'Grammar is the science of using words rightly, leading to thinking rightly, leading to deciding rightly, without which - as both common sense and experience show - happiness is impossible. Therefore: happiness depends at least partly on good grammar.' So writes Mr Gwynne in his small, but perfectly formed new book. Mr Gwynne believes passionately that we must regain our knowledge of the lost science of grammar before it is too late.

Formerly a successful businessman, Mr Gwynne has for many years been teaching and tutoring just about every sort of subject to just about every sort of pupil in just about every sort of circumstance. His teaching methods are very much the traditional, common-sense ones, refined over the centuries, that were almost everywhere until they were abolished in the 1960s. Being disappointed in the standards of grammar he encountered in his pupils, Mr Gwynne, over time, wrote this wonderful, succinct and yet comprehensive little book - because nothing quite as suitable already existed.

Not For Turning is the first volume of Charles Moore's authorized biography of Margaret Thatcher, the longest serving Prime Minister of the twentieth century and one of the most influential political figures of the postwar era.


Charles Moore's biography of Margaret Thatcher, published after her death on 8 April 2013, immediately supercedes all earlier books written about her. At the moment when she becomes a historical figure, this book also makes her into a three dimensional one for the first time.

The fourth book in the Science of Discworld series, and this time around dealing with The Really Big Questions, Terry Pratchett's brilliant new Discworld story. Judgement Day is annotated with very big footnotes (the interleaving chapters) by mathematician Ian Stewart and biologist Jack Cohen, to bring you a mind-mangling combination of fiction, cutting-edge science and philosophy. Marjorie Daw is a librarian, and takes her job - and indeed the truth of words - very seriously.

She doesn't know it, but her world and ours - Roundworld - is in big trouble. On Discworld, a colossal row is brewing. The Wizards of Unseen University feel responsible for Roundworld (as one would for a pet gerbil).

Alan Johnson's childhood was not so much difficult as unusual, particularly for a man who was destined to become Home Secretary. Not in respect of the poverty, which was shared with many of those living in the slums of post-war Britain, but in its transition from two-parent family to single mother and then to no parents at all...This is essentially the story of two incredible women: Alan's mother, Lily, who battled against poor health, poverty, domestic violence and loneliness to try to ensure a better life for her children; and his sister, Linda, who had to assume an enormous amount of responsibility at a very young age and who fought to keep the family together and out of care when she herself was still only a child. Played out against the background of a vanishing community living in condemned housing, the story moves from post-war austerity in pre-gentrified Notting Hill, through the race riots, school on the Kings Road, Chelsea in the Swinging 60s, to the rock-and-roll years, making a record in Denmark Street and becoming a husband and father whilst still in his teens.

This Boy is one man's story, but it is also a story of England and the West London slums which are so hard to imagine in the capital today. No matter how harsh the details, Alan Johnson writes with a spirit of generous acceptance, of humour and openness which makes his book anything but a grim catalogue of miseries.