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.

“Edgelands” forms a critique of what we value as ‘wild’, and allows our allotments, railways, motorways, wasteland and water a presence in the world, and a strange beauty all of their own.

For it is the name of the woman with whom he had an intense love affair twenty-six years ago in Berlin – at a time when the city was cleaved in two, and personal and political allegiances were haunted by the deep shadows of the Cold War. Refusing initially to confront what he might find in that box, Thomas nevertheless finds himself forced to grapple with a past he has never discussed with any living person – and in the process relive those months in Berlin, when he discovered, for the first and only time in his life, the full, extraordinary force of true love. But Petra Dussmann – the woman to whom he lost his heart – was not just a refugee from a police state, but also someone who lived with an ongoing sorrow beyond dreams…and one which gradually rewrote both their destinies.

In this, his tenth novel, Douglas Kennedy has written that rare thing: a love story as morally complex as it is tragic and deeply reflective. Brilliantly gripping, it is an atmospherically dense, ethically tangled tale of romantic certainty and conflicting loyalties, all set amidst a stunningly rendered portrait of Berlin in the final dark years before “The Wall” came down. Like all of Kennedy’s previous, critically acclaimed bestselling novels, “The Moment” is both unputdownable and profound.

Posing so many searching questions about why and how we fall in love – and the tangled way we project on to others that which our hearts seek – it is a love story of great epic sweep and immense emotional power.

And it is the story of the hidden places that I came to call my own, and the wild creatures that became my society’. “Touching. Through Ansell’s charming and thoroughly detailed stories of run-ins with red kites, curlews, sparrowhawks, jays and ravens, we see him lose himself …in the rhythms and rituals of life in the British wilderness”.

In the year 1570, at the age of thirty-seven, Michel de Montaigne gave up his job as a magistrate and retired to his chateau to brood on his own private grief – the deaths of his best friends, his father, his brother and, most recently, his first-born child. But finding his mind agitated rather than settled by this idleness, Montaigne began to write, giving birth to the Essays – short prose explorations of an amazing variety of topics. And gradually, over the course of his writing Montaigne began to turn his back upon his stoical pessimism, and engage in a new philosophy of life, in which living is to be embraced in all its sensory, exuberant vitality – the smell of his doublet, the pleasures of friendship, the intelligence of his cat and the flavour of his wine.

Quite frankly I was surprised by this book. I knew nothing of Montaigne to speak of, and could easily have mixed him up with Montesque. Now I have discovered what I have been missing. Montaigne was not only a great thinker and writer and philosopher, but he was also some one who was very human and whom we get to know in intimate detail..whether it was the agonising problems he had with kidney stones, the circular stone library he loved to inhabit, his love life, his problems with his vineyard, his close involvement with the horrific Wars of Religion then raging in France, or his attitiude to the foreigners he meets on his travels, it all adds up to making him a man we can almost regard as a friend…such is the acuity and cleverness with which Saul Frampton paints his picture.

Indeed Saul Frampton offers a celebration of perhaps the most joyful and yet profound of all Renaissance writers, whose work went on to have a huge impact on Shakespeare (very interesting this….Shakespeare virtually copies and pastes huge chunks of Monataigne into his plays) , and whose writings offer a user’s guide to existence even to the present day. I shall certainly now be reading some of the Essays as a result of this marvellous introduction which made a thoroughly enjoyable read.

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!

If nobody worked at night, Britain would cease to function. Or the night might be cold, haunted, inhuman and wild. When you look up into the night sky, you see that you are nothing.

An insignificant mote of dust. Or the night could be all too human. Hen parties in skimpy dresses and fairy wings being slammed into the back of a police van; girls working on street corners in the part of town where the lights don’t come on; businessmen going to lap-dancing clubs to forget what waits at home.

Or you could die. Most people do die at night. Or you could just lie awake and wait for the dawn.

Set over the course of an intoxicated night in a house up a mountain in West Cork, Ian Marchant offers a darkly funny account of what people get up to at night, explores his own experience of a life of night times, and shows us how we all have something of the night about us.