The popular American humorist on his move to Paris was inspired to write some hilarious pieces about his attempt to learn French. His family is another inspiration. Anyone who has heard him speaking live or on the radio may recall his attempts to learn French from a sadistic teacher who declared that 'every day spent with you is like having a caesarean section'. 'You Can't Kill the Rooster' is a portrait of his brother who talks incessant hip-hop slang to his bewildered father. No one hones a finer fury in response to such modern annoyances as restaurant meals presented in ludicrous towers of food, and cashiers with six-inch fingernails. Wonderfully astute observations, thoughtful honest and humorous writing such as 'Knuckle of flash-seared crappie served with a collar of chided ginger' and some pretty rude toilet humour. 272pp, paperback.

200 fast and furious code-cracking puzzles from the pages of The Daily Mirror. Each puzzle has a time limit and your task is to complete the crossword grid within the time, so can you beat the clock? Target times are given in minutes and seconds above the very large grid with the alphabet A-Z along the bottom to cross off as you go in these fun, frantic and taxing puzzles. With solutions, extra large softback, 304pp.

'We English men have wits,' wrote the clergyman Ralph Lever in 1573, and, 'we have also framed unto ourselves a language.' The book is a fresh and brilliant study of how philosophy became established in England, challenging what Rée calls the 'condescending smugness' of traditional histories of philosophy. He sees it as a mass of individual stories showing endurance, inventiveness, bewilderment, anxiety, impatience and good humour from men and women from many walks of life, engaged with the debates and cultures of their age. He includes celebrated British and American philosophers such as Hume, Emerson, Mill and James and also literary authors such as William Hazlitt and George Eliot and an overlooked past of priests and poets, teachers, servants and crofters, thinking for themselves about religion, politics, art and everything else. The book adopts a novel structure examining its subjects at 50 year intervals from the 16th century to the 20th - puritans, comedians, politicians, libertarians, and a collection of nonsense and folly, ethics in wartime and the prophets of the death of metaphysics. Wide ranging, fascinating. 746pp in heavyweight illustrated softback.

Celtic languages are now spoken only at the extreme edges of Europe, in Wales, Ireland, Scotland and Brittany, but when Caesar conquered Gaul his subjects were described as Celts, while the ancient Greek historian Herodotus mentions Celts living on the Danube and in Spain. Modern scholars have had widely different opinions as to whether these peoples were in any way related, and there is no doubt that original Celtic literature was overlaid in the Middle Ages by mythologising. For instance, the 12th century Geoffrey of Monmouth "wallowed in nostalgia for a golden Celtic past" and extrapolated origin stories from the doubtful evidence of placenames. The author of this book applies DNA analysis to ancient artefacts, using the results to construct a logical pattern of settlement and interrelationship. Julius Caesar remarked on the similarity of culture between the Gauls and the island Celts, and the possible explanation that La Tene culture was responsible for the spread is too simplistic given the evidence of earlier place-names. The author considers that the Bell-Beaker community and a Proto-Indo-European language may hold the key, arguing that genetic evidence supports a Steppe homeland, together with archaeological evidence such as distinctive humanoid stelae or standing stones carved with arms, belt and footprints. When the people of the Steppes moved up the Danube in the Iron Age they introduced swords, horse gear and wagon burials to the developing Hallstatt warrior culture, and the author traces westward displacement through genetic analysis of skeletons and remains. The Roman world created separate Celtic provinces and Christianity continued the fragmentation, but the author's argument that the Celts once united Europe is persuasively developed. 240pp, 16.5 x 24.4cm, maps, black and white photos.

The survival of manuscripts is often random. Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales survive in 92 manuscripts because Chaucer was a well-connected diplomat. By contrast, no medieval manuscript survives of Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love, nowadays considered a great religious classic. Julian was a woman, and her radical theology was sometimes at odds with church teaching. In other chapters, the author discusses the Paston Letters, the Lindisfarne Gospel, the artists of the colourful Winchester Bible, Canterbury Pilgrims, the artist Tamaris pictured at work, the only surviving Beowulf manuscript singed at its edges and other books which have survived fires and floods, the personal prayer book of Henry VIII, and the work of hidden writers such as the Saxon nun Hugeburc, who lived in Germany and wrote the lives of saints Willibald and Wynnebald, coding her name into the text. The world of manuscripts is full of breathtaking, can't-believe-it discoveries, and in this fascinating book the author starts with three manuscript discoveries that not only made headlines but changed our understanding of history. In 1934 a house party in search of ping-pong balls found a cache of old books. Luckily one of the guests was a keeper at the Victoria and Albert Museum with an instinct for a find. In fact it was the lost Book of Margery Kempe, the first autobiographical work in English, from the early 14th century. Kempe had 14 children, suffered from post-natal depression, went abroad on pilgrimages and had visions, all of which she described in colourful style. In the same year there was another astonishing discovery, the original manuscript of Thomas Malory's great Arthurian epic, Le Morte D'Arthur, an exploration of the 15th century culture of chivalry. It also confirmed the identity of the author, which had been contested on the grounds that Malory was something of a career criminal unlikely to have penned the refined classic. In fact he wrote it in prison. The author's third dramatic discovery was made in the 12th century, when the monks of Durham Cathedral opened the coffin of St Cuthbert and found the Cuthbert gospel, the earliest intact European book. Created in the early 8th century, it subsequently travelled round the north of England as the monks of Lindisfarne sought to preserve Cuthbert's remains from the marauding Vikings. 340 pages, gorgeous gleaming-with-gold decoration and colour decoration and capitals in reproductions. Please note contents same as Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and Their Makers.

It takes a fair amount of hard-necked heichtynes (old Scots word for temerity) to wrap oneself up in the mantle of Reverend Brewer who back in the Victorian era initiated the whole phrase-and-fable industry. He beavered for obscure allusions in the arcana of ancient texts, compiling scholarly serendipity and giving birth to his famous and eponymous Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. First published in 2012 and now updated 2021 with hundreds of new and expanded entries, this edition focusses on 4,500 Scottish phrases and fables, incorporating the texture and fabric of the nation's ever-shifting sense of itself. From Aald Rock to Zeenty-teenty, it is an unputdownable gallimaufry of curious sayings, put-downs, insults, mottos, traditions, legends, folklore, customs, festivals, games, songs, dances, nicknames, bards and characters, doctors and high days to The Broons. There are completely new entries including Big Tam, the Third Forth Bridge, the Loony Dook, and the War of the One-eyed Woman. Past and present, it is a kaleidoscopic snapshot of the Scottish nation, from the mythical origins of the Scots in ancient Scythia to the foibles of modern Follyrood, from Sawney Bean to Oor Wullie, and from 'The end of an old song' to 'Aw fur coat and nae knickers' and 'Ye cannae shove yer granny aff a bus'. Curiously useful eclectic scholarship which is wilfully idiosyncratic, this is a real linguistic treasure trove and hours of sheer joy. 584pp and a large size, 19.5 x 25cm.

For every bibliophile, a compendium of book chat with tasty nuggets about writers and their editors. We join Rebecca Lee, a professional text-improver, as she embarks on a fascinating journey to find out how words get from an author's brain to the finished, printed books. She reveals the dark arts of ghostwriters, explores the secret world of literary agents, and uncovers the hidden beauty of the typesetter. Along the way, her quest will be punctuated by a litany of little known but often controversial considerations that make a big impact - ellipses, indexes, hyphens, esoteric points of grammar, and juicy post-publication corrections. A funny and illuminating peek into publishing below stairs, from foot-and-note disease to the town of Index, welcome to the Gutenberg Galaxy. Get your blaps, blovers and blurbs here! 372pp of delight, paperback.

A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts. Is writing the word's greatest invention? Calling it an invention could be misleading unless, like Hildegard of Bingen, an individual in isolation develops a code with symbols. To illustrate the moment when a depiction becomes a name for something, the author takes us back to the palaeolithic period, when a symbol might mean a horse but could also mean a lot of other things. The transitional moment was about five millennia ago, when our ancestors discovered that a sound can be attached to different things and thus exists in its own right. A coherent and ordered system is slowly built up thereafter. The author covers the decipherment of a range of languages including Linear B, the only language whose decipherment, by Michael Ventris in 1952, was achieved solely on statistical analysis of the script's signs, without help from parallel texts in known languages, such as the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone. Linear A remains one of the world's still undeciphered languages, like the Rongorongo language of Easter Island, which the author was working on during the course of writing this book, establishing that it is a logo-syllabary language in which signs represent words, like most invented languages. Another little-known example of a syllabary language is Woleai of the Caroline Islands. Contrary to what we may assume, there are cultures where writing never develops, and codes that have never been cracked, such as the code in the 15th century chimerical Voynich manuscript. The author's argument is that writing is cultural, created by us and transmitted by us. "It is not biological, it is not in our genes. It is, in short, a cultural gizmo." It needs to be learned and eventually the rules of the game become pervasive and seem natural to us. Language, in the sense of face to face communication, is a well-oiled code, but writing is in a different category. 14.7 x 21.7cm, 289pp, photos.