Sub-titled 'How Humans Have Loved, Hated and Misunderstood Other Species', why do we treat our dogs as people but prefer pigs as bacon? The book is a compelling search inside our moral selves and through masterful introspection Girling delves into our relationships, fascinations and follies with animals, tracking the origins of attitudes and unpacking contradictions, at the same time asking whether our interactions with other species holds the key to our own survival. 'In an age of extinction, this is essential reading.' Without animals there would be no us. We are fellow travellers on the same evolutionary journey. By charting the love-hate story of people and animals, from their first acquaintance in deep prehistory to the present and beyond, Girling in his dazzling prose tells the story of the cumulative influence of theologians, writers, artists, warriors, philosophers, farmers, activists and scientists across the centuries, now locking us into debates on farming, extinction, animal rights, pets, experiments and religion. Brimming with wisdom and insight, 408pp, illus.

Enjoy delicious and healthy Japanese food any time with this stylish and beautifully designed cookbook with full page colour photos from the author of the international bestseller Tokyo Cult Recipes. It features 100 authentic and simple recipes for home cooking covering ingredients, tools and confidence to make the staples of Japanese family cuisine such as udon (Spinach Udon with Mint), soba (Cold Soba with Bottarga or Karasumi), miso, onigiri and tofu. These are the building blocks for all the classical dishes from ramen and miso soup to Japanese curry, gyoza, okono miyaki and tonkatsu. Learn how to ferment soy as well as how to cook rice, vegetables and meat the Japanese way and discover modern takes on classics such as Charred Eggplant with Soya Sauce or Fried Chicken with Sweet Chilli Sauce. We also love the Red Bean Pancakes, Meat Bento with Chicken in Honey and Ginger, Roasted Lemongrass Chicken stuffed with Rice and Mushrooms, Hot Pot with Sardine Balls, Savoury Egg Custard, Oven Baked Sweet Potato and even Japanese candy made with agar and candied ginger and biscuits. 264 large pages, 21 x 26.6cm.

Now rare 2014 first edition, a 96 glossy paged colour tribute to artist Tessa Newcomb. The book explores her enchantment with Paris in words and paint portraying the city's flâneurs, chic ladies walking their no less elegantly coiffured dogs, expectant lovers, children playing on carousels in the Tuileries, dainty eaters of patisseries, stall holders selling mushrooms, haute cuisine of delicious artistry and simple little restaurants with Lapin à La Cocotte on the menu, mobile phone users outside cafés, butchers cleaning up and chess players sequestered under trees in the Luxembourg Gardens. These vignettes are layered with the flavour of Tessa's own eclectic reading of writers inspired by Paris including Verlaine, Colette, Jean Rhys and François Sagan. Approximately 100 oils and watercolour drawings are reproduced in this wonderfully intimate visual record of her wanderings in both historic and hidden parts of Paris. Colour.

Art Nouveau was a phenomenon with many faces. Between 1890 and 1910, artists developed a variety of styles from the plant-like forms of the Belgian-French Art Nouveau to the ornamentation of the Viennese Secession. For a fruitful period between the 1880s and WWI, European and North American culture deferred to nature. With a symphony of flowing lines and organic shapes, Art Nouveau influenced architecture, design, painting, graphic work, applied arts and illustration. Turning to vine tendrils, flowering buds, and bird feathers as ornamental reference, artists pursued not only a linear freedom but also liberation from the weight of artistic tradition and expectation. Highlights include beautiful Tiffany and Gallé vases, the Paris Métro, train stations, department stores, door handles, furniture, dining rooms, cartoons, posters, chairs, porcelainware, Macintosh's Art-Lovers House design, the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Austrian glassware and more. Ther are exquisite multi-coloured glass domes, leaded glass windows like Grasset's Le Printemps, a double page colour spread of Maurice Denis' Palting Badminton with your ladies in white flowing dresses in woodlands to stylised functional and beautiful interiors and Aubrey Beardsley's Arthurian lithographs. This edition considers the style's wider artistic, economic, and political circumstances, as well as its particular flavour in such hubs as Vienna, Glasgow, Munich, Weimar, Brussels, Nancy, Barcelona, Darmstadt, Helsinki and Chicago. Outstanding proponents such as Victor Horta, Antoni Gaudí, Alphonse Mucha, Gustav Klimt, Maximilian Liebenwein, Walter Crane and Charles Rennie Mackintosh are featured in connection with the cities of their greatest activity plus unusual works by the Belgian symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff. Oozing with hundreds of colour photos. 264 pages, softback. 21 x 24cm.
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A beautiful quality item of great functionality, exactly along the lines of Art Nouveau, bursting with colourful flowers in reds, pinks, blues and sunflowers against a green background, and with an iridescent golden stripe, the matching pieces in this set comprise of a very generously sized A4 magazine folder measuring 25.5cm x 32cm tall x 10.5cm, together with a pencil pot, letter rack and filing tray. At the bottom of the magazine holder is a finger hole made of a golden ring to pull forward your file easily off the bookshelf. The letter rack has two generous slots at an angle one above the other, the flat filing tray is for A4 pages and has a blue interior, and the pencil pot approximately a 10" cube. All are in the matching design to grace any desk with this quality stationery item. Would also make a super gift idea.

Hexagonal shaped 7" tall sturdy cardboard case with 3" top in glittering iridescent gold as used by the famous painter Gustav Klimt in his artworks. The image on the 4" below matches the Gift Pen Set code 94267 with its green background, this time large sunflowers and red flowers speckled across the barrel. Life the lid and inside are 12 ready-sharpened full-length HB pencils in exactly the same cheerful design. Ready to use they are located in a foam holder at the base of the case. These items would grace any desk.

Turing said 'If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.' Spring 1940, the Battle of the Atlantic rages. Vulnerable merchant convoys are at the mercy of German U-boats controlled by a cunning system of coded messages created by a machine called Enigma. Only one man believes that these codes can be broken - mathematician and Bletchley Park cryptanalyst Alan Turing. Winston Churchill later describe Turing's success in breaking the Enigma code as the single biggest contribution to the victory against Nazi Germany. Unheralded during his lifetime, he is now recognised as the father of modern computer science and as possessing one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. Here his ground-breaking work and his private side lifts the veil of secrecy, particularly with regard to his post-war contribution to computing science with the Americans and his work as Manchester Computing Machine Laboratory. Only in 1974 was the official ban on any mention of Ultra lifted. Watched by MI5, Turing died of cyanide poisoning. A vat of cyanide was found in the 'nightmare room' between his bedroom and the bathroom, and the coroner ruled that Turing had committed suicide 'while the balance of his mind was disturbed'. Yet no evidence was given about the state of his mind and the verdict has been questioned ever since. Slim illustrated biography, New full price paperback128pp.

Many reminiscent of Arthur Rackham here are 44 beautiful, magical vintage illustrations from early 20th century popular literature including the foremost fantasy illustrators such as Margaret Tarrant, Rene Cloke, Molly Brett and Hilda Miller. Each beautiful colour artwork has on the facing page an outline drawing of the same image for you to colour in, at your own pace, in your own colours if you wish, and either side may be removed for framing. Softback 9" x 11".

An ingenious pre-cut cardboard kit which creates a layered landscape and hand-drawn icons which makes traffic move and brings London to life. The London Eye, Nelson's Column, St. Paul's Cathedral, the Post Office Tower and Big Ben, the Bank of England and city skyscrapers, there are full instructions of which pieces to glue together and piece to the base top or on to the back of buses which should shake when turned! Also a crowd can move too and finally when your model is ready, turn the handle and watch the wheel of the ginormous blue London Eye rotate with a tube train below. A quality National Gallery product, large resealable wallet. Colour.

In 1939, ever increasing numbers of budding cryptanalysts started reporting for wartime duty at a country house in north Buckinghamshire. Musicians, society debutants and novelists were among the women and tweedy, owlish young men, their heads filled with astounding equations and barely comprehensible calculations. The 10,000 men and women who worked at Bletchley Park had to sign the Official Secrets Act and they kept their vow of silence implacably for decades afterwards. Some died without the satisfaction of even their own families knowing about their crucial work breaking the German and Japanese codes. Belatedly however the secret was lifted, and now Sinclair McKay chooses a hundred of Bletchley Park's alumni to tell the stories of their whole lives, and not just the wartime interlude. Sometimes the distinction as chess players, musicians or linguists was what saw these young people selected. For others the intense intellectual crucible seems to have galvanised their ambition and widened their horizons, and sent them out into the post-war world determined to make a difference with their lives. Here then are the historians and archaeologists, novelists and naturalists, but also classics masters, a Nuremberg prosecutor and an associate of Andy Warhol - everyone from Roy Jenkins to the man who wrote the music for the Dracula films, and from the woman who saved St Pancras Station to Prince Philip's first girlfriend, and even those unfairly judged during their lives not to have amounted to much at all. 250pp, eight pages of photos.