In this poignant and hilarious memoir, the author recalls his childhood in Northern Ireland after the death of his mother when he was just five years old. Raised by his beloved but often overwhelmed father alongside his ten siblings (divided into three classes - the Big Ones, the Middle Ones, and the Wee Ones ), O'Reilly, one of the Wee Ones, paints a vivid picture of growing up in a large, grief-stricken, eccentric, and fiercely loving family during the tail end of the Troubles...

This is a book about Ben Franklin. It’s a biography, but the writer focuses not just on what Franklin said and did in his life, but on what he thought about life, and how it should be lived, so it is philosophy as well. What makes it even better is that Eric Weiner doesn’t just write about Franklin, he engages with his ideas and tries to apply them to his own life...

This is a remarkable and very necessary book that is not so much about idleness as it is a call to examine our lives and our choices, and to do a better job of living than we currently do. Hodgkinson’s definition of idleness is not that we sit around and do nothing, but that we build enough down-time into our lives that we can make the time to think, to read, to reflect, to appreciate art, and to engage in rewarding and hands-on activities like cooking, gardening, engaging with the natural world, and having good times with friends and family, doing things that truly bring us joy...

This book is many things, it is philosophy, memoir, general life advice and musings on a life well lived. It’s unusual in its structure in that it is not a straight-line narrative in which ideas build on each other. Rosen does not have a theory of happiness or a five-step plan to a happier life. While the word is in the title, he doesn't really talk about happiness in the narrative. He's thinking less in terms of how to be happy and more in terms of what we can do to have a good day.

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...