“There was a time not so very long ago when boys were taught to be men” writes author, archaeologist and broadcaster Neil Oliver, and “part of the education of boys came from reading tales of brave and selfless deeds”. Not so any more. “It’s rubbish being a British man at the moment…nowadays the rest of the world sees British men as the performing seals of George W Bush’s Wild West Show. We’re the sick men of Europe too with our lazy fat guts and our binge-drinking.” He also opines that nothing grand or challenging that we do now is simply for the sake of it; nothing is important unless it is done live on air or filmed to be broadcast to the masses – perhaps a strange complaint from a man who makes his living from such media. But while being an archaeologist in Scottish winters, growing hero hair and appearing on TV in armour and wielding swords may be a little bit manly, Oliver is more interested in manliness on a much grander scale and how stories about such manliness could be an antidote to his despair for the youth of today.

Neil Oliver

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The paranormal is a subject with seemingly limitless fascination for us, and in which people continue to hold as part of their belief systems. A Gallup poll taken in 2005 indicated that 30% of people believed in ghosts and 15% claimed to have seen one. Another survey taken in 2008 had 58% of respondents stating they believed in the supernatural – more than believed in God (54%). Professor Richard Wiseman states in his latest book that between 40% and 50% of people in the UK (and between 80% and 90% in the US) claim to have had some sort of paranormal experience. These are extraordinary figures. For all that we live in a well-educated society where science is more readily accessible than ever before, belief in the things that go bump in the night is still remarkably persistent. As an arch-sceptic and Britain’s only Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology, Wiseman has investigated the paranormal for over twenty years, and all his experience has been poured into his latest book – Paranormality: Why We See What Isn’t There.

Professor Richard Wiseman

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How To Be a Woman may seem an oddly titled book for a 33 year old woman to be reading – surely with 33 years of practice I must have figured it out by now? Yet despite this ample experience, being a woman is something I feel I’m a bit rubbish at. I only own one dress (the one I got married in, never to be worn again). I only own one pair of heels that I can’t walk in (putting me apparently way below average on this count). I never wear, and never have worn, make-up (not even on my wedding day – I drew the line at having to wear a frock). I don’t have a handbag, either (why would I need one when I have a perfectly serviceable rucksack and pockets in my clothes?). And the biggest failing of all – I don’t want babies.

How To Be a Woman is described as being part rant, part memoir, and part The Female Eunuch rewritten “from a barstool”. Yes, that’s right: a lot of How To Be a Woman is about FEMINISM. Before a lot of you flee before the very mention of this word, let me say that Moran is far from being one of those scary, aggressive men-hating feminists

Caitlin Moran

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America has long been billed as the land of opportunity, a place where the streets are paved with gold and anyone who is prepared to work hard enough can buy themselves a part of the American dream. “I grew up hearing over and over, to the point of tedium, that `hard work’ was the secret of success,” Barbara Ehrenreich writes. “No one ever said that you could work hard – harder even than you thought possible – and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt.”

On 22nd August 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act brought about major welfare reform in the US. Couched in terms of promoting a work ethic amongst those in receipt of welfare payments, this act brought about significant change to the American poor, removing any automatic entitlement to payouts and restricting any that were received to a lifetime limit of five years. This reform meant that almost overnight, 4 million women (many of them with children) had to enter the work force in low-paid entry level jobs.

Barbara Ehrenreich

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If you are a fan of Ruth Rendell’s work, you will have noticed that recently two unthinkable things have happened. Firstly, in The Monster in the Box, her much loved Chief Inspector Wexford retired, and then in her latest book The Vault, she has produced her first sequel in her catalogue of over seventy titles. The Vault is not just unusual in being a sequel, however, it also brings the two distinct strands of her work (the Wexford novel and the non-Wexford crime thriller) together into an intriguing and compelling whole.

Reg Wexford (plain old Mr these days) is taking some time to adjust to no longer being a member of Kingsmarkham’s police force. Making an effort to keep himself busy, he and his wife Dora start dividing their time between their country home and their daughter’s coach house in London.

Ruth Rendell

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“Some are born Welsh. Some achieve Welshness. I am going to thrust myself upon Wales”.

Jasper Rees is a thoroughly English man; born in London, educated at Harrow, and brought up to cheer whenever he crossed the Severn Bridge in an eastward direction. But despite this background, he admits to an “unfilled sense of ancestral belonging” whenever he crosses the border to visit his grandparents in Carmarthen. This is what the Welsh call hiraeth – a deep longing to be somewhere (the nearest you can get to it in English is probably “homesickness”, although the translation isn’t quite literal). Jasper’s hiraeth led him to establish Project Wales, an attempt to explore his Welsh ancestry, to reclaim his roots and to live up to his surname by way of a book deal that produced the wonderfully titled Bred of Heaven.

So how do you set about doing something as nebulous as reclaiming your ancestry?

Jasper Rees

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Twenty years ago, three uniquely talented men decided that there was far too much unsolved crime in the world, and set out to use their talents to do something about it. Put like that, this sounds like a story about a batman-style avenger of the wronged, but the true tale of The Murder Room is something altogether more remarkable. These three men – a former FBI agent, a forensic artist and a criminal profiler – are the founder members of the Vidocq Society, a pro bono crime-fighting society based in Philadelphia, named in honour of Eugene Vidocq, the head of the first known private detective agency. The Society is little publicised but has done a huge amount of valuable work over the years.

Michael Capuzzo

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Warwickshire, August 1780.

Deep in the countryside near Rugby stands the Tudor manor house of Lawford Hall, occupied this summer by Sir Theodosius Boughton, his mother Anna Maria, his sister Theodosia, brother-in-law John Donellan, the Donellans’ two young children, and a handful of servants. It is early in the morning of 30th August and something is about to happen that will bring notoriety and scandal to the Boughton household.

Sir Theodosius, aged 20 and suffering from venereal disease he contracted at Eton some five years earlier, has just woken and is visited in his bedchamber by his mother. Anna Maria was keen for her son to take the medicine made up for him by the local apothecary Mr Powell in the hope that it might cure him; he, on the other hand, seems reluctant to take it as a dose he received from the same man the previous week made him ill.

Elizabeth Cooke

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Roy H Williams once wrote, “lives, like money, are spent. What are you buying with yours?”. This is a question that many of us will struggle to answer coherently, I suspect, but not Robert Penn. For Penn is a man with enthusiasm for all things pedal-powered; he has ridden a bike for thirty-six years, on nearly every day of his adult life, including one 40,000km, three-year, round the world trip as an apparent reaction to having been a pin-striped solicitor for too long. As his book “it’s all about the bike” – a cheeky riposte to Lance Armstrong’s best-selling biography about recovering from cancer to win the Tour de France – opens, Penn owns five bikes in various states of repair, but has decided he needs a new one. “I could go online right now with a credit card and spend £3000 on a mass-produced carbon or titanium racing bike” he writes. “It’s tempting, very tempting. But it’s not right. Like many people, I’m frustrated at the round of buying stuff that is designed to be replaced quickly…I want the best bike I can afford, and I want to grow old with it…I want MY bike.”

Robert Penn

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How do you even begin to write about a book like this? A book so unlike any you have read before, a book so absorbing, so original, so intelligent and so magnificently written? A book that makes you want to rush home from work just so that you can pick it up again and find out what happens next? It’s not any easy thing to do, I can tell you. I am sure that many people have been put off trying the His Dark Materials series (of which this is the second installment) because it has been unfairly labelled as children’s fiction; let me assure you that this is a story that works on many levels and is just as good for adults as it is for children. It is the best fantasy adventure I have read since the Chronicles of Narnia (and that, for me, is saying a lot). So, how do I begin? Well, the opening seems like a good place…

“Will tugged at his mother’s hand and said, ‘Come on, come on…’. But his mother hung back. She was still afraid.

Phillip Pullman

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Deep in the stillness of a remote Norwegian forest, there stands a house with a view over a lake. A quiet queue of people stands at the door to the house, patiently waiting their turn. Old and young, male and female, in small groups or alone, everyone waits silently for the person in the house to answer their unspoken pleas. On the other side of the door there lives an author, a writer whose job it is to tell the tale of each person in the queue. Once a year she invites the next person in line to come into the house and have their story told by her. At the front of the queue tonight is a young woman with a dead baby in her arms, but as the author retires to bed wondering what the woman’s story will be, she is startled to hear the front door open and footsteps hesitantly mount the stairs. A man enters the author’s bedroom and stands at the foot of her bed. He is a socially awkward middle aged man who fears his tale might be too nondescript to tell, and he has jumped the queue to speak to the author directly. After some discussion, the author is drawn into naming this man – Alvar Eide – and to ignoring the young woman who waits outside in favour of writing Alvar’s story.

Karin Fossum

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