Billy Joe Shaver wrote nine of the ten songs included on Waylon Jennings’s landmark album Honky Tonk Heroes and played a dominant role in the origins and development of the Outlaw Country movement of the 1970s. He has been named by Ray Wylie Hubbard, alongside Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, as a member of the “holy trinity” of Texas songwriters. He has exerted a Texas-sized influence on Texas music and especially Texas singer-songwriters, and is cited as a chief inspiration by at...

Boswell’s biography of his friend and hero Samuel Johnson is an acknowledged classic, full of humorous anecdote and rich characterisation. Johnson’s complex humanity (his depression, fear of death, intellectual brilliance and rough humour) is set within a vivid picture of eighteenth-century London, peopled by personalities of the time such as Sir Joshua Reynolds, John Wilkes, Oliver Goldsmith and David Garrick.

‘We are all travelers in the “wilderness of the world” travelers with a donkey.’ So Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to a friend on completing this enchanting account of a journey in rural France in 1878. Alone with his pack-donkey Modestine, and showing total disregard for discomfort, Stevenson relishes to the full his walking tour of the Cévennes. Freedom was the important thing: ‘I bless God that I was free to wander, free to hope, and free to love.’ This diary will find many kindred spirit...