The year is 1972, the Cold War is far from over and Serena Frome, in her final year at Cambridge, is being groomed for MI5. Sent on Operation Sweet Tooth - a highly secret undercover mission - she meets Tom Haley, a young writer. First she loves his stories, then she begins to love the man. Can she maintain the fiction of her undercover life?

Almost six hundred years ago, a short, genial man took a very old manuscript off a library shelf. With excitement, he saw what he had discovered and ordered it copied. This book details how one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, made possible the world as we know it.

Is there anything quite so exhilarating as swimming in wild water? This is a joyful swimming tour of Britain, a frog's-eye view of the country's best bathing holes - the rivers, rock pools, lakes, ponds, lochs and sea that define a watery island.

The Penwith Peninsula in Cornwall is where the land ends. In this book, the author takes us into this huddle of grey roofs at the edge of the sea at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It brings Cornwall and its seas to life, mixing drinking and drugs and sea spray, moonlit beaches and shattering storms, myth and urban myth.

Lucie Manette has been separated from her father for eighteen years while he languished in Paris' most feared prison, the Bastille. Finally reunited, the Manettes' fortunes become inextricably intertwined with those of two men, the heroic aristocrat Darnay and the dissolute lawyer Carton.

When Henry James died he left behind a series of notebooks filled with ideas for novels and stories that he never wrote.

Drawing on conflicts from Colombia and Sri Lanka to Palestine and South Africa, this book is about how and why we should talk to terrorists.

Spring 1868, and the population of Boston is being terrorised by a series of mysterious attacks: first a magnetic storm causes ships in the harbour to collide in flames, then in another bizarre catastrophe every piece of glass in the financial district spontaneously melts - clocks, windows, eyeglasses.