Family Britain continues David Kynaston's groundbreaking series Tales of a New Jerusalem, telling as never before the story of Britain from VE Day in 1945 to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. 'The book is a marvel ... the level of detail is precise and fascinating' Sunday Telegraph 'A wonderfully illuminating picture of the way we were' The Times As in Austerity Britain, an astonishing array of vivid, intimate and unselfconscious voices drive the narrative. The keen-eyed Nella Last shops assiduously at Barrow Market as austerity and rationing gradually give way to relative abundance; housewife Judy Haines, relishing the detail of suburban life, brings up her children in Chingford; the self-absorbed civil servant Henry St John perfects the art of grumbling. These and many other voices give a rich, unsentimental picture of everyday life in the 1950s. We also encounter well-known figures on the way, such as Doris Lessing (joining and later leaving the Communist Party), John Arlott (sticking up on Any Questions? for the rights of homosexuals) and Tiger's Roy of the Rovers (making his goal-scoring debut for Melchester). All this is part of a colourful, unfolding tapestry, in which the great national events - the Tories returning to power, the death of George VI, the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth, the Suez Crisis - jostle alongside everything that gave Britain in the 1950s its distinctive flavour: Butlin's holiday camps, Kenwood food mixers, Hancock's Half-Hour, Ekco television sets, Davy Crockett, skiffle and teddy boys. Deeply researched, David Kynaston's Family Britain offers an unrivalled take on a largely cohesive, ordered, still very hierarchical society gratefully starting to move away from the painful hardships of the 1940s towards domestic ease and affluence.

Presenting more than two hundred of the greatest haiku ever written about the game. There are moments in every baseball game that make fans catch their breath: the pause while a pitcher looks in for the sign, the moment a cocksure rookie gets picked off first, or the instant a batter lashes a game-winning homer into the night sky, just before the sell-out crowd explodes onto its feet. Haiku captures these moments like no other poetic form, and Baseball Haiku captures the sights, the sounds, the smells, and the emotions of the game like no previous collection. Some of the most important haiku poets of both America and Japan are featured in this anthology; including Jack Kerouac, a longtime baseball fan who pioneered English-language haiku; Alan Pizzarelli, one of the top American haiku and senryu poets of the last thirty years; and Masaoka Shiki, one of the four great pillars of Japanese haiku—a towering figure—who was instrumental in popularizing baseball in Japan during the 1890s. With over two hundred poems spanning more than a century of ball playing, Baseball Haiku reveals the intricate ways in which this enduring and indelible sport—which is played on a field, under an open sky—has always been linked to nature and the seasons. And just as a haiku happens in a timeless now, so too does Baseball Haiku evoke those unforgettable images that capture the actions and atmospheres of the national pastime: each poem resonates like the lonely sound of cleats echoing in the tunnel as a grizzled veteran leaves his final game. The largest collection of haiku and senryu on baseball ever assembled, Baseball Haiku is an extraordinary treasure for any true baseball fan.

The complete, uncensored journals of Sylvia Plath—essential reading for anyone who has been moved and fascinated by the poet's life and work. "A genuine literary event.... Plath's journals contain marvels of discovery." —The New York Times Book Review Sylvia Plath's journals were originally published in 1982 in a heavily abridged version authorized by Plath's husband, Ted Hughes. This new edition is an exact and complete transcription of the diaries Plath kept during the last twelve years of her life. Sixty percent of the book is material that has never before been made public, more fully revealing the intensity of the poet's personal and literary struggles, and providing fresh insight into both her frequent desperation and the bravery with which she faced down her demons.