Christina Hardyment

Novel Houses' visits unforgettable dwellings in twenty legendary works of English and American fiction. Each chapter stars a famous novel in which a dwelling is pivotal to the plot, and reveals how personally significant that place was to the writer who created it. We discover Uncle Tom's Cabin's powerful influence on the American Civil War, how essential 221B Baker Street was to Sherlock Holmes and the importance of Bag End to the adventuring hobbits...

In November, hundreds of people submitted recordings of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Roger McGough in an attempt to win the prize -- participation in the recording of this new poetry collection by Christina Hardyment, historian and audiobook reviewer for The Times. The collection covers a wide range of classics by Shakespeare, Keats, Clare, Blake and others, as well as modern poems by Roger McGough among others.

Pleasures of the Garden begins in ancient China and ends on the Isle of Man; it admires both stately landscaped parks and a soap box full of red geraniums on a fire-escape. It shows that gardening is for everybody, whatever their resources. It features classic writers on gardens such as John Evelyn and Gertrude Jekyll, famous historical figures like Pliny, Francis Bacon and Thomas Jefferson, the novelists Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and Robert...