In this nail-biting true story of man versus nature, former Royal Marine commando Dawson, a Guinness World Record-holder for ocean-rowing and high-seas adventurer takes on the Atlantic and ultimately the North Pacific.

It took Dawson three attempts and a back-breaking voyage of over six months to finally cross the mighty North Pacific for the first time. Dawson and his rowing partner Chris Martin spent 189 days, 10 hours and 55 minutes rowing around the clock, facing the destruction of their small boat and near-certain death every mile of the way, before finally reaching the iconic span of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.

Dawson’s thrilling account of his epic adventure details how he and Chris propelled their fragile craft, stroke by stroke for thousands of miles across some of the most dangerous expanses of ocean, overcoming failure, personal tragedy and everything that nature could throw at him along the way.

Welcome to the Hezbollah Hiking Club . . .

At a boozy, cricket-filled afternoon at Lord’s, Dom Joly convinces his two closest friends to agree to the unthinkable: a challenging hike across Lebanon, from the Israeli border in the south, along the spine of the country’s mountain range, all the way to the Syrian border in the north. For Joly it is something of a homecoming, having grown up in Beirut. It was a happy childhood, though he did go to school with Osama bin Laden.

Arriving in Lebanon armed with copious amounts of Vaseline – and no walking experience, bar taking the dog for the occasional stroll – Dom, Chris and Harry don’t quite know what they’ve got themselves into. Joined by their bemused chaperone Caroll, they meet a variety of characters along the way including Ali, a stony-faced Hezbollah Museum guide who seems unperturbed by circling Israeli jets, and part-time Londoner Raf, who challenges Dom and the boys to a brain-freeze drinking contest. From a hair-raising creep along the ‘Valley of the Skulls’ to accidentally flashing an unsuspecting Ethiopian cook, the three friends just about manage to keep going.

With more than a smattering of persiflage and some cringe-worthy moments, The Hezbollah Hiking Club is a big-hearted, witty and affectionate love letter to Lebanon and its rich history with a meditation on family and homeland at its heart. Written with Dom’s trademark humour, it is a paean to both the simple joys of friendship and to growing old disgracefully.

Great players such as Brian O’Driscoll, Willie John McBride, J. P. R. Williams, Chester Williams, Colin Meads, Gavin Hastings and Brian Moore give us a fascinating insider’s view, as does World Cup Final referee Derek Bevan, who reveals what it is like to try to control thirty powerful and often volatile men in a highly competitive situation. But some of the best writing and the wittiest insights come from those who played their rugby at a much less exalted level.

The origins of the game – sometimes true, sometimes fanciful – are explored as are some of its rituals like the haka. There are amusing tales including that of the four Tibetan boys sent by the Dalai Lama to learn the game at Rugby School and an account of New Zealand scrum-half Chris Laidlaw’s hostile reception at a village fête in Wales. Along with barely believable stories about the game’s hardest men, including the French coach Jean ‘le Sultan’ Sébédio, who used to conduct training sessions wearing a sombrero and wielding a long whip, and ‘Red’ Conway who had his finger amputated rather than miss a game for South Africa.

One section ‘Double Vision’ looks at the same incident from opposing viewpoints, such as when the then relatively inexperienced Irish immortal Willie John McBride took a swing at the mighty All Black Colin Meads in a line-out. Another, ‘Giving it Everything’, shows how exceptional courage was not restricted to the rugby field but extended to the battle grounds of the First World War.

From the compiler of highly acclaimed All in a Day’s Cricket, this selection covers the game from virtually every angle and is sure to delight any rugby fan.

Baking tins usually see daylight only when we’re making cakes or the Sunday roast. But with a little imagination, these kitchen stalwarts can do so much more.

Did you know that the best chocolate brownie tin is also a perfect fit for Sweetly spiced roast chicken with chorizo or Blackberry vodka marshmallows? That a simple loaf tin can make a mean Berry ripple ice cream and towering Spicy sausage and fennel lasagnes, as well as heartbreakingly tasty bread? Or that a classic tray bake tin is the ideal size for an Oven baked chicken and roast garlic risotto and a Sweet potato and mustard gratin as well as Almond and blueberry bars?

By making better use of what’s already in our kitchens, we can create more space in our homes and in our lives to enjoy what we eat.

Of all Italian cities, Florence has always had the strongest English accent: the Goncourt brothers in 1855 called it ‘ville tout anglaise‘. Though that accent is diminished now, Florence remains for the English-speaking traveller what it always has been – one of the best loved, and most visited, of cities.

In this Traveller’s Reader, Florence’s rich and glorious past is brought vividly to life for the tourist of today through the medium of letters, diaries and memoirs of travellers to Florence from past centuries and of the Florentines themselves. The extracts chosen by cultural historain Edward Chaney include: Boccaccio on the Black Death; Vasari on the building of Giotto’s Campanile; an eye-witness account of the installation of Michaelangelo’s ‘David’; the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning at the Casa Guidi; and D. H. Lawrence and Dylan Thomas on twentieth-century Florentine society.

Sir Harold Acton’s introduction provides a concise history of the city from its origins, through its zenith as a prosperous city state which, under the Medici, gave birth to the Renaissance, and up to the Arno’s devastating flood in 1966. Sir Harold Acton, man of letters, historian, aesthete, novelist and poet, spent most of his life in Florence. Among his best-known books is The Last Medici, Memoirs of an Aesthete.

Reactions to Venice have been, throughout the ages, astonishingly different. John Julius Norwich has put together a dazzling anthology, drawing on the writings of Byron, Goethe, Wagner, Casanova, Jan Morris, Robert Browning and Horace Walpole, among many others.

The pieces range from the sixth century, when the early lagoon-dwellers lived ‘like sea-birds in huts, built on heaps of osiers’ to the exquisite city of eighteenth-century revellers and nineteenth-century art lovers. The city’s many diferent guises are shown as both its citizens and visitors saw them.

This wonderful volume from the Traveller’s Reader series also contains maps, engravings and notes on history, art, architecture and everyday city life.

In this evocative and fascinating anthology, Moscow’s turbulent growth is recorded through the voices of visitors and residents: Peter the Great’s bloody reprisals after the revolt of the streltsy in 1698; a visit to the city’s brothels by medical students in the 1890s; Kutuzov abandoning Moscow to Napoleon in 1812, and Napoleon’s ignominious retreat from the burning city; Pushkin railing against the mindlessness of 1830 society; the flowering of literary greatness in the ninenteenth century and of the Moscow Art Theatre in the twentieth; and the dazzling profusion of jewels in the Treasury of the Kremlin.

These and many other milestones in over seven hundred years of history are brought vividly to life.

Drawing on diaries, letters, biographies, travelogues and poems from the sixth century AD onwards, this evocative anthology recreates for contemporary visitors the vanished glories of Constantinople. It provides vivid eyewitness accounts of the coronation of a Byzantine emperor; the funeral of a sultan; the triumphal entry of Mehmet the Conqueror; the building of the Süleymaniye, the most magnificent of the city’s moques; and the death of Atatürk in 1938.

It also describes the rampant sexual exploits of the Byzantine empress-to-be Theodora; the public execution of a Turkish wife and her young, Christian lover; the near execution of an envoy given the unenviable task of transporting a large organ from England to Constantinople in 1599, a gift from Queen Elizabeth to Sultan Mehmet III, who was caught admiring the sultan’s personal harem; and the unfortunate Frenchman caught drinking wine and eating a pork sausage while sketching in Hagia Sophia in the 1680s.

This fully illustrated book contains photographs, not only of the recipes but of beautiful, rural southwestern France, where Robin lives and leads sell-out cooking workshops focused on simple, delicious and healthy Mediterranean cuisine, making the most of all the fresh local ingredients available.