and gives a fascinating account of how the world wide web came to be. Unlike so much of what makes up the internet today, the web was not invented in or by a tech company. It was created by a physicist working at CERN who began by wanting to create an information sharing system for the people working within the organisation...

This is a book that tries to answer a very fundamental question, How to Live?  Not how we should live, in the sense of morality, but how to live a good life, a fully human, satisfying, and flourishing one. Sarah Bakewell tries to answer this question through the medium of the life and writings of one man, Michael de Montaigne, the man who single-handedly created the literary genre of the essay, and gave it its name...

Julian Barnes likes to cook. He's a competent cook with a simple ambition. To cook tasty, nutritious food, and to, over time, expand his culinary repertoire. But with him, it's all about the recipes and the instructions. He can and will follow them faithfully, but he needs them to be precise...In this collection of essays, Barnes brings his pedantic but charming outlook to life in the kitchen.

Tom Fort is a writer, and an angler who aspires to be handy. In 2018, his daughter-in-law, Sharona, took over their local hardware shop, a century old place called Heath and Watkins. While she, as the handy-woman of the family, was the driving force behind it, the rest of the family got involved in some capacity, and the author got to be a part of the day to day working of a village hardware shop...