Penguin Specials

I have been a restaurant critic for over a decade, written reviews of well over 700 establishments, and if there is one thing I have learnt it is that people like reviews of bad restaurants. No, scratch that. They adore them, feast upon them like starving vultures who have spotted fly-blown carrion out in the bush.

They claim otherwise, of course. Readers like to present themselves as private arbiters of taste; as people interested in the good stuff. I'm sure they are. I'm sure they really do care whether the steak was served au point as requested or whether the soufflé had achieved a certain ineffable lightness. And yet, when I compare dinner to bodily fluids, the room to an S & M chamber in Neasden (only without the glamour or class), and the bill to an act of grand larceny, why, then the baying crowd is truly happy.

Don't believe me? Then why, presented with the chance to buy this ebook filled with accounts of twenty restaurants - their chefs, their owners, their poor benighted front of house staff - getting a complete stiffing courtesy of the sort of vitriolic bloody-curdling review which would make the victims call for their mummies, did you seize it with both hands?

Benjamin Britten single-handedly transformed the reputation of British classical music. The enormous popular appeal of his great works, such as Peter Grimes (1945) and the Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1946), make him the most successful opera composer of any born in the twentieth century. But his success was not without controversy and pain: he was accused of fleeing Britain to avoid military service, he was widely known to be sexually obsessed with boys and he suffered an astonishing array of illnesses.

This short book combines a colourful overview of his life with pithy descriptions of all of his major musical works, providing an intimate portrait of this highly unusual man and the perfect introduction to a towering figure of British culture.

Free is coming. We all know how artists and are at risk from filesharing; now digital manufacturing and 3D printing mean that no industry is immune. But the same technology that enables easy piracy also offers a huge opportunity: artists and businesses can share what they do at low cost, while building relationships with fans.

So how can you embrace free, while finding the superfans who will help you thrive? How can you make money in the Free world? Here are ten ideas to reshape your future. Welcome to the Curve.

Books, Movies, Rhythm, Blues is the companion volume to Fan Mail, Nick Hornby's collection of writings on football. This second collection brings together the best of his other non-fiction pieces, on film and tv, writers and painters and music, and including one exceptional fragment of autobiography. With subject matter ranging from the Sundance Festival to Abbey Road Studios, from P.G. Wodehouse to The West Wing, these are pieces that 'were written for fun, or because I felt I had things to say and time to say them, or because the commissions were unusual and imaginative, or because ... I was being asked to go somewhere I had never been before.'

This is a story that affects us all: our friends, our family and our children. Antibiotics add, on average, 20 years to everyone's lives. Since the manufacture of penicillin in 1943, for over 70 years we have survived extraordinary operations and life-threatening infections. We are so familiar with these wonder drugs that we take them for granted. The truth is that we have been abusing them: as patients; as doctors; as travellers; in our food.

No new class of antibiotic has been discovered for 26 years and the bugs are fighting back. If we do not take action now, in a few decades we may start dying from the most commonplace of ailments that can today be treated easily. This book is vital in raising awareness for the future health of our children and our grandchildren.

After the phenomenal success of Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby tried to avoid writing about football, for fear that he'd be writing about it forever. But occasionally over the years he's found it impossible to turn down a particularly enticing assignment or, in the case of the 2012-13 Premier League, just unable to resist writing about that most spectacular of seasons.

Fortunately for those who love great writing about football, all these fugitive pieces are collected in Fan Mail. You can follow the fortunes, as Hornby did, of a hopelessly out-of-their-depth Cambridge United in the old Second Division, discover why Perry Groves was an unlikely hero among Arsenal fans, enjoy Hornby trying to explain the World Cup to Americans, and share with him the pain of watching our national team.

'Anyone artistic needed Abroad in the 1950s.'

Paul and his girlfriend are artists in need of subject matter. Arresting, evocative subject matter. So they decide to go Abroad, as much as possible, for as long as possible. Because Abroad is full of well furnished scenery. Particularly peasants. Real, earthy, traditional peasants. Except you shouldn't really call them peasants should you? 'Country people'. Abroad is full of country people.

In this funny, deftly written short story, Penelope Lively satirises an arty student of the 50s, a precursor of the gap year traveller, who hasn't learnt as much from her time Abroad as she likes to think . . .

The Badlands, a warren of narrow hutongs in the eastern district of pre-communist Peking, had its heyday in the 1930s. Home to the city's drifters, misfits and the odd bohemian, it was a place of opium dens, divebars, brothels, flophouses and cabarets, and was infamous for its ability to satisfy every human desire from the exotically entertaining to the criminally depraved. These vignettes of eight non-Chinese residents of the precinct White Russians, Americans and Europeans bring the Badlands vividly back to life, providing a short but potent account of a place and a way of life until now largely forgotten, but here rendered unforgettable.

Whaam! Roy Lichtenstein - architect of Pop art, connoisseur of the comic strip, master of irony and prophet of popular culture. From exhilarating images of ice-cool jet pilots in dog fights, to blue-haired Barbie dolls drowning in scenes of domestic heartache, Lichtenstein's instantly recognisable paintings, with their Ben-Day dots and witty one-liners, defined the art of a generation. But how did a jobbing, unassuming painter of the Fifties become a world-famous Pop artist whose work today sells for millions? What do his paintings really tell us? And what is his legacy?

This book, which can be read in two hours or less, is a perfect introduction to the artist and his work. Spanning Lichtenstein's career, and explaining his unique style, it is a journey through the life of one of the twentieth century's greatest artists.

'Tonight it is the concert. Two Prodigies of Nature are coming to play in my lady's ball-room. As soon as the concert begins I understand why the whole world comes to stare and listen.'

Scipio is eleven years old and a lady's page. He plays the harpsichord, speaks French and German, and sings in Italian. But what was appealing and remarkable in a small child is no longer so in a 'hobbledehoy'. And after he meets the two child prodigies, Wolfi and Nannerl, at a concert, Scipio's fate will change forever.

When a family celebrates the prize-giving day at their daughter's secondary school, thoughts turn to their own childhoods. The father remembers his living room piano recital, recorded on a well-worn cassette tape. The mother remembers her own father's war tragedy. As the father searches for the physical reminder of his past and the mother longs to forget her own, they confront the breakdown of their marriage in the present.

In Pentatonic, Jonathan Coe movingly explores the memories that unite us and the experiences that drive us apart. The story is simultaneously available as a digital download with the piece of music which originally inspired the story.

When news of the murder trial of prominent Communist Party leader Bo Xilai's wife reached Western attention, it was apparent that, as with many events in the secretive upper echelons of Chinese politics, there was more to the story. Now, as the Party's 18th National Congress oversees the biggest leadership transition in decades, and installs the Bo family's long-time rival Xi Jinping as president, China's rulers are finding it increasingly difficult to keep their poisonous internal divisions behind closed doors.

Bo Xilai's breathtaking fall from grace is an extraordinary tale of excess, murder, defection, political purges and ideological clashes going back to Mao himself, as the princeling sons of the revolutionary heroes ascend to control of the Party. China watcher John Garnaut examines how Bo's stellar rise through the ranks troubled his more reformist peers, as he revived anti-'capitalist roader' sentiment, even while his family and associates enjoyed the more open economy's opportunities. Amid fears his imminent elevation to the powerful Standing Committee was leading China towards another destructive Cultural Revolution, have his opponents seized their chance to destroy Bo and what he stood for? The trigger was his wife Gu Kailai's apparently paranoid murder of an English family friend, which exposed the corruption and brutality of Bo's outwardly successful administration of the massive city of Chongqing. It also led to the one of the highest-level attempted defections in Communist China's history when Bo's right-hand man, police chief Wang Lijun, tried to escape the ruins of his sponsor's reputation.

Garnaut explains how this incredible glimpse into the very personal power struggles within the CCP exposes the myth of the unified one-party state. With China approaching super-power status, today's leadership shuffle may set the tone for international relations for decades. Here, Garnaut reveals a particularly Chinese spin on the old adage that the personal is political.

Nineteen year-old Madeleine Smith may have been charged in 1857 with poisoning her lover, Emile L'Angelier, but her real sin was having sex - a lot of sex - out of wedlock. Her mistake was to write him frank and passionate letters, described by the trial judge as 'without any sense of decency', which L'Angelier threatened to send to her father when she cooled on the idea of marriage, having secretly engaged herself to someone else.

Some fifty years later, the trial of Robert Wood, a respectable, hard-working illustrator by day, who frolicked with prostitutes by night, including the unfortunate Emily Dimmock, also hinged on a dangerous correspondence. Dimmock's murderer had evidently ransacked her rooms for a postcard written by Wood. Was there something he was desperate to hide? The author of his trial is certain he was guilty.

But both escaped conviction - in Wood's case, thanks to the defence of the best defence barrister in the land. In Madeleine Smith's, the three judges ruled two-to-one to exclude from evidence L'Angelier's pocket book, which recorded her meetings with him on the day of the murder. These two salacious and controversial trials demonstrate how the dramatic difference between 'guilty' and 'not guilty' can sometimes be decided by a mere scrap of paper.

Thomas Cream, erstwhile Sunday school teacher and serial poisoner, has an unsettling air and wonky eye. He also happens to be a doctor, which provides him with ample means and an ideal cover for his murderous activities. His victims are vulnerable young women, whose trust he gains with drinks and trips to the music hall, before offering them pills or swigs from a medicine bottle. A few hours later, they are dying in agony.

The Honourable Thomas Ley, meanwhile, has an even better disguise: he's the former Justice Minister for New South Wales and a successful businessman, albeit with a shady past. Rumours abound when a political opponent disappears without trace and a business partner winds up at the bottom of a cliff.

Neither killer can help themselves - and this, in the end, leads to their downfall - and both defy our comprehension. Brilliantly reconstructed here, their trials, in 1892 and 1947, reveal a deeply sinister conundrum: by the time you've discovered the secrets in their heart, it's inevitably much too late.

A respectable solicitor in the town of Hay-on-Wye, harried by his troubled wife, slowly and carefully poisons her to death. Pleased with the results, he sees an opportunity for another quick-fix solution and turns his murderous attentions to his business rival...

Trapped in a marriage of convenience to an aging man almost thirty years her senior, thirty-eight year-old Alma falls in love with seventeen year-old George, when he answers her advertisement for a 'willing lad' to do the housework. It's the perfect set up - a well-disposed husband and a passionate lover - until George destroys it all by trying to get the husband out of the way...

These two classic cases of spousal murder - one chillingly domestic, the other bizarre and touching - took place in 1922 and 1935. In these brilliant reconstructions, they continue to confound our expectations of how murderers are meant to proceed.

When most of the British press conspired to cover up the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World, what did that tell us? That it wasn't just the News of the World that had something to hide. And when the Leveson Inquiry lifted the lid on their activities we saw what it was: illegal practices, dishonesty, a disregard for the rights of ordinary people and an arrogant assumption of unaccountability. Now the battle is on to decide whether anything will change and the editors and proprietors, with their vast propaganda power, are determined to ensure nothing will. This book, by a long-time journalist who is a founder of the Hacked Off campaign, paints a damning picture of press corruption and makes a passionate case for journalism that doesn't bully and lie - journalism that is truly answerable to the public while remaining free from government interference. We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get this right, and we must not allow powerful media corporations to snatch that chance from us.