Returning home late one summer's evening, antiquarian bookseller Adam Snow takes a wrong turning and stumbles across the derelict old White House. Compelled by curiosity, he approaches the door, and, standing before the entrance feels the unmistakeable sensation of a small hand creeping into his own, 'as if a child had taken hold of it'.

Mrs Donaldson is a conventional middle-class woman beached on the shores of widowhood after a marriage that had been much like many others: happy to begin with, then satisfactory and finally dull. But when she decides to take in two lodgers, her mundane life becomes much more stimulating.

Social theory lets us understand the full complexity of the world we live - this book explains how.

Explores the influence of immigrant cultures on the capital's music scene. This title tells the story of the music and the larger-than-life characters making it, journeying from Soho jazz clubs to Brixton blues parties to King's Cross warehouse raves to the streets of Notting Hill - and onto sound systems everywhere.

Why is there an 'h' in ghost? William Caxton, inventor of the printing press and his Flemish employees are to blame: without a dictionary or style guide to hand in fifteenth century Bruges, the typesetters simply spelled it the way it sounded to their foreign cars, and it stuck. This book takes you on a journey through English spelling.

Mary Beard on Ancient Rome: Britain's favourite classicist lifts the lid on the Roman Empire.

It is the 1960s. England has become a dictatorship, governed by a sly, ruthless politician called Jobling. All non-whites have been deported, "The English Times" is the only newspaper, and ordinary people live in dread of nightly curfews and secret police. Richard Watt used all his journalistic talents to expose Jobling before he came to power.

100+ writers, artists, philosophers and scientists explore the nature of consciousness.