Bloomsbury

Towards the end of his life Titian didn't finish his paintings. The elderly artist kept them in his studio, never quite completing them, as though wanting to endlessly postpone the moment of letting go. Created with the fingers as much as the brush, Titian's last paintings are imbued with a sense of final, desperate effort - a rawness and immediacy...

The Nightingale family live on a barge on the canal near London Zoo, and Mum is a vet. When Tom and Sophie find a bag of snakes dumped at the gates of the zoo, a great and exciting adventure begins. Soon they are finding out about the trade in illegal animals and learning how to care for these wonderful creatures. The snakes are carefully housed in...

"Maybe he doesn’t like anything, but he can do everything," New Yorker editor Harold Ross once said of the magazine’s brilliantly sardonic theater critic, Wolcott Gibbs. And, for over thirty years at the magazine, Gibbs did do just about everything. He turned out fiction and nonfiction, profiles and parodies, filled columns in "Talk of...

’But that’s what this is, isn’t it? The ultimate bitch fight.’ When John takes a break from his boyfriend, he accidentally meets the girl of his dreams. Filled with guilt and indecision, he decides there is only one way to straighten this out... Mike Bartlett’s punchy new story takes a playful, candid look at one man’s...

Visit www.lisateasley.com Lost souls, the disenfranchised, the destitute: these are the denizens of Lisa Teasley’s stories. There’s Magda, the drug-addicted surfer chick, Gita, who juggles sexual relationships, and Boogie, an overweight ten-year-old. Teasley follows her characters deep into the mire. "Baker" emerged from the 1997 rape and...

The Idea of History is the best known work of the Oxford philosopher and historian RG Collingwood. Published posthumously in 1946 it is, in effect, two books: a historiography and a philosophy of history. Students look to Collingwood for a history of thinking about history, and to discover his ideas about the nature of historical understanding. It...