"You're always good on ideas, Tom..." An American art collector is claiming that the expensive masterpiece he bought is a fake. He wants to meet with the artist - but Tom Ripley knows that artist no longer exits. Ripley needs to hide his role in the fraud, and keep his colleague's mouth shut.

Someone else should do the dirty work for them - yes, someone with no criminal record could earn a very generous fee for doing a couple of simple murders. Ripley's Game is the third book in Highsmith's Ripley series, and was made into a film starring John Malkovich.

The relentless rise of Communism was the most momentous political development of the first half of the twentieth century. This book explains how and why Communists came to power; how they were able, in a variety of countries on different continents to hold on to power for so long; and, what brought about the downfall of so many Communist systems.

In the space of a single generation, three eighteenth-century writers - Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding - invented an entirely new genre of writing: the novel. This book explains why these authors wrote in the way that they did, and how the complex changes in society - the emergence of the middle-class and more.

Lev is on his way from Eastern Europe to Britain, seeking work. Behind him loom the figures of his dead wife, his beloved young daughter and his outrageous friend Rudi. London holds out the alluring possibility of friendship, sex, money and a new career and, if Lev is lucky, a new sense of belonging...

Takes seven occasions when Britain came closest to revolution: the Peasants' Revolt of 1381; the Jack Cade rebellion of 1450; the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536; the English Civil Wars of the 1640s; the Jacobite Rising of 1745-6; the Chartist Movement of 1838-48; and the General Strike of 1926.

No other bird is quite so ever-present and familiar, so embedded in our culture, as the robin. At the same time we trace the robin's relationship with us: how did this particular bird - one of more than 300 species in its huge and diverse family - find its way so deeply and permanently into our nation's heart and its social and cultural history?

Robinson Crusoe runs away from home to join the navy. After a series of adventures at sea, he is shipwrecked in a devastating storm, and finds himself alone on a remote desert island. He remains there many years, building a life for himself in solitude, until the day he discovers another man's footprint in the sand...