Cyn. Cyn, where have you bin? I’ve been trying to call you all day. Expect you’re in bed with Kevin the Red, Where the skies are not cloudy all day. Life is happy for 40-year-old poetry buff and senior librarian Colin Quirke, happily married to Cynthia for thirteen years with two great kids. Not so for Cynthia. Cyn is bored. This all changes when a new, younger couple moves in next door. Eddie and ditsy blonde Avril’s motto is ‘Life is for living!’. Wild parties with loud music are soon followed by girls’ nights out, and life will never be the same on the De Lacey Street cul-de-sac. In the meantime, Eddie is killed in a tragic micro-light plane accident. Cyn consoles Avril by taking her to Miami. Next thing you know, she’s met up with some red-haired American guy called Kevin Ranker (aka 'the home-wrecker'). Is divorce on the cards for Cyn and Colin? Consolations, at least. Still, there’s always the lovely Alison at the Poetry Society. Or the new assistant librarian at work, she could be interesting… It Always Rains on Sundays is a laugh-out-loud new novel from BBC prize-winner Roger Johnson. Full of intelligent humour, it is an entertaining read for fans of funny and original fiction.

A powerful, atmospheric novel that captures the everyday flavours of London's East End in the 1930's. Dreams meet reality as the rain keeps falling, family arguments rage, a youngDreams meet woman looks for love, gangsters lurk, a fugitive makes his mark and murder and suicide hangs heavily in the air. Described as a predecessor to Alan Sillitoe's classic Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, this fine work is now available again after many years out of print, ready to take up its rightful place in the realist literary canon.

Charlotte Brunsdon's illuminating study explores the variety of cinematic 'Londons' that appear in films made since 1945. Brunsdon traces the familiar ways that film-makers establish that a film is set in London, by use of recognisable landmarks and the city's shorthand iconography of red buses and black taxis, as well as the ways in which these icons are avoided. She looks at London weather – fog and rain – and everyday locations like the pub and the housing estate, while also examining the recurring patterns of representation associated with films set in the East and West Ends of London, from Spring in Park Lane (1948) to Mona Lisa (1986), and from Night and the City (1950) to From Hell (2001). Brunsdon provides a detailed analysis of a selection of films, exploring their contribution to the cinematic geography of London, and showing the ways in which feature films have responded to, and created, changing views of the city. She traces London's transformation from imperial capital to global city through the different ways in which the local is imagined in films ranging from Ealing comedies to Pressure (1974), as well as through the shifting imagery of the River Thames and the Docks. She addresses the role of cinematic genres such as horror and film noir in the constitution of the cinematic city, as well as the recurrence of figures such as the cockney, the gangster and the housewife. Challenging the view that London is not a particularly cinematic city, Brunsdon demonstrates that many London-set films offer their own meditation on the complex relationships between the cinema and the city.

Although new writing and research on British cinema has burgeoned over the last fifteen years, there has been a continued lack of single-authored books providing a coherent overview to this fascinating and elusive national cinema. Amy Sargeant's personal and entertaining history of British cinema aims to fill this gap. With its insightful decade-by-decade analysis, British Cinema is brought alive for a new generation of British cinema students and the general reader alike. Sargeant challenges Rachel Low's premise 'that few of the films made in England during the twenties were any good' by covering subjects as diverse as the art of intertitling, the narrative complexities of Shooting Stars and Brunel's burlesques. Sargeant goes onto examine among other things, the differing acting styles of Dietrich and Donat in the seminal Knight Without Armour to early promotional campaigns in the 1930s, whereas subjects ranging from product endorsement by stars to the character of the suburban wife are covered in the 1940s. The 1950s includes topics such as the effect of post-war government intervention, to Free Cinema and Lindsay Anderson's 'infuriating lapses of rigour', together with a much-needed overview of Michael Balcon's contribution to British cinema. For Sargeant, the 1960s provides an overview of the tentative relationship between film and advertising and the rise of young Turks such as Tony Richardson, Ken Loach, Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg.

In this new collection of essays on film, all written over the last ten years, Peter Wollen explores an extraordinarily wide range of topics, stretching from an analysis of 'Time in Film and Video Art' to a study of 'Riff-Raff Realism' in British films. There are provocative discussions of the works of established auteur directors such as Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock and of the film-making careers of such experimental movie-makers as William Burroughs and Viking Eggeling, the dadaist pioneer of abstract film. The collection also includes fascinating studies of a number of film classics, such as John Huston's Freud, Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Other essays deal with the relationship of film to the other arts, such as dance and architecture, and explore the interaction between film and anthropology. This is not a theoretical book but it is one that suggests many new approaches to thinking about film and many unexpected connections between film studies and the history of such strangely related activities as espionage, psychoanalysis, Stalinism, love of speed and digital technology. Full of fascinating new insights, Peter Wollen's new book is based on the premise that there are no fixed ways of writing about film but, rather, a plethora of paths leading in very different directions, each contributing to a new understanding of the twentieth century's major art-form.

From Augustine to Caesarius, through the Reformation and the Puritan flight from England, down through the ages to contemporary debates about Sunday worship, Miller explores the fascinating history of the Sabbath.

Jacob Bronowski was, with Kenneth Clarke, the greatest popularizer of serious ideas in Britain between the mid 1950s and the early 1970s. Trained as a mathematician, he was equally at home with painting and physics, and wrote a series of brilliant books that tried to break down the barriers between 'the two cultures'. He denounced 'the destructive modern prejudice that art and science are different and somehow incompatible interests'. He wrote a fine book on William Blake while running the National Coal Board's research establishment. The Common Sense of Science, first published in 1951, is a vivid attempt to explain in ordinary language how science is done and how scientists think. He isolates three creative ideas that have been central to science: the idea of order, the idea of causes and the idea of chance. For Bronowski, these were common-sense ideas that became immensely powerful and productive when applied to a vision of the world that broke with the medieval notion of a world of things ordered according to their ideal natures. Instead, Galileo, Huyghens and Newton and their contemporaries imagined 'a world of events running in a steady mechanism of before and after'. We are still living with the consequences of this search for order and causality within the facts that the world presents to us.