Showing results by publisher "W. F. Howes Ltd" in Home & Garden

This definitive biography of Anna Wintour chronicles the steep climb of an ambitious young woman who would, with singular and legendary focus, become the most powerful woman in media.

What should I wear? More than ever, we are told it should be something new. Today, the clothing industry churns out 80 billion garments a year and employs every sixth person on Earth. Historically, the apparel trade has exploited labour, the environment and intellectual property. Best-selling journalist Dana Thomas has travelled the globe to discover the visionary designers and companies who are reclaiming traditional craft and launching cutting-edge sustainable technologies to produce better fashion. 

Mokhtar Alkhanshali is 24 and working as a doorman when he becomes fascinated with the rich history of coffee and Yemen's central place in it. He leaves San Francisco and travels deep into his ancestral home to tour terraced farms high in the country's rugged mountains. He collects samples and organizes farmers and is on the verge of success when civil war engulfs the country. Saudi bombs rain down, the US embassy closes, and Mokhtar has to find a way out of Yemen with only his hopes on his back.

Written by experts and offering listeners the opportunity to pass off appropriated knowledge as their own, the Bluffer's Guides provide hard fact masquerading as frivolous observation in one witty, easy listen. Instantly acquire all the knowledge you need to pass as an expert in the world of quantum physics. Never again confuse a boson with a hadron, a fermion with a meson, or a photon with a lepton or an electron. If in doubt, always fall back on a bluffon.

Monty was just like any other dog. A scruffy and irascible Maltese terrier, he enjoyed barking at pugs and sniffing at trees. But after yet another dramatic confrontation with the local Rottweiler, Anthony McGowan realises it’s high time he and Monty had a chat about what makes him a good or a bad dog. Taking his lead from Monty’s canine antics, McGowan takes us on a hilarious and enlightening jaunt through the major debates of philosophy.

A history of Russia in the twentieth century unlike any other—from the Russian revolution to the oligarchs of the '90s, via the Holodomor, the siege of Leningrad and Chernobyl.

In a bid to uncover the unique spirit of the single malt whisky, author lain Banks has decided to undertake a tour of the distilleries of his homeland. His tour of Scotland combines history, literature and landscape in an entertaining and informative account.

With an incredible list of celebrated contributors including DAVID SEDARIS, NAOMI FRY, PATTI SMITH, SIAN CLIFFORD and JIA TOLENTINO, My First Popsicle revels in the delights of food in all its forms. Edited by ZOSIA MAMET—Shoshanna in Girls—this is a riotous, mouth-watering celebration of jelly, mac and cheese, donuts, the best sandwich in the entire world—and much more.

From atomic structures to theories about magnetic forces, scientific progress has given us a good grasp on the properties of many different materials. However, science cannot tell us how to measure the temperature of steel just by looking at it, or how to sculpt stone into all kinds of shapes, or what it feels like to blow up a balloon of glass. Handmade is the story of materials through making and doing. Author and material scientist Anna Ploszajski journeys into the domain of makers and craftspeople to comprehend how the most popular materials really work.

The spatter of sauce in a pan, a cook's subtle deviation from a recipe, the careful labour of cooking for loved ones: these are not often the subjects of critical enquiry. Cooking, we are told, has nothing to do with serious thought; the path to freedom and fulfilment, especially for women, leads directly out of the kitchen. In this invigorating, revelatory book, Rebecca May Johnson rewrites the kitchen as a space of infinite variety and infinite potential.

How we live is shaped by how we eat. You can see this in the vastly different approaches to growing, preparing and eating food around the world, such as the hunter-gatherer Hadza in Tanzania whose sustainable lifestyle is under threat in a crowded planet, or Western societies whose food is farmed or bred in vast intensive enterprises. And most of us now rely on a complex global food web of production, distribution, consumption and disposal, which is now contending with unprecedented challenges. The need for a better understanding of how we feed ourselves has never been more urgent. 

In The Meaning of Beer, award-winning beer writer Jonny Garrett tells the stories of incredible human moments and inventions, taking listeners to some of the best-known beer destinations in the world–Munich and Oktoberfest, Carlsberg Brewery's historic laboratory, St Louis and the home of Budweiser–as well as those lesser-known, from a 5,000 year old brewery in the Egyptian desert to Arctic Svalbard, home to the world's most northerly pub.

In times of plenty, we stuff ourselves. When the food runs out, we're stuffed too. How have people in the British Isles shared the riches from our fields, dairies, kitchens and seas, as well as those from around the world? And when the cupboard is bare, who steps up to the plate to feed the nation's hungry children, soldiers at war or families in crisis? Stuffed tells the stories of the food and drink at the center of social upheavals from prehistory to the present.

Hettie and Tilly are invited to host a Christmas Eve murder mystery aboard the Santa Claws Express. No sooner has the train left the station at Mogbury-on-the-Tilt than our two feline detectives are caught up in a murderous family feud between the Shuttles and the Stokers. Is the ghost of Hornby Stoker haunting the line? Are there enough sausage rolls in the Biscuit Jar Buffet? Who will hit the buffers at Hissingford Holt? And will Hettie and Tilly's Christmas be derailed?

From an amateur affair made by retirees to a multi-million-pound industry with quality to rival Champagne, the rise of English wine has been one of the more unexpected wine stories of the past 30 years. In this illuminating and accessible account, award-winning drinks writer Henry Jeffreys takes you behind the scenes of the English wine revolution. It's a story about changing climate and technology but most of all it's about men and women with vision, determination and more than a little bloody-mindedness.

A Fenland Garden is the story of the creation of a garden in a complex and fragile English landscape—the Fens of southern Lincolnshire—by a writer who has a very particular relationship with landscape and the soil, thanks to his distinguished career as an archaeologist and discoverer of some of England's earliest field systems. It describes the imagining, planning and building of a garden in an unfamiliar and sometimes hostile place, and the challenges, setbacks and joys these processes entail. 

1941. Rupert and Adelaide Stride are raising their two daughters, Clare and Rosa, in the midst of war. When Rupert is called to fight, he dies on the beaches of Dunkirk, leaving his family to fend for themselves. 2023. Decades later, Clare and Rosa have retreated to the annex, trapped in the place where they were raised: Yew Tree House. When the rooms are put up for rent, Jack Harmon sees the perfect spot for a family holiday with his twins and detective Stella Darnell. But then the children discover a skeleton with a hole in its skull hidden in the brambles of a decommissioned WWII pill box.

When Jess Newman married the love of her life Ben she was sure they had what it took to stay together forever. So when Ben falls out of love with her only to promptly fall in the arms of new girlfriend, Naomi, she really doesn't know how to come to terms with their divorce.

We are on the brink of environmental catastrophe. Cutting emissions is essential but won't be enough. We also need to harness the power of nature, recognizing that the natural world is not only priceless, but has measurable economic value. Restoring biodiversity aided by technological and financial innovation will unlock environmental protections and economic benefits. The Case for Nature sets out with powerful clarity how protecting nature is both the right thing to do, and in our economic interests.

Ben Aitken wasn't getting enough. He knew it and so did everyone else. He was grumpy, increasingly boring, mostly joyless. So, he joined a lawn bowls club. A week later, he doubled down on the doldrums by learning to dance like they do in Bollywood. Then—with an almost entirely reformed selfhood winking appealingly just around the corner—he started swimming in cold water and was back to square one. Despite the setbacks, it was becoming clear to him that the very pursuit of fun was a great way of not feeling naff. And so he made a vow to have as much of the f-stuff as he possibly could