This beautifully produced, limited-edition gift box contains our eight titles from Autumn 2011. Only 500 sets are created and individually numbered for the perfect gift. All our books are exquisitely designed and bound in vibrant high-quality linen.

For a limited time only, buy at the special price of £59.95 (usual price £80)

In the Winter of 1811 Lewis Way – an accidental millionaire –  had an epiphany which would lead him to devote his life and fortune to the return of the Jews to the Holy Land. This essay, focusing on Way’s travels – as far as Moscow and Mount Lebanon – and personal faith - he believed passionately in Armageddon and the Apocalypse – shines new light on the contemporary Church, the condition of the Jews in Europe, and the politics of his time and our own.

From Macaulay in the 19th century to Fukuyama in the late 20th, historians have often been lulled into thinking that things can only get better. Such belief in progress, argues Simon Heffer, may be typical of times of plenty, but it ignores a less palatable truth: that, since the beginnings of recorded history, the major events in international relations can be attributed to a single cause, the desire by rulers to assert or protect their power.

Taking a panoramic view from the days of Thucydides up to the present, Heffer analyses the motive forces behind the pursuit of power, and, explains in a beautiful argument why history is destined to repeat itself.

What is it that makes you distinct from me? Identity is a term much used but hard to define. For that very reason, it has long been a topic of fascination for philosophers but has been regarded with aversion by neuroscientists – until now. Susan Greenfield takes us on a journey in search of a biological interpretation of this most elusive of concepts, guiding us through the social and psychiatric perspectives and ultimately into the heart of the physical brain. As the brain adapts exquisitely to environment, do the cultural challenges of the 21st century mean that we are facing unprecedented changes to identity itself?

"Late Spring, directed and co-written by Yasujiro Ozu, was released in 1949, which makes it an old film, or a film that has been new for a long time…" So begins this remarkable essay in narrative reconstruction. Film-critic, novelist and essayist Mars-Jones gives a virtuoso performance as the lost figure of film explainer, drawing out a host of meaning from the reticence of Ozu’s classic Japanese movie.

“So long after its first release Late Spring is still limber and elusive,” enthuses Mars-Jones. Noriko Smiling breathes new life into both Ozu’s film, and film studies as a whole. There has never been a film book like this.

Joseph Roth, whose many novels included The Radetsky March, was one of the most seductive, disturbing, and enigmatic writers of the twentieth century. Born in the Habsburg Empire in what is now Ukraine, and dying in Paris in 1939, he was a perpetual displaced person, a traveler, a prophet, a compulsive liar, and a man who covered his tracks.

In this revealing ‘psycho-geography’, Dennis Marks makes a journey through the eastern border­lands of Europe to uncover the truth about Roth’s lost world. The result is a riveting and involving documentary that reunites Roth with his creative and spiritual landscape.

‘At once a travel narrative, an allegorical journey, a withering comment on State-Building, a humanist philosophy of life, a preparation for death and a prophecy of resurrection (both for Armenia and for himself), this breathtaking, elliptical prose first appeared in the Soviet magazine Zvezda in 1933. Journey was the last piece Mandelstam saw published, and it takes its place among the outstanding masterpieces of twentieth century literature’ — Bruce Chatwin

This edition also includes the companion-piece, 'Conversation about Dante', ‘Osip Mandelstam’s astonishing fantasia on poetic creation’ (Seamus Heaney).

Endlessly surprising and entertaining, Humiliation is an essay-in-fragments unlike any other you will read on the human condition. With a disarming blend of personal reflec­tion and cultural commentary, Wayne Koestenbaum walks us – at times cajoles us – through a spectrum of mortifications, in history, current events, literature, art, music, film, and in his own life. The book’s timing, the New York Times tells us, “is flawless.”

'The funniest, smartest, most heart breaking yet powerful book I've read in a long time.' John Waters

Prefaced by Frances Wilson, My Prizes is a brilliantly mordant memoir of the background and circumstances of nine literary prizes awarded to Austrian novelist and enfant terrible, Thomas Bernhard, between 1963 and 1980, followed by some of the speeches he delivered on those occasions. The result is a self-portrait of the artist as prizewinner and prize farceur: sardonic, biting the-hand, relishing both the world and himself with bitter amusement.