Tim Smith-Laing Book order

Accompanied by local guides, two Canadians paddle dugout canoes down the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea, one of the world's great jungle rivers.

The indispensable guide to the gins of North West England

A guide to Yorkshire's gin scene - the history, the distillers and their gins.

Long recognised as perhaps the greatest non-fiction writer at work in Ireland for his vast, polymathic accounts of nature and culture in the Aran Islands and Connermara, Tim Robinson is also an essayist of genius whose fascinations range across the globe. In 'Experiments on Reality', he shines the light on his own life, and on some of the most fascinating questions in science and culture

A guide to Scotland's gin scene - the history, the distillers and their gins.

Tim Robinson has a poet's eye for other poets' work and the potential for humorous rewording, so he set himself a task for Lent, to ‘retell' twenty famous poems, endeavouring to retain the style of their original writers (and apologise to them!). Following this, he then wrote twenty poems of his own, having learned from the masters.This delightful compilation is the result of his exertions: a whole new take on old favourites as diverse as The Owl and the Pussycat and I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. You will probably never view Jabberwocky in the same light again! Tim makes amends for the rewrites by offering up his own original work for comparison, to complete this delightful riotous assembly of rhyme and rhythm. One for poetry lovers - and doubters - everywhere. Leave it on the coffee table; it's irresistible. Oh, and do undertake the Mouse challenge on your way through.

Jacques Derrida's Structure, Sign, and Play is one of the most controversial and influential philosophical texts of the 20th century. Delivered at a conference on structuralism at Johns Hopkins, the lecture took aim at the critical and philosophical fashions of the time and radically proposing a world in which meaning cannot be pinned down or traced to an origin, but instead is continuously shifting, fleeting, and open to play. Hailed by many as a watershed in philosophy and literary theory, Derrida's lecture has shaped both disciplines. At once dense, brilliant, and humorous, it is a crucial read for anyone interested in questioning our natural assumptions about meaning in the world.

A central theme of Michel Foucault's work as a philosopher and historian is the quest to see through the surface of society and understand the processes going on beneath it. Across a long career that saw him become perhaps the most influential philosopher of the mid-late twentieth century, he applied his efforts to analyzing a range of phenomena and their relationship to power and the individual in society--ranging from the history of mental illness and its classification, to the history of crime and punishment, through to the history of human sexuality. His 1969 essay What is an Author? applies the same approach to the central figure of literary criticism: the author, asking, against the grain of our intuitions, whether an "author" is truly the real individual who writes a text, or something else.

As recently as the 1920s, the lack of great female writers was often considered evidence of women's inferiority. Virginia Woolf disagreed. Her 1929 essay argues that creativity is impossible without privacy and freedom from financial worries, and throughout history, women have had neither therefore, no tradition of great female writing existed.

Woolf's focus on the everyday suppression of women was a turning point in feminism, marking a realization that gaining legal and voting rights was just the first step on the road to true equality. Everyday life had to be altered, too. Woolf's essay remains deeply relevant, providing a framework for analysis of any group suffering injustice.