"Lost Cosmonaut" documents Daniel Kalder's travels in the bizarre and mysterious worlds of Russia's ethnic republics. Obsessed with a quest he never fully understands, Kalder boldly goes where no man has gone before: in the deserts of Kalmykia, he stumbles upon a city dedicated to chess and a forgotten tribe of Mongols; in Mari El, home to Europe's last pagan nation, he meets the Chief Druid and participates in an ancient rite; while in the bleak industrial badlands of Udmurtia, Kalder looks for Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47, and accidentally becomes a TV star. Profane yet wise, utterly honest and yet full of lies, "Lost Cosmonaut" is an eye-opening, blackly comic tour of the most alien planet in our cosmos: Earth.

Mistresses and wives, mothers and daughters - Antonia Fraser brilliantly explores the relationships which existed between The Sun King and the women in his life. This includes not only Louis XIV's mistresses, principally Louise de La Valliere, Athenais de Montespan, and the puritanical Madame de Maintenon, but also the wider story of his relationships with women in general, including his mother Anne of Austria, his two sisters-in-law who were Duchesses d'Orleans in succession, Henriette-Anne and Liselotte, his wayward illegitimate daughters, and lastly Adelaide, the beloved child-wife of his grandson.

Despite the number of claims in publishers blurbs, not many people actually achieve the status of legend in their own lifetime. Fewer still actually deserve that status. John Peel is the exception which proves that rule, a Great Briton whose contribution to British culture is undeniable, without whom popular culture would never have become popular. Beloved by millions - whether for his unstinting championing of musical talent on Radio 1 or for his wildly popular Radio 4 show "Home Truths" - this is the astonishing book he began to write before his untimely death in October 2004, completed by the woman who knew him best, his wife Sheila.

At the heart of the "Memoir" is a son's unembarrassed tribute to his mother. His memory of walks with her through the narrow lanes to the country schools where she taught and his happiness as she named for him the wild flowers on the bank remained conscious and unconscious presences for the rest of his life. A classic family story, told with exceptional restraint and tenderness, "Memoir" cannot fail to move all those who read it.

Taking us from Fleet Street to Clive James on TV, from Russian department stores to Paris fashion shows via fatherhood, some killer bees, and a satire starring Anne Robinson as Mrs Thatcher, "North Face of Soho" is the larger-than-life story of a life lived to the full.

Alternative politics, libertarian socialism, experimental living, feminist communes, street theatre, radical magazine, love affairs - gay and straight ...sex 'n' drugs 'n' rock 'n' roll. Paper Houses is the memoir of a young woman who comes down from Oxford to London in 1970, determined to break free from a conventional middle-class, close-knit family.

Edna Healey has been married to Denis Healey for more than fifty years and has seen parliamentary life, both in power and opposition from the inside.

Emilie du Chatelet was one of the greatest thinkers of the 18th century, a woman whose work was of by history. Fiercely intellectual and passionate, Emilie's relationship with Voltaire was as radical as he vital use to Einstein and who, until now, has been largely ignoredr thinking.

In 480 BC, Xerxes, the King of Persia, led an invasion of mainland Greece. Its success should have been a formality. For seventy years, victory - rapid, spectacular victory - had seemed the birthright of the Persian Empire. In the space of a single generation, they had swept across the Near East, shattering ancient kingdoms, storming famous cities, putting together an empire which stretched from India to the shores of the Aegean. As a result of those conquests, Xerxes ruled as the most powerful man on the planet. Yet somehow, astonishingly, against the largest expeditionary force ever assembled, the Greeks of the mainland managed to hold out.

With characteristic modesty and a captivating eye for the absurd, Nigel Havers treats us to the highlights and lowlights of a life like no other; a life in which chilling reality (watching his father Michael - later the Attorney General - begin his prosecution of the Yorkshire Ripper) and beguiling fantasy (sleeping with 'Elizabeth Taylor') continuously and arrestingly collide.

The classic memoir by one of the great British journalists of the twentieth century, a man who earned universal respect not only for his courage in reporting from dangerous places, but for his candour and independence. "Point of Departure" features Cameron's eyewitness accounts of the atom bomb tests at Bikini atoll, the Chinese invasion of Tibet and the war in Korea; and vivid evocations of his encounters with Mao Tse-tung and Winston Churchill.

Andrew Greig grew up on the East coast of Scotland, where playing golf is as natural as breathing. He sees the game as the great leveller, and has played on the Old course at St Andrews as well as on the miners' courses of Yorkshire. He writes about the different cultural manifestations of the game, the history, the geography, the different social meanings, as well as the subjective experience, the reflections between shots. An indispensable book for golfers and non golfers alike.

We spend our days catching buses and trains, tapping away at computers, shopping, queuing, lying on sofas...But we know almost nothing about these activities. Exploring the history of these subjects as they come up during a typical day, starting with breakfast and ending with bedtime, Joe Moran shows that they conceal all kinds of hidden histories and meanings.

In 1983, Arthur Miller was invited to Beijing to direct the first Chinese production of Death of a Salesman. This book is the diary he kept during of that unique and eccentric production. The diary portrays the challenges that faced Miller as a Liberal American playwright and director working in Communist China. Miller's major concern was how to overcome the linguistic and cultural difficulties of trying to communicate his artistic vision to a Chinese cast. The result is not merely an interesting account of a highly unusual production, but it also reveals the process any production may go through, and is an insight into the mind of a considerate director.

A meticulously researched history of the Santa Claus myth, tracing the munificent, rosy-cheeked one's journey from medieval Constantinople, through renaissance Amsterdam to his twentieth century comeback in the advertising studios of New York City.

We've always dreamed of perfect places: Eden, heaven and Oz - places over the rainbow, beyond death and loss. Now, through computer technology, we can inhabit those worlds together. Each week, between 35 and 50 million people worldwide abandon reality for virtual worlds. Tim Guest takes us on a revelatory journey through the electronic looking-glass, as he investigates one of the most bizarre phenomena of the 21st century.

In February 1972, Nixon amazed the world with a trip to China. He was the first US President to go there -- in fact officially the first American since the Communist takeover. It was like a visit to the far side of the moon, but also a brilliant stroke of policy. With China on side Nixon could get out of Vietnam; US technology could help Mao recover from his disastrous Cultural Revolution; most of all, both needed a buttress against Soviet Russia in aggressive mood.

Beloved broadcaster and writer Miles Kington's account of an endearingly eccentric childhood has everything - a lovable narrator, a mother who is constantly on her deathbed, a gadget-obsessed father and a flamboyantly theatrical older brother. SOMEONE LIKE ME is a collection of enchanting musings on life from the fringes of a sometimes roundabout, often perplexing but always entertaining adult world in which the incidents and accidents of dog training, borrowed lawnmowers, badminton, figs and unlikely brushes with the Catholic Church combine in the most original and laugh-out-loud funny book you'll have read in decades.

In September 2005, Alex Kapranos began writing about what he ate while touring the world with the rock band Franz Ferdinand. The writing is as much about where he eats and the people he eats with as the unusual flavours he tastes on the road. Whether it's munching donuts with cops in Brooklyn, swallowing bull's balls with the band in Buenos Aires or queuing for a saveloy in South Shields, these are surprising and vivid snapshots of life on the road. Funny, poignant, sickening or sexual depending on the situation, the material, both new and previously published in the "Guardian", is fascinating and entertaining.

To be a good doctor you have to be a compassionate chameleon, a shape shifter - a shaman. Even if your adaptation to your patients' world happens at an unconscious level you should always work within their system of ideas, never against it...' So writes Cecil Helman after 27 years as a family practitioner in the suburbs of North London interlaced with training and research as a medical anthropologist, comparing a wide variety of health systems. This unique combination of frontline health worker and detached academic informs the many stories that make up this fascinating book.

The founder of the first lonely hearts agency for country dwellers brings us the happiest, funniest, most poignant and sometimes downright eccentric tales of love in the countryside. Since founding the Farmers' and Country Bureau from her Peak District farmhouse over twenty years ago, Patricia has been helping love blossom the length and breadth of rural England.

In 1945, just as the war was ending, 'the teenager' arrived. This is the story of how we got to that moment - the century and a half of ferment, folly, and angst that created a separate Teen Age in Europe and America.

The candid, wryly funny and emotional autobiography of one of the UK’s most respected actresses.

More tales of life as a schools inspector in Yorkshire. Gervase Phinn's colourful cast of characters have now become firm favourites - the eccentric staff at County Hall as well as the children themselves who find ways of embarrassing the school inspectors with innocent ease. Gervase Phinn has an extraordinary talent to entertain, and the latest instalment to the "Dale" series is heart-warming, wry and will make you laugh out loud.

Hunger is the loudest voice in my head. I'm hungry most of the time'. One January morning in 2003, William Leith woke up to the fattest day of his life. That same day he left London for New York to interview controversial diet guru Dr Robert Atkins. What started out as a routine assignment set Leith on an intensely personal and illuminating journey into the mysteries of hunger and addiction. "The Hungry Years" charts new territory for anyone who has ever had a craving or counted a calorie. This story of food, fat, and addiction will change the way you look at food for ever.

Bill Bryson's first travel book opened with the immortal line, 'I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.' In his deeply funny new memoir, he travels back in time to explore the ordinary kid he once was, and the curious world of 1950s America. It was a happy time, when almost everything was good for you, including DDT, cigarettes and nuclear fallout. This is a book about growing up in a specific time and place. But in Bryson's hands, it becomes everyone's story, one that will speak volumes - especially to anyone who has ever been young.

The tale of the agitation led by Samuel Plimsoll MP, "The Sailor's Friend", and by his wife Eliza, who worked together to defend sailors against nefarious practices including overloading and the use of unseaworthy "coffin-ships".

Following on from the success of "The Speckled People", Hugo Hamilton's new memoir has at its heart the story of a summer he spent working at a local harbour in Ireland, at a time of tremendous fear and mistrust.

Thomas Hardy is one of the sacred figures in English writing, a great poet and a novelist with a world reputation. His life was also extraordinary: from the poverty of rural Dorset he went on to become the Grand Old Man of English life and letters, his last resting place in Westminster Abbey. This seminal biography covers Hardy's illegitimate birth, his rural upbringing, his escape to London in the 1860s, his marriages, his status as a bestselling novelist, and in later life, his supreme achievements as a poet.

An astute and poignant depiction of two uprooted lives which are drawn together, touching on key periods of 20th-century history, from the Raj and the Holocaust, to life in post-war Britain. This is a life-enhancing and moving love story of two ordinary yet exceptional people.