Reflections by the creator of the essay form, display the humane, skeptical, humorous, and honest views of Montaigne, revealing his thoughts on sexuality, religion, cannibals, intellectuals, and other unexpected themes. Included are such celebrated works as “On Solitude,” “To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die,” and “On Experience.”

In recent years David Hockney has returned to England to paint the landscape of his childhood in East Yorkshire. Although his passionate interest in new technologies has led him to develop a virtuoso drawing technique on an iPad, he has also been accompanied outdoors by the traditional sketchbook, an invaluable tool as he works quickly to capture the changing light and fleeting effects of the weather. Executed in watercolour and ink, these panoramic scenes have the spatial complexity of finished paintings the broad sweep of sky or road, the patchwork tapestry of land yet convey the immediacy of Hockneys impressions. And as in the views down village streets and across kitchen tables that appear alongside them, his rooted and fond knowledge of the area around the East Yorkshire Wolds is always clear. If you know the region, the location of the sketches is unmistakable; if you dont, its features will come to life in these pages.

Innocent, invader, lover, thief. Sparrows wear many guises, and they are everywhere. Able to live in the Arctic and the desert, and in cities from Beijing to San Francisco, the house sparrow is the most widespread wild bird in the world.

In this book, award-winning science and natural history writer Kim Todd explores the bird’s complex history, biology and literary tradition. Old World sparrows, like the house sparrow, can nest in a garage or an airport, while New World sparrows often stake their claim to remote islands or meadows in the high Sierra. The nineteenth-century ‘Sparrow War’ in the USA (a battle over the sparrow’s introduction) set the stage for decades of invasive species debate, while in the 1950s Mao Zedong began a catastrophic programme to eradicate the bird in China.

While studies of house sparrows have taught us about topics from evolution to adultery, their recent decline in cities globally remains an ornithological mystery. Richly illustrated, this is an unforgettable exploration of the natural and cultural history of a beloved, reviled and ubiquitous bird.

Leaping effortlessly from the bright stream into the human imagination, the trout has an ancient fascination that can be traced back to Stone Age cave dwellers and it is present in our religion, folklore, literature and, of course, fishermen’s tales. Trout follows this beautiful fish in its myriad forms around the world, starting in Europe and North America, then tracking the nineteenth century voyage that took the creature from England to Australia. Along the way, it presents a cast of characters as diverse as the animal itself, from obscure British saints and fly-fishing nuns to visionary inventors, jazz singers and counterculture novelists, while showcasing the trout as a fish of scientific investigation, of colonial conquest and middle-class aspiration, and as a symbol in Western countries of our conflicted relationship with nature.

Trout will delight and surprise anglers who have ever cast a fly to it, or anyone who has ever stopped to look in the water from a bridge, hoping for a tantalizing glimpse of this very special fish.

Feared, reviled and revered, the wolf has always evoked powerful emotions in humans. It has been admired as a powerful hunter; feared for the threat it is imagined to pose to humans; reviled for its depredations on domestic livestock and revered as a potent symbol of the wild. “Wolf” explores the ways in which indigenous hunting societies respected the wolf as a fellow hunter and how, with the domestication of animals, the wolf became regarded as an enemy because of attacks on livestock.

Such attacks led to the wolf’s reputation as a creature of evil in many human cultures. Alone or in packs, farmers hated wolves. In children’s and other popular literature, they became the intruder from the wild preying on the innocent.

So powerful is the image of the wolf in the human imagination that it became the creature that evil humans can transform into – the dreaded werewolf. Garry Marvin shows how the ways in which wolves are imagined has had far-reaching implications for how actual wolves are treated. Fear of this enigmatic creature eventually led to an attempt to eradicate it as a species.

However, with the development of scientific understanding of wolves and their place in ecological systems and the growth of popular environmentalism, the wolf has been re-thought and re-imagined. Still hated by some, the wolf now has new supporters who regard it as a charismatic creature of the newly valued wild and wilderness. This book investigates the latest scientific understanding of the wolf, as well as its place in literature, history and folklore, and synthesises a huge range of material to offer insights into our changing attitudes to wolves.