Warm, nostalgic and very funny, Mike Harding's memoir of his early life in post-war Manchester is as idiosyncratic and engaging as the man himself.

For a number of years now, writer, photographer, stand-up comic and folk musician Mike Harding has written a monthly column for 'The Great Outdoors', Britain's premier backpacking and trekking magazine. Witty, acidic and sometimes frothing over with barely concealed grump, these articles have plumbed the heights and soared to the depths of travel writing. Here is a selection of some of the best of those literary burblings. Meet the Yorkshire transvestite and hero Maurice Wilson, climb the Devil's Bollocks, and hear the story of Akala and the Monk's Ghost. May you read them in health.

Max Glickman, a Jewish cartoonist whose seminal work is a comic history titled Five Thousand Years of Bitterness, recalls his childhood in a British suburb in the 1950s. Growing up, Max is surrounded by Jews, each with an entirely different and outspoken view on what it means to be Jewish. His mother, incessantly preoccupied with a card game called Kalooki, only begrudgingly puts the deck away on the High Holy Days. Max's father, a failed boxer prone to spontaneous nosebleeds, is a self-proclaimed atheist and communist, unable to accept the God who has betrayed him so unequivocally in recent years. But it is through his friend and neighbor Manny Washinsky that Max begins to understand the indelible effects of the Holocaust and to explore the intrinsic and paradoxical questions of a postwar Jewish identity. Manny, obsessed with the Holocaust and haunted by the allure of its legacy, commits a crime of nightmare proportion against his family and his faith. Years later, after his friend's release from prison, Max is inexorably drawn to uncover the motive behind the catastrophic act -- the discovery of which leads to a startling revelation and a profound truth about religion and faith that exists where the sacred meets the profane. Spanning the decades between World War II and the present day, acclaimed author Howard Jacobson seamlessly weaves together a breath-takingly complex narrative of love, tragedy, redemption, and above all, remarkable humor. Deeply empathetic and audaciously funny, Kalooki Nights is a luminous story torn violently between the hope of restoring and rebuilding Jewish life, and the painful burden of memory and loss.

Liberty Fund's new six-volume The Collected Works of Frederic Bastiat series, of which "The Man and the Statesman "is the first volume, may be considered the most complete edition of Bastiat's works published to date, in any country, and in any language. The main source for this translation is the seven-volume "Oeuvres completes de Frederic Bastiat," published in the 1850s and 1860s. The present volume, most of which has never before been translated into English, includes Bastiat's complete correspondence: 207 letters Bastiat wrote between 1819, when he was only 18 years old, until just a few days before his untimely death in 1850 at the age of 49. For contemporary classical liberals, Bastiat's correspondence will provide a unique window into a long-forgotten world where opposition to war and colonialism went hand-in-hand with support for free trade and deregulation. Bastiat's numerous letters to Richard Cobden, a Member of Parliament and best known today as the leader of the British Anti-Corn Law League, chronicle the profound effect the Anti-Corn League had on Bastiat. The League's success in mobilizing a popular movement in England to pressure the British government into abolishing the very protectionist "corn laws," in 1846, inspired Bastiat to emulate the League's success in France by starting his own free-trade movement. "The Man and the Statesman "also includes articles and other writings on politics and current events that showcase Bastiat's talent as a theoretician, a pamphleteer, a journalist, and a deputy (Member of Parliament) of the nascent French Second Republic. Together with the correspondence, the writings in this volume fill an important gap in our understanding of the lesser-known Bastiat, who, in just a few short years, made a profound impact on French intellectual and political life in Paris. Forthcoming titles in The Collected Works of Frederic Bastiat series include: ""The Law," "The State," and Other Political Writings, 1843-1850 Economic Sophisms and "What is Seen and What is Not Seen" Miscellaneous Works on Economics: From "Jacques-Bonhomme" to Le Journal des ""economistes Economic Harmonies The Struggle Against Protectionism: The English and French Free-Trade Movements " Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) was born in the French port city of Bayonne and became one of the leading advocates of free markets and free trade in the mid-nineteenth century. A theorist of classical liberal political economy and an elected member of various French political bodies, he opposed both protectionism and the rise of socialist ideas. Jacques de Guenin is president of the Cercle Frederic Bastiat. He is a graduate of the ecole des Mines in Paris and holds a Master of Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley. Jean-Claude Paul-Dejean is a historian from the University of Bordeaux and a Bastiat scholar. Dennis O'Keeffe is Professor of Social Science at the University of Buckingham, Buckingham, England, and is Senior Research Fellow in Education at the Institute of Economic Affairs, London. David M. Hart received a Ph.D. in history from King's College, Cambridge, and is the Director of Liberty Fund's Online Library of Liberty Project.