Portable magicMost of what we say about books is really about their contents: the rosy nostalgic glow for childhood reading, the lifetime companionship of a much loved novel. But books are things as well as words, objects in our lives as well as worlds in our heads. And just as we crack their spines, loosen their leaves and write in their margins, so they disrupt and disorder us in turn. All books are, as Stephen King put it, 'a uniquely portable magic'. In this

amid the deserts and the mountains

together these stories challenge the boundaries between our minds and the exterior world

Alys Fowler shows you how to create a rich

How did we get from there to here in a single reign

Vibrant recipes

these larger-than-life figures had high-achieving professional lives and extremely complicated emotional lives

where he patiently digs the barren dirt in search of a legendary oak tree

maddening students who inspired and enraged him

resourceful Phileas Fogg takes up a wager at the London Reform Club to prove that the world is a smaller place that can be circumnavigated in 80 days

an Old Drifter named Percy M

Book I begins in the city of Pompeii shortly before the eruption of Vesuvius

We are all descended from migrants