'I don't know any tract of land in which in so narrow a compass may be found an equal variety of sublime and beautiful features'. So said the poet William Wordsworth of the Lake District, an area as rich in cultural associations as it is in beautiful scenery. Hunter Davies, who has spent every summer in the Lakes for nearly half a century, takes the reader on an engaging, informative and affectionate tour of the lakes, fells, traditions, denizens and history of England's most popular tourist destination. From the first discovery of Lakeland as a tourist destination in the 18th century, to the tale of the Maid of Buttermere, the poet Coleridge's ascent of Scafell Pike in 1802, to such enduring local traditions as Cumberland wrestling and hound trailing, here are the lakes and tarns and towns and villages, literary and artistic folk and Cumbrian characters and a miscellaneous Lakeland A-Z in a living place, not a museum. Very well illustrated throughout, 324pp in paperback.

Yorkshire is a county with more strangeness than you can shake a Dale walking stick at. Home of Robin Hood (born in Barnsdale), Guy Fawkes, Dick Turpin and Dracula (Bram Stoker wrote part of the vampire tale in a Whitby hotel) and, some say, the birthplace of modern civilisation began in Leeds, but you'll have to read the book to find out why. Ideal for a blowy winter night, the history begins in Jurassic Yorkshire 200,000,000BC, Britain's oldest house (8770BC), the Stonehenge of the north, St Hilda of Whitby and Caedmon the Cowherd (614); the uneducated Yorkshire lad who gave us the British Empire (1693) who was John Harrison from Wakefield, Gentleman Jack, the Luddites and what they stood for, and the Brontë connection, four exceptionally well-married daughters, a cat, a cliff and a life-saving intervention (1934), the Yorkshire accent combats Nazi propaganda, building Britain's highest motorway (1963), the Yorkshire Ripper finally caught (1981), and John Noakes gets down about Shep among the dozens of entries in this fun and readable quirky reference book. 170pp, paperback.

Tall, elegant hardback, slim enough to fit into the walker's pocket, with beautiful line drawn maps for meandering through Salcey Forest in Northamptonshire towards Buckinghamshire, St. David's Head in Pembrokeshire, Castle Carrock and the River Gelt Cumbria, the Ashdown Forest to play Pooh Sticks or Swanwick to Corfe in Dorset, here are paths that will lead you through our golden island of discovery. Christopher Somerville is one of Britain's best-loved walking journalists and personalities and here presents a personal selection of his best walks. Laid by region with over 40 illustrations and area maps, car parks, circular routes, easy-to-follow directions and what to look out for, the volume is a treasury of anecdote, observation and description. 534pp.

Country Life magazine has been delighting readers with its observations from rural Britain for 130 years, and this collection of extracts covers a range of subjects - sports, pastimes, village life, landscape and architecture - from the magazine's first 50 years. An old boy of Winchester College takes the reader on a walk round the school as it was in 1902, including the "bare and cheerless" dining hall. 1903 sees a portrait of an old-mole-catcher with a bizarre contraption round his neck, but disappointingly the profession is reluctant to reveal any secrets of the trade. "Ponies for Children" in 1934 urges parents to get a pony who is keen but not too keen, just enough to keep the child on their toes without actually endangering life, and as late as 1926 a doctor is called in to pronounce on the dangers of women riding astride. Although the matter was considered too delicate for detail, the MD concluded by saying his own daughter rides the modern way. A celebration of barge-painting in 1944 reveals that the typical bargee is hazy about the origins of the traditional designs depicting "big old teapots with roses and castles". Knickerbockers or trousers for golf? To the regret of the writer, the traditional plus fours have been discarded in favour of slacks and (whisper it) shirt-sleeves. In 1940 the travel writer H .V. Morton writes patriotically from the tower of the village church, where he was doing guard duty, saying "All over our land, villages, once proclaimed dead and done for, have awakened to arms." In the same year the historian A. L. Rowse is confident that "it is the English who provide the best example of a people in harmony with their environment". 244pp, numerous black and white illustrations.

These fascinating short articles from Country Life in the first half of the 20th century plunge us into a nostalgic world when gentlemen's leisure pursuits were rarely penetrated by women. "Yachting in London" describes the Peter Pan pleasures of sailing models boats on the Round Pond, while "Ferreting" is accompanied by an archive photo of a man heading down a rabbit hole with only his legs visible. "The pleasures of a cold" from 1939 describes what we now know as man-flu with uncanny accuracy. In 1900 an article praising the master tattooist, Sutherland Macdonald, promises absence of pain if alleviated by cocaine. "Hitch and hike" is a popular pastime in 1926, and the secret to getting a ride is to have a clean collar; the illustration in fact shows the hitchhiker wearing a jacket and tie. In 1934, the year driving tests were introduced, a letter to the editor suggests that licences should be accompanied by a set of rules forbidding cutting in, driving in the middle of the road, and parking on bends. Boxing, cricket, rugby and polo all elicit strong opinions, while fishing has a whole section to itself, concluding with "Experiments with fishing gut". Lord Baden Powell writes in 1937 about the importance of fitness for all in the face of the coming conflict. Hunting and point-to-point are popular pastimes among readers of Country Life, and in 1921 the Prince of Wales's first steeplechase is deemed worthy of close analysis. Everything from fine brandy to crocodile shooting is dissected, usually with advice about how to dress for it. 244pp, black and white illustrations.

Frederick Daniel, George, Heywood, James and their descendants are the celebrated Hardy family of artists, some of the leading genre painters of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Heywood Hardy was one of the best Victorian animal painters and instrumental in advancing a more realistic portrayal of animals, leaving behind the romanticised representations of Landseer. His elder brother James was amongst the most accomplished sporting artists of the day, while their cousins Frederick Daniel and George painted some of the most sympathetic pictures of county towns and villages. Here is putting at Blackheath, a splendid music room at Brighton Pavilion, a Scottish country scene of a young gillie with his setter dogs and dead game, stunning portraits of Grand National-winning horses, foxhounds and hunting dogs and hunting scenes, riding on sand dunes in Morecambe as young girls and women enjoy holiday time in 1908, the sale of Cavalry horses in 1884, two Victorian ladies being scared by a bull over the fence, a lion cub, corn stooks by Bray Church, a mother and child posting a letter, a baby's birthday and other family scenes like taking in orphans, a firstborn and trying on spectacles. James Hardy Sr was a miniature portrait painter; his granddaughter Mable Emily Lee-Hankey maintained the tradition and painted a famous series of miniatures of Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, later Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, held in the Royal Collection. The author discusses the life and work of each artist and the influences of each other's paintings, the context of artistic and social developments and draws on contemporary sources to expertly illustrate how critics and collectors viewed the work of the Hardy family. Many are reproduced here in colour for the very first time in this beautifully made 224 page large art gallery, 9½" x 12". Colour.

Sub-titled 'One Man's Walk In Search of his Father and A Lost England' this powerful and moving book is about the need to write new stories for our communities and ourselves. In 1981, Mike Carter's dad Pete organised the People's March for Jobs which saw 300 people walk from Liverpool to London to protest as the Thatcher government's policies devastated industrial Britain and sent unemployment skyrocketing. Just before the 2016 EU referendum, Mike set off to walk the same route in a quest to better understand his dad and his country. As he walked, Mike found many echoes of the early 80s - a working class overlooked and ignored by Westminster politicians, communities hollowed out, anger and despair co-existing with hope and determination for change. He also found that he and his father shared more in common than he might have thought. The book begins with the story of Pete who left school in West Bromwich at the age of 15 in 1953, illiterate, one of six children of alcoholic parents. He trained as a bricklayer where he was radicalised on the building sites and joined the Young Communist League, and by the early 70s, led the Birmingham Building Workers in their successful strike action against the use of casual labour. He went on to become the industrial organiser of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Working on the Guardian, his son Mike asked himself "what had happened to the Britain that my father had promised me?" Clearing his father's belongings, Pete discovered papers, photographs and scrapbooks and newspaper cuttings about the industrial disputes of the 70s, love letters and letters to himself and his sister and his father?s old flat cap. He put it on and decided to follow the route of the March which had set off on 2nd May 1981 35 years to the day later. 391pp, paperback.

Sub-titled 'The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938-1941', this sweeping ground-breaking epic combines military with social history, the world-historically significant story of Britain at war. In looking closely at the military and political dimensions of the conflict's first crucial years, Alan Allport tackles questions such as: could the war have been avoided? Could it have been lost? Were the strategic decisions the right ones? How well did the British organise and fight? How well did the British live up to their own values? What difference did the war make in the end to the fate of the nation? He also looks intimately at the changes in wartime society and culture and draws on a large cast of characters from the leading statesmen and military commanders who made the decisions, to the ordinary men, women and children who carried them out and lived through their consequences, to present a comprehensible and compelling single history of 46 million people. What he tries to explain is how a country that got so many things catastrophically wrong in the early years of the conflict managed not just to hold out against Hitler, but in the second anniversary of the war's outbreak in September 1941, to have apparently halted the rout and even perhaps to be constructing a plausible theory of victory. It ends on a note of cautious hope. With maps including the battlefield of May to June 1940, the Battle of Britain, major Luftwaffe night attacks, the North Atlantic, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Imperial Crisis spring 1941 and Bomber Command targets September 1939 to December 1941. The British-born historian's book has been published in the USA, 590 roughcut pages which are highly desirable in the US. 2021 Alfred A. Knopf New York.

Sub-titled 'The True Story of a Serial Killer, The Great London Smog, and The Strangling of A City', this is a book about a killer fog and a killer loose amidst it. London was still recovering from the devastation of World War II when another disaster hit. For five long days in December 1952, a killer smog held the city firmly in its grip. Day became night, transport ground to a halt, criminals roamed the streets and some 12,000 people died from the poisonous air. In the chaotic aftermath, another killer was stalking the streets using the fog as a cloak for his crimes. All across London women were going missing - poor women, forgotten women, whose disappearance has caused little alarm. Each had one thing in common - the misfortune of meeting a quiet, unassuming man named John Reginald Christie who invited them back to his decrepit Notting Hill flat during that dark winter. They never left. The eventual arrest of the Beast of Rillington Place caused a media frenzy. Were there more bodies buried in the walls, under the floorboards, in the back garden of this house of horrors? Was it the fog that cause Christie to suddenly snap and what role had he played in the notorious double murder that happened in the same apartment, building not three years before, a murder for which another probably innocent man was sent to the gallows? Journalist Kate Winkler Dawson braids three strands together in a taut, readable, true crime thriller about a man who changed the fate of the death penalty in the UK, and an environmental catastrophe with implications that still echo today. In the words of Simon Winchester, who became asthmatic at the age of seven as a result of the Great Smog "she is to be commended for telling a terrible tale memorably and brilliantly." Kate certainly includes much first-hand reportage and we feel we are there in blackout with bodies in the mist and a madman on the loose who strangled at least seven women and a baby. Illustrations, 341 pages.

With plentiful literary references, quotations from visitors and boxes covering topics such as Jack the Ripper, Black analyses the pivotal moments in history that make London what it is today. From the influence of the Romans on the main roads, to the long, arduous battles for both royal and political leadership, from Shakespeare's influence on the written word to the impact of the Swinging Sixties, from the influx of those who arrived in the city by ship in the 1950s to the riots that set about change in the 1980s, the book is as much about economics and culture as it is about politics and society. It deals with migration, communications, empire and cultural energy. London's earlier period is covered, but the principal focus is on the last half millennium, the period during which London became a major trader with the trans-oceanic world, the ruler of trans-oceanic colonies, and the English language became an increasingly important cultural medium. Travel through history and jump on to the Tube to discover the tales of our great capital. 260pp, paperback.