Relationships: The more times a person’s heart is broken, the nearer they will tend to move to the sea. If you want to find a good man to marry head for the countryside. North and South: People in the south move home on average every seven years and job every eight years.

This is a year faster than in the north of England, but a year slower than is usual in Scotland. Optimum population: Emmigrant nation – There are twice as many grandchildren of British-born people living over-seas as there are people living in Britain who have grandparents who were themselves born abroad. The problem now is more about getting pregnant than a population explosion and we need more immigration not less.

Immigration: Muslims are far more likely to marry non-Muslims in Britain than Christians are to marry non-Christians. The elderly: Most people in Britain never live long enough to experience being burgled. In some areas you would have to live for over five hundred years to have an ‘evens’ chance of being a crime victim.

Town and Country – divided since the enclosures: Step children are most commonly found in the most leafy of idyllic rural villages. Nuclear family homogeneity is now an inner city phenomena. Why are there no cheap homes in the countryside any more? Transport: The greatest threat to life in Britain of all those aged under 40 is the car.

For adults aged over 24 they most likely die as a driver, over 15 as a passenger, and over age 4 as a pedestrian. Work: There is no need for us to work until we drop – all could retire early. Reviews for “Injustice”: ‘A geographer maps the injustices of Selfish Capitalism with scholarly detachment’ – Oliver James.

‘Dorling provides the brain-cleaning software we need to begin creating a happier society’ – Richard Wilkinson author of “The Spirit Level”.

It is a wonderful collection and a wonderful introduction to the fascinating world of Greek mythology, brought to life by one of our finest writers and an exciting new illustrator.

A story, rather remarkable really, of someone who decided to live in a run-down, isolated, virtually derelict cottage in mid-Wales where he saw no-one for weeks on end. So this is a lovingly-written account of his communion with nature and all the multifarious creatues that surrounded him. Lyrical and magical are two words that would best describe it.

Because he had little to do, other than survive, he came to know every inch of ground around the cottage and he knew the animals and birds almost by name, certainly as individuals. Such a privilege is rarely given to anyone. Indeed very few would put themselves in his position to find out.  We learn about bats and goshawks, otters and ravens, sparrowhawks and starlings….and we feel we get to know them as intimately as he did. A wonderful book. So much missing in our lives!

Meticulously researched, surprising and sometimes shocking, “Calories and Corsets” tells the epic story of our complicated relationship with food, the fashions and fads of body shape, and how cultural beliefs and social norms have changed over time. Combining research from medical journals, letters, articles and the dieting bestsellers we continue to devour (including one by an octogenarian Italian in the sixteenth century), Foxcroft reveals the extreme and often absurd lengths people will go to in order to achieve the perfect body, from eating carbolic soap to deliberately swallowing tapeworm. This unique and witty history exposes the myths and anxieties that drive today’s multi-billion pound dieting industry – and offers a welcome perspective on how we can be healthy and happy in our bodies. Great reviews too….

But when someone special swims into her life, Kasienka learns that there might be more than one way for her to stay afloat. The Weight of Water is a startlingly original piece of fiction; most simply a brilliant coming of age story, it also tackles the alienation experienced by many young immigrants. Moving, unsentimental and utterly page-turning, we meet and share the experiences of a remarkable girl who shows us how quiet courage prevails.

Some were glorious days, some were tragic, or even shameful, but each has played its part in making us who we are as a nation. From pop stars to politicians, Suffragettes to punks, this is a journey around Britain in search of who we are.

Englishness is an ancient and powerful concept, but no one seems sure exactly what it means in the twenty-first century. In exploring our national identity, Tony Thorne has compiled a fascinating compendium of the hundred words and phrases that have become the cornerstones of modern English, and have been used – sometimes deliberately, but often inadvertently – to stake out our common ground, to define what makes us essentially English….

For some while I was reluctant to pick up this book. After all there are lots of great books around on the English language and its quirks and meanings ( a lot of them on our shelves). However, I’m very glad I did as Tony Thorne, as director of  the Slang and New Language Archive, is an expert on how language betrays a lot more about us and our perceptions than we might believe, or like! This is quite definitely the sort of book you can’t put down. It is endlessly fascinating. Here’s an example. At the back of our minds we know that personal  names are suffused with meaning. Tony Thorne in the section headed ‘Kevin’ lays it all out for us.The eponymous Kevin or Kev is now one of the synonyms for the new feckless underclass, the tracksuit-, gold chain- and trainer- wearing ‘chav’ or ’scally’.  A Kev is according to one contemporary Thorne quotes ‘a twat in a Burberry cap from a housing estate’, and his female counterpart is a ‘Shaz’ (from ‘Sharon’). As he says this is the English love of minute differentiations of status and class in a new incarnation, and he then goes on to ask what the difference is between a Kevin, a Darren and a Trevor, as well as looking at the history of such ‘representative’ names..Billies and Betties and Doris’s and son on. But what really took the biscuit as far as I was concerned was his unravelling of the Churchill Insurance Group’s survey of car owners which demonstrated that the truth does back up fiction and Darrens drive downmarket Escorts (as do Waynes and Traceys). And the typical Mondeo Man is ( somewhat unbelievably ) Rodney, Laurence or Julian. Not content with that Thorne leads us on to another piece of research (this time by Barclays) which shows that Susans and Davids are more likely to earn over £100k each year, and another piece of evidence that reveals the names which strike terror into teachers… Paige being the main culprit in females and Ashley in males. All brilliant stuff and calculated to make us think even more about the words we use. Don’t miss this book…it’s a gem.

Enlisting the villagers themselves – who dug test pits in their gardens in search of Roman pottery, were DNA tested to examine their Viking origins and offered up their family collections of photos and documents – and using the archives of the village housed at Merton College Oxford (an archive unique in western Europe going back 700 years), Michael Wood tells the incredible story of the village over 2000 years. This is an account of England told not from the top but from the bottom – a story of Anglo-Saxon peasants, medieval reeves, Tudor vicars, Victorian frame-work knitters and First World War soldiers. This is a people’s history of England, told through the history of one small community.