'A startlingly original journey into the soul of Shakespeare by one of his greatest living interpreters.' - Sir Antony Seldon. Whether audience, actor or scholar, Bate represents his own personal 'madness' and the importance of reading and talking about reading with people, young and old. Bate has devoted his professional life to reading, teaching and writing about literature, and in his brave and candid memoir takes us on a sad, uplifting and inspiring journey into the classroom to witness great Shakespearian actors in the theatre. His examples include an array of writers including Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Edward Thomas and Dr Johnson himself, who even as they struggled with mental illness took inspiration from the greatest of all writers - William Shakespeare. Shakespeare's world is permeated with the same existential questions and domestic worries as ours today and Bate investigates losses and challenges and asks whether, if you persevere with Shakespeare, he can offer a word of wisdom or a human insight for any time of crisis. Along the way we also meet actors such as Judi Dench and Simon Callow and writers Keats, Austen and the Brontes and Ben Jonson. 303pp with fairly large print, illus.

Illustrated by Robert Ingpen the well-renowned artist and author in the most glorious full page colour artworks showing historical details like the quayside, hauling a sailor back on board (his trousers dropping!), playing and fighting and lost at sea, capturing all the mystery of the sea chest and a secret pirate treasure map. When an old ship's captain arrives at the sleepy Admiral Benbow Inn, young Jim Hawkins soon finds himself in the middle of one of the greatest adventure stories of all time. A ship named the Hispaniola is fitted out for the voyage, and a crew is engaged to find the treasure and bring it home, but some of the crew have other intentions for the treasure and their loyalties lie not with the honest Captain Smollett, but with the fearsome cook, a one-legged pirate called Long John Silver. Jim soon finds himself in a race to find the treasure, save the lives of his friends, wrest control of the ship from the hands of the pirates, and apprehend the villains. But when he is gravely injured, it is Long John Silver who's the only man who stands between Jim and certain death. Can the bonds of friendship, so convincingly betrayed, still be strong enough to pierce the black heart of so ruthless a man? The book still excites and enthrals readers of all ages as it has done for the last 150 years with all its adaptations on stage and film. Gloriously illustrated complete and unabridged edition bringing these characters to life as never before. 192pp, 19.7 x 23.5cm, perfect for all swashbuckling pirates young and old. Complete with satin bookmark, a glorious gift edition.

Aesop's celebrated collection of fables has always been popular with both adults and children. These simple tales embody truths so powerful, the titles of the individual fables - the fox and the grapes, the dog in the manger, the wolf in sheep's clothing and many others - have entered the languages and idioms of most European tongues. Fables include The Fox and the Grapes, The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs, The Fox and the Stork, The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, The Shepherd's Boy and the Wolf, The Hare and the Tortoise, The Lion and the Ass, The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, The Ass and His Masters, Prometheus and the Making of Man and many more. This edition is beautifully illustrated in black and white by the great Arthur Rackham. 199pp in paperback.

Ebenezer Scrooge is a miserly old skinflint. He hates everyone, especially children. But at Christmas three ghosts come to visit him, scare him into mending his ways, and he finds, as he celebrates with Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim and their family, that geniality brings its own reward. This finest of all Christmas stories is beautifully illustrated with Arthur Rackham's superb line drawings. 160pp. Paperback.

John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) is perhaps the foremost economic thinker of the 20th century. On economic theory, he ranks with Adam Smith and Karl Marx; and his impact on how economics was practiced, from the Great Depression to the 1970s, was unmatched. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was first published in 1936. But its ideas had been forming for decades ? as a student at Cambridge, Keynes had written to a friend of his love for 'Free Trade and free thought'. Keynes's limpid style, concise prose, and vivid descriptions have helped to keep his ideas alive - as have the novelty and clarity, at times even the ambiguity, of his macroeconomic vision. He was troubled, above all, by high unemployment rates and large disparities in wealth and income. Only by curbing both, he thought, could individualism, ?the most powerful instrument to better the future', be safeguarded. The 21st century may yet prove him right. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Keynes elegantly and acutely exposes the folly of imposing austerity on a defeated and struggling nation. 538 page paperback.

Orphan Ellinor Arden is called from her secluded Paris home to London for the hearing of a will. To her surprise she is named as the inheritor of her estranged uncle's fortune, on condition that she marry his adopted son. Encouraged by her lawyer and guardian, the dashing Horace Margrave, Ellinor enters into wedded life with this perfect stranger, but it soon becomes clear that her trust in a dead man's wishes has been misplaced. Suspense-ridden sensational Victorian literature presented with the counterpart piece 'The Mystery at Fernwood'. The author Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1837-1915) counted W. M. Thackeray and Henry James among her admirers and wrote more than 70 books. 118pp, paperback.

Set in the shabby world of England's theatricals, populated by hack writers, drunken actors, pushy stage mothers and unscrupulous directors, is a drama of greed, ambition and love. Christopher Tatham is trying to 'make it' in acting, surviving on third-rate bit parts and the charity of his uncle and continues to hope for the elusive leading-man role. A chance encounter with the enchanting Peggy Harper seems to herald a change of fortune, but Tatham is soon forced to give up his flagging career for a dispiriting position as a clerk in the City as he wanders nostalgically through the West End. In a London daubed with greasepaint and filled with hungry actors, will Peggy and Tatham manage to carve out a life for themselves and attain the success and stability they crave? An Edwardian classic thankfully reprinted, this is a surprisingly modern dilemma for the young couple. George Orwell writes in his foreword of 'trudging up and down the Strand on worn-out boot soles, the agents' offices where women in dyed frocks sit waiting their turn, the forlorn collection of press cuttings, the manager who bolts in the middle of the tour with all the takings.' 164pp, paperback.

Sub-titled 'Writers, Artists and a Peculiarly British Tradition', the book explores three fascinating examples of relationships between artists and writers - the illustrations of Paradise Lost and Pilgrim's Progress, Hogarth and Fielding; a writer and artist dealing with common material; Wordsworth and Thomas Bewick, a poet and engraver working separately but imbued with the spirit of their age. A brief coda turns to a fourth kind of relationship, the writers and artists who collaborate from the start, beginning with Dickens and Phiz and Lewis Carroll and Tenniel. All were great innovators who shared common aims and this is a book for all with an interest in the poetry, novel writing, painting, engraving or cartooning of the period, a rewarding and generally illustrated book. Includes colour plates, several of Thomas Bewick's birds and Hogarth's The Shrimp Girl and Blake's The Temptation of Eve. 162pp, softback.

Gray authored, designed and illustrated seven novels, several books of short stories, a collection of his stage, radio and TV plays and a book of his visual art. In November 2019 he received a Lifetime Achievement award by the Saltire Society. He died in December 2019 at the age of 85. He is now regarded as the doyen of Scottish letters, and this publication is a fitting acknowledgement of his status. Born in 1934 in Glasgow, Alasdair Gray is considered by many to be one of the great Scottish writers and artists. In this frank, playful and typically unorthodox autobiography, he tells of how his early life experiences influenced his writing, including the creation of those landmarks of literature, Lanark and 1982, Janine. He details the inspirations behind his many acclaimed murals and artworks, and makes clear how his moral, social and political beliefs and his work are inextricably linked. Constructed from essays published and unpublished, the book is as much about people, place and politics as it is about Gray's own life in art. 'One of the most gifted writers to have put pen to paper in the English language.' - Irvine Welsh. A beautifully produced hefty softback, 470pp, beautifully typeset and with fairly large print covering many of his wee articles and radio talks, obituaries and postscripts and names from the art community like playwright Joan Ure, Ian Hamilton Finley, Anthony Burgess and Jack Vettraino, John Connelly and Will Self among them.

Sub-titled 'Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece', Kevin Birmingham's impressive research is combined with his flair for characterising the teeming intellectual debates of the day and giving insight into one of the world's great novels. It is the immersive tale of how Fyodor Dostoevsky came to write Crime and Punishment and why it changed the world. As a young man, Dostoevsky was a celebrated writer, but his involvement with the radical politics of his day condemned him to a long Siberian exile. There he spent years studying the criminals who were his companions. Upon his return to St Petersburg in the 1860s, he fought his way through multiple hardships - gambling addiction, debilitating debt, epilepsy, the deaths of loved ones, and literary banishment - to craft an enduring classic. The germ of the novel came from the sensational story of Pierre-Francois Lacenaire, a notorious murderer who charmed and outraged Paris in the 1830s. Lacenaire was a glamorous egotist who embodied the instincts that lie beneath nihilism, a western-influenced philosophy inspiring a new generation of Russian revolutionaries. Lacenaire was a character who could demonstrate the errors of radical politics and ideas through the character of Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov began to merge with Dostoevsky. The novelist was determined to tell a murder story from the murderer's perspective, but his character couldn't be a monster because he wanted so desperately to be good. The writing consumed Dostoevsky. As his debts and the predatory terms of his contract caught up with him, he hired a stenographer so that he could dictate the final chapters in time. Anna Grigorievna Snitkina became Dostoevsky's first reader and chief critic, and she changed the way he wrote forever. By the time he finished his great novel, he had fallen in love. We are brought back into the fevered panic of Raskolnikov as he murders an old woman, and Birmingham braids a hat trick of three biographies - the life of the man who wrote the novel, the murderer who inspired the tale, and the evolution of the novel itself. A magnificent achievement, 416pp, photos. Remainder mark.