Books v. Cigarettes: (Penguin Great Ideas)

Bubbling with gaiety and humour, these letters will delight Leigh Fermor and Mitford fans alike

Includes a selection of radio talks.

Explores everything from the perils of second-hand bookshops to the dubious profession of being a critic, from freedom of the press to what patriotism really means.

'A uniquely charming and enticing journey through a remarkable life.' Stephen Fry With virtually all the letters in this volume previously unpublished - this is a revealing new insight into the private life of a legendary figure.

A treasury of selected quotations from one of the world's best-loved and best-selling writers and the author of The Alchemist.

A collection of more than seventy-five newspaper columns from The Philadelphia Inquirer . Combining humour, wit, poignancy and affection, it offers insight into the intriguing and wonderful world we live in. It also features writings about animals (from dogs to elephants to geese!), comments on life's foibles and farces, and interviews.

A collection of articles written by Stephen Fry for magazines, newspapers and radio, includes selected wireless essays of Donald Trefusis, the ageing professor of philology brought to life in Fry's novel The Liar and the best of Fry's weekly column for the Daily Telegraph .

A guide to the twentieth-century, illuminating the careers of many of its greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists and philosophers, such as Louis Armstrong, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust.

For this treatise on statecraft the author drew upon his own experience of office under the turbulent Florentine republic, rejecting traditional values of political theory and recognizing the complicated, transient nature of political life.

Presents an account of the author's observations of working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire in the 1930s. It provides descriptions of social injustice, cramped slum housing, dangerous mining conditions, squalor, hunger and growing unemployment.