'A brilliant, unlikely book' Spectator How can we celebrate, challenge and change our remarkable world? In 2012, the world arrived in London for the Olympics...and Ann Morgan went out to meet it. She read her way around all the globe's 196 independent countries (plus one extra), sampling one book from every nation. It wasn't easy. Many languages have next to nothing translated into English; there are tiny, tucked-away places where very little is written down; some governments don't like to let works of art escape their borders. Using Morgan's own quest as a starting point, Reading the World explores the vital questions of our time and how reading across borders might just help us answer them. 'Revelatory... While Morgan's research has a daunting range...there is a simple message- reading is a social activity, and we ought to share books across boundaries' Financial Times

For nine-year-old Beth Lowe, it should have been a magical summer--sun-kissed days lounging in deck chairs. But what begins as an innocent vacation to Hungary ends with the devastating separation of her parents and a lifetime of haunting memories of a time long forgotten.

Based on the real figure of the fascinating Elizabeth Poole, The Crimson Ribbon is the mesmerising story of two women's obsession, superstition and hope. May Day 1646: Ruth Flowers finds herself suddenly, brutally, alone. Forced to flee the household of Oliver Cromwell, the only home she has ever known, Ruth takes the road to London, and there is given refuge by Lizzie Poole. Beautiful and charismatic, Lizzie enthrals the vulnerable Ruth, who binds herself inextricably to her world. But Ruth is still haunted by fears of her past catching up with her. And as Lizzie's radical ideas escalate, Ruth finds herself carried to the heart of the country's conflict, to the trial of a king.

Don't open your car door to anyone, even if you believe they're there to help you.

Sun Yatsen (1866-1925) occupies a unique position in modern Chinese history: he is equally venerated as the founding father of the nation by both the mainland Communist government and its Nationalist rival in Taiwan. The first president of the Republic of China in 1911-12, the peasant-born yet Western-trained Dr Sun was also a dedicated political theorist, constantly in search of the ideal political and constitutional blueprint to underpin his incomplete revolution. A decade before the public emergence in Japan of his ‘Three Principles of the People’, and weeks before even his first slim publication in 1897, Kidnapped in London, Sun was already hard at work in the Reading Room of the British Museum, planning his most ambitious book yet: a comprehensive political treatise in English on the tyrannical misgovernment of the Chinese nation by the Manchus of the Qing Dynasty. Started then abandoned twice over, destined never to be completed, let alone published, we can only conjecture what title this revolutionary book might have had. The Lost Book of Sun Yatsen and Edwin Collins is the first study of this lost work in all scholarship, Western or Chinese. It draws its originality and its themes from three primary sources, all presented here for the first time. The first is a series of interconnected lost writings co-authored by Sun Yatsen between 1896 and 1898. The second is the mass of lost political interviews with, and articles dedicated to, Sun Yatsen and his politics, first published in the British press in the aftermath the dramatic world-famous rescue of Sun from inside the Chinese Legation in London in 1896. The third source is the ‘Apostle of the Simple Life for Children’, the Anglo-Jewish Rabbi Edwin Collins (1858-1936), a devotee and practitioner of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile and the New Education movement it inspired, who became Sun’s writing collaborator of choice during his years of political exile from China. Drawing on this wealth of neglected material, Patrick Anderson’s book offers a genuinely fresh perspective on Sun Yatsen and his political motivations and beliefs.

Covering a wide range of magazine work, including editing, illustration, poetry, needlework instruction and typesetting, this book provides fresh insights into the participation of women in the nineteenth-century magazine industry.