Granta Books imprint: 105 books

Another rapid-fire selection of short, stimulating and entertaining capsules of philosophy from the master of the genre. This time Baggini applies his philosophical scalpel to famous sayings, proverbs and pieces of homespun wisdom. Should you really do as the Romans do when in Rome and practise what...

'A day without laughter is a day wasted.' It is Christmas Day when Charlie Chaplin receives a visit from Death. The great actor is 82 years old, but not yet ready to face the final curtain. Desperate to see his teenage son grow up, the actor strikes a deal: if he manages to make Death laugh,...

In The Age of Wire and String Ben Marcus welds together a new reality from the scrapheap of the past. Dogs, birds, horses, automobiles and the weather are some of the recycled elements in Marcus's first collection - part fiction, part handbook - as familiar objects take on markedly unfamiliar meanings....

Iosif Dzhugashvili is born on the day Stalin dies and is given his name by a zealous hospital official. Young Iosif grows up haunted by his great namesake, convinced that the dictator has found a new dwelling place within his chest, behind his heart. But when Iosif unwittingly destroys his family's happiness he is forced to question his lifelong loyalties to Stalin's ghost.

Historian Anna Bennett has a book to write. She also has an insomniac toddler, a precocious, death-obsessed seven-year-old, and a frequently absent ecologist husband who has brought them all to Colsay, a desolate island in the Hebrides, so he can count the puffins. Ferociously sleep-deprived, torn...

A solitary child, Leonardo da Vinci's only intimate is Lisa Gherardini, the girl who spies on him in his workshop. Spurned by his tutor, he is sent by his despairing father to Florence as an apprentice. Under the guiding hand of Verrocchio, the master sculptor, he begins to make his name. But success...

Kapka Kassabova first set foot in a tango studio ten years ago and, from that moment, she was hooked. With the beat of tango driving her on and the music filling her head, she's danced across the world, from Auckland to Edinburgh, from Berlin to Buenos Aires, putting in hours of practice for fleeting...

For over two thousand years, attitudes to the menopause have created dread, shame and confusion. This meticulously researched and always entertaining book traces the history of 'the change of life' from its appearance in classical texts, via the medical literature of the eighteenth century, to up-to-the-minute...

Not so long ago, our roads, buildings, gravestones and monuments were built from local rock, our cities were powered by coal from Welsh mines, and our lamps were lit with paraffin from Scottish shale. We live among the remnants of those times but for the most part our mines are gone, our buildings...

As a baby, Simon Gray discovered that he could move his pram while still nestling inside it. 'It was a complete mystery to the adult intelligences, how had he done it, if it was he who had done it, but if not he, who then and why? So the next afternoon they (Mummy and Nanny) planted the pram...

Coda is Simon Gray's powerful account of the year in which he struggled to come to terms with terminal lung cancer. Darkly comic depictions of the medical team are set against joyful accounts of sunlit days with his beloved wife, Victoria. Written with exceptional candour and a poignant reluctance...

'The devil had his workshop here in Belarus. The deepest graves are in Belarus. But nobody knows about them' A young boy grows up in Terez�n - an infamous fortress town with a sinister past. Together with his friends he plays happily in this former Nazi prison, scouting the tunnels for fragments...

Growing up queer in a Communist state, queens Patricia and Lucretia spent the '70s and '80s underground, finding glamour in the squalor, strutting their stuff in parks and public toilets, seducing hard Soviet soldiers, preying on drunks and seeing their friends die of Aids. Today they're about to...

When L�a's car gets a puncture out in the countryside, the man who lives nearest proves recalcitrantly helpful. She ends up falling asleep in his armchair and wakes to intense guilt at neglecting her daughter back in Reykjavik, followed by shock at what she finds in her helper's back room - half-finished,...