Cooking In A Bedsitter

There is one powerful smell closely associated with the making of coffee in bedsitters. It is the smell of burning plastic, and will go away if you move the handle of the pot away from the flame. Legendary journalist Katharine Whitehorn's classic handbook of quick, simple meals - including Swedish Sausage Casserole, Lamb Tomato Quickie and Shrimp Wiggle - became the essential survival manual for the busy single person living in their first rented room. Whitehorn's trademark intelligent, practical and fabulously funny writing shines as brightly as ever, addressing the problems of 'cooking at ground level, in a hurry, with nowhere to put the salad but the washing-up bowl, which is in any case full of socks'. Delightful, entertaining and utterly indispensable. Praise for Katharine Whitehorn: 'A meteor: clever, funny, compassionate, insightful, beautiful' RACHEL COOKE 'Everyone grabbed the Observer to read her column on a Sunday morning' JILLY COOPER 'Wise, witty, mischievous' JAY RAYNER

The witty and brilliant autobiography from legendary, beloved and groundbreaking journalist Katharine Whitehorn. 'A book to treasure for its wit, honesty, good sense and warm laughter' DAILY TELEGRAPH Q: A mother's place? A: In the wrong. Much loved for her frankness and humour, Katharine Whitehorn was a legendary journalist who pioneered the first of the personal columns. She told us how it really was. She was funny - and smart. SELECTIVE MEMORY, her autobiography, is about childhood, motherhood, marriage and of course her pioneering work on Fleet Street. Praise for Katharine Whitehorn: 'Everyone grabbed the Observer to read her column on a Sunday morning' JILLY COOPER 'Wise, witty, mischievous' JAY RAYNER 'A meteor: clever, funny, compassionate, insightful, beautiful' RACHEL COOKE

The Career Woman (who buys a chicken as a treat) The Bedsitter (who experiments with newfangled gadgets) The Old Lady (who feeds her menagerie of pets) The Schoolboy Moocher (who makes toffee and wallows in grapes) The Bachelor (who learns to stockpile food) The Lonely Mother, 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. (who becomes a toast connoisseur) Meet the experts in cooking alone . . . Supper for one? Cooking Alone (1954) is a delicious miniature compendium of tales inspired by a cast of eccentric solitary characters. Brimming with entertaining anecdotes, recipes (rabbit with aubergine and prunes, anyone?) and top tips (ever wondered how to store ice cream in a bedsit?), Kathleen Le Riche is a witty, charming guide to the single life. Reissued with a new foreword by Bee Wilson, this vintage delight is a hymn to the pleasures of dining solo. 'A clever book, and amusing too. Somebody ought to bestow its author's name upon a sauce.' Belfast News Letter 'Every servantless man and woman should read her.' Truth 'Delightful . . . Ingenious.' Home and Country

A stylish compendium of 100 of the world's best cookery books, from the seventeenth century to the present day.

'One of the best novels about growing up fast' GUARDIAN 'One falls for Sally Jay Gorce from a great height from the first sentence' OBSERVER 'Scandalous and entertaining . . . Both funny and true' EVENING STANDARD The Dud Avocado gained instant cult status on first publication and remains a timeless portrait of a woman hellbent on living. Sally Jay Gorce is a woman with a mission. It's the 1950s, she's young and she's in Paris. Having dyed her hair pink, she wears evening dresses in the daytime and vows to go native in a way not even the natives can manage. Embarking on an educational programme that includes an affair with a married man (which fizzles out when she realises he's single and wants to marry her); nights in cabarets and jazz clubs in the company of assorted "citizens of the world"; an entanglement with a charming psychopath and a bit part in a film financed by a famous matador. But an education like this doesn't come cheap. Will our heroine be forced back to the States to fulfill her destiny as a librarian, or can she keep up her whirlwind Parisian existence? Books included in the VMC 40th anniversary series include: Frost in May by Antonia White; The Collected Stories of Grace Paley; Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault; The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter; The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann; Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith; The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West; Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston; Heartburn by Nora Ephron; Memento Mori by Muriel Spark; A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor; and Faces in the Water by Janet Frame

Jocasta Innes shows that delicious and stylish cooking does not have to rely on expensive ingredients and that budget food does not mean simply opening a tin or a packet. Frugal and inventive tips on sensible shopping, using leftovers and creating home-made versions of store-bought favourites help to cut the costs at every stage.

Opening at the Hay Festival, and ending with the prospect of a spring wedding, Sue Gee's novel is a lively story of tangled relationships and the sustaining powers of good books, loyal friends and conversation. Friends since university, with busy working lives behind them, Dido and Georgia have long been looking forward to carefree days of books and conversation, when each finds herself caught up in unexpected domestic drama. Dido, for the first time, has cause to question her marriage; widowed Georgia feels certain her husband will return to her. Meanwhile, an eccentric country cousin goes wildly off the rails, children are unhappy in love, and perfect health is all at once in question.

This charming autobiographical tale from Princess Michael of Kent tells of a girl growing up and the incredible bond that can exist between people and animals. Beautifully written by a natural storyteller and packed with fabulous photographs, it is also a wonderful portrait of Africa - the cheetah version of Born Free - and will delight readers worldwide. In the early 1960s, Marie Christine von Reibnitz (who would later become HRH Princess Michael of Kent) lived with her father on his farm in Mozambique. Then just a teenager, Princess Michael was entranced by the African landscape, by the wildlife and by the people she met. It was one of the happiest times of her life and she recounts that it was an orphaned cheetah cub (called Tess) who played a huge part in making it so. The relationship between the young Princess Michael and Tess, whom she hand-reared and later successfully released into the wild having trained her to hunt and survive on her own, will touch every reader's heart. The events of that period have remained with Princess Michael for the rest of her life and in A Cheetah's Tale she recalls not just the tale of Tess, but also the realities of life in Africa: from waking up in the middle of the night to find her father had just shot a lioness that was about to eat her to discovering a deadly Black Mamba curled up inside the loo! Tess was the inspiration for Princess Michael's lifelong interest in cheetah conservation and the epilogue covers some of her work as Patron of the Endangered Species Centre in South Africa and of the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia.