Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was one of the intellectual giants of the 20th century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954, when he was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. To date his Narnia books have sold over 100 million copies. The revered professor in this huge tome offers a magisterial take on the literature and poetry (excluding drama) written during one of the most consequential periods in world history and the rise of English Literature. In his classic survey he provides deep insight into the greatest of the 16th century writers, including: Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, William Tyndale, John Knox, Dr Johnson, Richard Hooker, Hugh Latimer, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, Thomas Cramner and many more. It is a wise and distinctive collection in which Lewis expounds on the profound impact prose and poetry have had on both British intellectual life and his own critical writing and thinking. As readers we obtain an invigorating overview from the Norman Conquest through the mid 17th century and you feel reading this that he has read every book he is writing about. He makes a principle of telling us which authors he thinks we will enjoy as he invites us to a literary feast and a realm of discovery and enjoyment. He writes 'with astonishing freshness on subjects which might be thought to be exhausted.' - the New Statesman. He even includes 'bad books'. Spenser's Faerie Queene draws on masque, pageants, tapestry, carvings, tournaments and the whole panoply of the court. Shakespeare's sonnets are the heart of the Golden Age, and for Lewis they tell a story of a young man's passion both for another man and also for a fickle woman. 744 pages.

How to be Happy Though Married, How I Got Licked and Why, The English: Are They Human?, Erections on Allotments, Drummer Dick's Discharge, Planet of the Knob Heads, Tosser Gunman, How to Avoid Being Drowned, Scouts in Bondage, The Art of Faking Exhibition Poultry, Moles and Their Meaning - here is a celebration of all the weird and wonderful books to treat all bibliophiles, booksellers and fans of the bizarre. Complete with covers from our past and books that have inexplicably fallen out of print - now never be forgotten. Beautifully produced full page colour covers, marbled endpapers. 128pp.

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2021, here is a dazzling piece of historical reimagining. It is a revolutionary sermon, a furious denunciation of inequality. The fight for equality begins in the streets. In the 16th century, the Protestant Reformation launched an attack on the privilege and the Catholic Church, but as it rapidly became an established, on bourgeois authority itself. Rural labourers and the urban poor, who were still being promised equality in heaven, began to question why they shouldn't have equality here and now on earth. There followed a violent struggle and out of this chaos steps Thomas Müntzer, a complex and controversial figure who sided with neither Martin Luther, nor the Roman Catholic Church. He addressed the poor directly, encouraging them to ask why a god who apparently loved the poor seemed to be on the side of the rich. In his bold cinematic style, Éric Vuillard tells the story of one man whose terrible and novelesque life casts light on the times in which he lived, a moment when Europe was in flux. He draws insights from this revolt from nearly 500 years ago which remain shockingly relevant to the dire inequalities we still face today. 80 short and poignant pages of this epic moment known as the Peasants' War.

Published in 1983, this was the first novel in Len Deighton's Bernard Samson series. An East German agent codenamed Brahms Four wants to cross the Iron Curtain and come to the West. Samson, the former field agent now stationed in London, is tasked with the rescue, but before he even sets out on the mission, suspicions arise that there is a traitor in the MI6, likely one of his closest colleagues. The agent had once saved Bernie's life. A book about betrayal of both the personal kind and that which spies indulged in. The novel was the first in the acclaimed Game, Set, Match trilogy featuring the talented yet jaded intelligence officer. 296pp, paperback.

Skilled Royal Air Force bomber pilot Sam Lambert is exhausted, and his veteran crewmen have just been replaced by an inexperienced new team. Victor von Löwenherz, a German night fighter pilot who intercepts RAF bombers in his Junkers Ju88, looks on with horror at the Nazi regime. Hansl, a German boy in the small market town of Altgarten, sleeps at home. Lambert and his crew prepare for a bombing raid on the Ruhr area. It's a night that many will never forget. Bomber is a masterful, gripping, minute-by-minute account of what occurs over the next 24 hours, told through the eyes of protagonists on all sides. It is astonishingly precise in its depictions of planes, weapons and behind-the-scenes war strategy, an unforgettable portrait of war both in the air and on the ground. Len Deighton combines his expertise as both a historian and novelist in this classic Second World War novel. Nicely designed series, 484pp in paperback.

Along with The IPCRESS File code 94978 this became a film starring Michael Caine, but the book is somewhat different in its chronically aching painful pace. 1963 and Berlin is dark and dangerous, and neither side of the wall is safe. Deighton's skilled, jaded anonymous hero of The IPCRESS File (Harry Palmer) is now set to arrange the defection, and the fake death, of a leading Soviet scientist. But behind the elaborate funeral and mock coffin, Palmer discovers this deception hides an even deadlier truth - the scientist may not be all he appears. The Russian Colonel Stok makes criticisms of Western capitalism, but from the other side there are side swipes against 'communism' - for example 'Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Yes? Well Socialism is exactly the reverse.' As with all in the series, excellent entertainment. 276pp, paperback.

The author of Moby Dick (1851), following hostile reviews and poor sales, Melville abandoned fiction in 1857 and became an inspector on the New York Docks. Yet he produced some of the most singular, enigmatic stories in American literature, from surreally funny tales of office life to claustrophobic accounts of obscure tensions at sea. His darkly modern sensibility produced works of unparalleled narrative inventiveness. A lawyer hires a new copyist who begins to exhibit a strange, confounding resistance to work. A cynical lightning-rod salesman plies his trade by exploiting fears in stormy weather. After boarding a beleaguered Spanish slave ship, a cheerful American trader is repeatedly struck by paralyzing unease as figures move in the shadows. A beautifully produced Pushkin Press softback, 256pp, 12.12 x 16.5cm.

'A stone-cold Cold War classic' by one of the greatest fictional spymasters. A high-ranking scientist has been kidnapped, and a secret British intelligence agency has just recruited Deighton's iconic unnamed protagonist, later christened Harry Palmer, to find out why. His search begins in a grimy Soho club and brings him to the other side of the world. When he ends up amongst the Soviets in Beirut, what seemed a straightforward mission turns into something far more sinister. With its sardonic cool, working-class hero, this sensational debut was a bestseller and broke the mould of thriller writing and became the defining novel of 1960s London. Very different from the film, here is the gritty realism of a working class protagonist on a paltry salary in a spy agency that doesn't do much spying and assignments that are rather tedious except for the rather prescient stuff on brainwashing and industrial espionage. 240pp, paperback reprint in a nicely designed set.

Alexander McCall Smith sprang to fame with the No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series and has been delighting fans with his bestsellers ever since. In this unusual and highly personal memoir he describes what the poems of W H Auden have meant to him in some of life's high and low points. In 1940 Auden controversially moved to America, but the plight of all those affected by war remained uppermost in his mind. The words "And love illuminates again/The city and the lion's den" were written to a refugee friend, and eventually he returned to Europe and Christianity. Auden was gay and there is a hint of this in the famous poem "Lay your sleeping head my love/Human on my faithless arm". In an interesting episode he and his partner Chester Kallman collaborated with the composer Stravinsky. One of the most famous poems is "Stop all the Clocks", read by a grieving lover in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Auden's verse can be criticised for prioritising sound over sense, but McCall Smith is fascinated by its sheer intellectual density. In one poem he traces Nazi Germany back to the split between feeling and intellect: "I and the public know/What all schoolchildren learn, /Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return". Auden is a poet of love, both individually and communally. 137pp, printed on art paper.

Settle down with a cup of tea (or something stronger) on a snowy winter night to enjoy an endearing and poignant novel about loss and the healing power of love. Elfrida Phipps loves her new life in her pretty Hampshire village in her tiny cottage. She has her faithful dog Horace and the friendship of the neighbouring Blundells, particularly Oscar, to ensure that her days are filled with companionship as well as independence. But an unforeseen tragedy upsets her tranquillity - Oscar's wife and daughter are killed in a terrible car crash, and he finds himself homeless when his stepchildren claim their dead mother's inheritance. Oscar and Elfrida take refuge in a rambling house in Scotland which becomes a magnet for various waifs and strays including an unhappy teenage girl. It could be a recipe for disaster, but somehow the Christmas season weaves its magic, and the winter solstice brings love and solace. The novel shows that log fires and the warmth of friends can thaw the coldest heart, and as the bells peal out for the midnight service, they ring in a very magical Christmas. Charming and utterly convincing this is a beautiful and haunting story by the beloved novelist. Published 2000 and here reissued in paperback with a stunning new jacket. 698pp in chunky paperback.