In the summer of late 2007, shares of Northern Rock went into free-fall causing a run on the bank – the first since the Great Depression. Northern Rock was only the first: in the ensuing months, Alistair Darling stood firm in the eye of this perfect storm – all over the world financial institutions thought ‘too big to fail’ were falling prey to the lethal toxicity of the US sub-prime mortgage market. Back from the Brink tells the gripping story of one thousand days of crisis.

As Chancellor, Alistair Darling sanctioned the GBP37bn bailouts of RBS and HBoS just minutes before their cash machines would have ceased to function; at the 11th hour, he prevented Barclay’s from acquiring Lehman Brothers, telling US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson that he wouldn’t allow British banks to import America’s economic cancer; he used controversial legislation to stop Icelandic banks from withdrawing funds from the UK. From all night meetings at the White House, to confrontations with the titans of international banking and fractions relations with Gordon Brown, Darling places the reader in the rooms where the destinies of millions weighed heavily on the shoulders of a few.

During the Victorian age, British collectors were among the most active, passionate and eccentric in the world. Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves tells the stories of some of the nineteenth century’s most intriguing collectors following their perilous journeys across the globe in the hunt for rare and beautiful objects. From art connoisseur John Charles Robinson, to the aristocratic scholar Charlotte Schreiber, who ransacked Europe for treasure, and from London’s fashionable Pre-Raphaelite circle to pioneering Orientalists in Beijing, Jacqueline Yallop plunges us into the cut-throat world of the Victorian mania for collecting.

When Sam Bailey tells people that she used to take her clothes off for money, three questions usually follow. The first is ‘Why?’ The simple answer is that she enjoyed it. She liked showing off, being desired and earning a lot of money.

The second is ‘How did you get started?’ Sam was 17, had a poorly paid job that she hated and couldn’t bear to think that was all there was for her in life. The third question is: ‘So, Sam, what was it like?’ In “Stripped”, Sam Bailey reveals all about her experiences, taking us behind the scenes and introducing us to the other strippers and the punters, aged 18 to 80. She recounts a series of episodes that shine a light on the simultaneously sexy and seedy, glamorous and gritty world of lap-dancing clubs.

“Stripped” takes you down the steps and through the double doors to reveal some of the night’s darkest secrets and expose the reality of life in the strip-club underworld.

“London Under” is an atmospheric, imaginative introduction to everything that goes on under London, from original springs and streams and Roman amphitheatres to Victorian sewers, gang hideouts and modern Underground stations. This book tunnels down through the geological layers, meeting the creatures, both real and fictional, that dwell in the darkness – rats and eels, monsters and ghosts. From the Anglo-Saxon graves under St Paul’s, to the hydraulic device in Kensal Green cemetery which lowered bodies into the catacombs below, to the fossils uncovered when the Victoria Line was built and the gold bars within the Bank of England’s vaults, “London Under” takes you into a hidden world, beneath our feet.

John Julius Norwich examines the oldest continuing institution in the world, tracing the papal line down the centuries from St Peter (traditionally – but by no means historically – the first Pope) to the present. Of the 280-odd holders of the supreme office, some have unquestionably been saints; others have wallowed in unspeakable iniquity. One was said to have been a woman, her sex being revealed only when she improvidently gave birth to a baby during a papal procession.

Almost as shocking was Formosus whose murdered corpse was exhumed, clothed in pontifical vestments, propped up on a throne and subjected to trial; or John XII, of whom Gibbon wrote ‘his rapes of virgins and widows had deterred the female pilgrims from visiting the shrine of St Peter’. John Julius Norwich brings the story up to date with lively investigations into the anti-semitism of the contemptible Pius XII, the possible murder of John Paul I and the phenomenon of the Polish John Paul II. From the glories of Byzantium to the decay of Rome, from the Albigensian Heresy to controversy within the Church today, “The Popes” is superbly written, witty and revealing.