The Adventures of Don Roberto is a book of action, mystery, friendship and fun. Roberto is a gringo who meets Chapo, the son of a Mexican migrant worker, when his uncle brings Chapo's family from Mexico to work his cotton fields in West Texas. At the tender age of seven, Robert takes the Spanish version of his name. In his mind, the only thing he lacks to be a real Mexican is a Green Card. The boys are friends for life, and the story revolves around their antics when they are young and their adventures, together and separately on both sides of the border, as they become men. Roberto accidentally discovers an international drug smuggling operation and drags a reluctant Chapo into the middle of it. Things get serious when Chapo has to choose between the lives of his wife and children or the life of his friend.

An imposing, life-size oil painting dominates the main meeting room at the RSPB’s base in the heart of England: ‘the man above the fireplace’ – always present, rarely mentioned. Curious about the person in the portrait, the author began a quest to rediscover William Henry Hudson (1841–1922). It became a mission of restoration: stitching back together the faded tapestry of Hudson’s life, re-colouring it in places and adding new threads from the testaments of his closest friends. This book traces the unassuming field naturalist’s path through a dramatic and turbulent era: from Hudson’s journey to Britain from Argentina in 1874 to the unveiling by the prime minister of a monument and bird sanctuary in his honour 50 years later, in the heart of Hyde Park – a place where the young immigrant had, for a time, slept rough. At its core, this extraordinary story reveals Hudson’s deep influence on the creation of his beloved Bird Society by its founding women, and the rise of the conservation movement. It reveals the strange magnetism of this mysterious man from the Pampas – unschooled, battle-scarred and once penniless – that made his achievements possible, and left such a profound impression on those who knew him. By the end of his life, Hudson had Hollywood studios bidding for his work. He was a household name through his luminous and seminal nature writing, and the Bird Society had at last reached the climax of a 30-year campaign, working to create the first global alliance of bird protectionists. A century after Hudson’s death, this is a long-overdue tribute to perhaps our most significant – and most neglected – writer-naturalist and wildlife campaigner.

For much of the mid-twentieth century, Roberto Gerhard found himself an outsider. He was airbrushed from much writing on contemporary music in Spain during the Franco regime, and was known in England more for his ‘commercial’ music for theatre, film and radio than his concert works. However, his significance as a musical innovator in developing serial technique and in the field of electro-acoustics is now being gradually recognised in both Spain and England, as well as further afield. The volume explores an extensive range of Gerhard’s work from the early Wind Quintet and the Spanish ballets Pandora and Don Quixote with their overt political overtones, through to the late period Metamorphoses and a newly discovered chance-based composition Claustophilia written in response to a request by John Cage for his book Notations. One of the key themes presented throughout the book is Gerhard’s innovative use of serialism. Gerhard’s development of Schoenberg’s technique led him to explore the serialization of both pitch and time. This volume suggests evidence for the first time that situates Gerhard’s idiosyncratic experiments alongside rather than after the total serialist works of his European counterparts Pierre Boulez, Olivier Messiaen and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

How would any of us feel if we could meet our teenage selves, a ghost on the road? Everything Passes, Everything Remains is a confluence of journeys, made by Chris Dolan, his friends, and writers before him. It’s a bit about cycling, a bit about walking, and a bit about buses. It’s a kind of travelogue, over time, and through some lesser-known parts of Spain. It’s an obsession with Spain’s writers and its history, from the Inquisition to the Civil War to the questions it faces as a country today. What makes a nation, or a family for that matter, or a group of friends? In many ways it’s as much about Dolan’s native Scotland as Spain. But mostly, it’s about the highs and lows of growing up and growing older – how the past plays merry hell with the present. About friendship, loss, music, memory, and the demons that follow us as we try to make sense of our history and our place in the world.

More than forty years after the composer's death, the music of Roberto Gerhard (1896-1970) continues to be recorded and performed and to attract international scholarly interest. The Roberto Gerhard Companion is the first full length scholarly work on this composer noted for his sharp intellect and original, exploring mind. This book builds on the outcomes of two recent international conferences and includes contributions by scholars from Spain, the USA and UK. The essays collected here explore themes and trends within Gerhard’s work, using individual or groups of works as case studies. Among the themes presented are the way Gerhard’s work was shaped by his Catalan heritage, his education under Pedrell and Schoenberg, and his very individual reaction to the latter’s teaching and methods, notably Gerhard’s very distinctive approach to serialism. The influence of these and other cultural and literary figures is an important underlying theme that ties essays together. Exiled from Catalonia from 1939, Gerhard spent the remainder of his life in Cambridge, England, composing a string of often ground-breaking compositions, notably the symphonies and concertos composed in the 1950s and 1960s. A particular focus in this book is Gerhard's electronic music. He was a pioneer in this genre and the book will contain the first rigorous studies of this music as well as the first accurate catalogue of this electronic output. His ground-breaking output of incidental music for radio and the stage is also given detailed consideration.

Keir Hardie was a founder and the first parliamentary leader of the Labour Party. At the turn of the 19th century he was Labour's most famous face. But despite being voted Labour's 'Greatest Hero' at the 2008 Party Conference, in recent years his extraordinary story seems all but forgotten. Born illegitimate just outside Glasgow in 1856, his life didn't start gently. Before the age of 10, he was the sole wage earner in his working class, atheist family. He never went to school but was self-taught, avidly reading books lent him by a kind young clergyman. This led to two major conversions in his life: first to Christianity, and then to socialism. While earlier biographies have neglected the former, pointing out his experience of hardship as the source of his passion for social justice, the role of Christianity in Hardie's life was profound. It shaped his involvement in many of the greatest social changes of the time.