'Uglow makes us feel the life beyond the facts.' GUARDIAN'Few can match Uglow's skill at conjuring up a scene, or illuminating a character.' SUNDAY TIMES'Charming . . . Like Radio 4's shipping forecast for naturalists.' Andrea Wulf, FINANCIAL TIMES'A glorious celebration of curiosity and nature.' OBSERVERA BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE TIMES, THE SPEC...

Led by Erasmus Darwin, the Lunar Society of Birmingham was formed from a group of amateur experimenters, tradesmen and artisans who met and made friends in the Midlands in the 1760s. Most came from humble families, all lived far from the centre of things, but they were young and their optimism was boundless: together they would change the world. Among them were the ambitious toy-maker Matthew Boulton and his partner James Watt, of steam-engine fame; the potter Josiah Wedgwood; the larger-t...

Winner of the Portico PrizeShortlisted for the Whitbread Biography of the YearHigh-spirited, witty and passionate, Elizabeth Gaskell wrote some of the most enduring novels of the Victorian age, including Mary Barton, North and South and Wives and Daughters. This biography traces Elizabeth's youth in rural Knutsford, her married years in the tension-ridden city of Manchester and her wide network of friends in London, Europe ...

Edward Lear's poems follow and break the rules. They abide by the logic of syntax, the linking of rhyme and the dance of rhythm, and these 'nonsenses' are full of joy - yet set against darkness. Where do these human-like animals and birds and these odd adventures - some gentle, some violent, some musical, some wild - come from? His many drawings that accompany his verse are almost hyper-real, as if he wants to free the creatures from the page. They exist nowhere else in literature, springi...

'Terrific . . . fabulously rich and insightful.' Dominic Sandbrook'Intense, involved, absorbing.' Frances WilsonCharles II was thirty when he crossed the Channel in fine May weather in 1660. His Restoration was greeted with maypoles and bonfires, like spring after long years of Cromwell's rule. But there was no going back, no way he could 'restore' the old. Certainty had vanished. The divinity of kingship fled with his father's beheading. 'H...

'Whatever Uglow writes about she makes absolutely fascinating.' DIANA ATHILLThe story of Sybil Andews and Cyril Power, two artists who changed each other in an age of experiment and turmoil.'In all her books, she makes us feel the life behind the facts.' GUARDIAN'Wonderfully sharp and sympathetic . . . Uglow is a perfect biographer.' CRAIG BROWN, MAIL ON SUNDAYIn 1922, Cyril Power, a fifty-...

William Hogarth is a house-hold name across the country, his prints hang in our pubs and leap out from our history-books. He painted the great and good but also the common people. His art is comically exuberant, 'carried away by a passion for the ridiculous', as Hazlitt said.Jenny Uglow, acclaimed author of Elizabeth Gaskell, Nature's Engraver and In These Times, uncovers the man, but also the world he sprang from and the lives he pictured. He moved in th...

We know the thrilling, terrible stories of the battles of the Napoleonic wars - but what of those left behind? The people on a Norfolk farm, in a Yorkshire mill, a Welsh iron foundry, an Irish village, a London bank or a Scottish mountain? The aristocrats and paupers, old and young, butchers and bakers and candlestick makers - how did the war touch their lives?Every part of Britain felt the long twenty years of war against the French: one in five families had people in the services...

Thomas Bewick wrote A History of British Birds at the end of the eighteenth century, just as Britain fell in love with nature. This was one of the wildlife books that marked the moment , the first 'field-guide' for ordinary people, illustrated by woodcuts of astonishing accuracy and beauty. But it was far more than that, for in the vivid vignettes scattered through the book Bewick drew the life of the country people of the North East - a world already vanishing under the ...

Words & Pictures explores three fascinating examples of relationships between artists and writers: the illustrations of Paradise Lost and Pilgrim's Progress; Hogarth and Fielding, a writer and artist dealing with common material; Wordsworth and Thomas Bewick, a poet and engraver working separately, but imbued with the spirit of their age. A brief coda turns to a fourth kind of relationship, the writers and artists who collaborate from the start, beginning with Di...

In the village of Wreay, near Carlisle, stands the strangest and most magical church in Victorian England. This vivid, original book tells the story of its builder, Sarah Losh, strong-willed and passionate and unusual in every way. Born into an old Cumbrian family, heiress to an industrial fortune, Sarah combined a zest for progress with a love of the past. In the church, her masterpiece, she let her imagination flower - there are carvings of ammonites, scarabs and poppies; an arrow pierce...

Did the Romans have rakes? Did the monks get muddy? Did the potato seem really, really weird when it arrived on our shores?This lively 'potted' history of gardening in Britain takes us on a garden tour from the thorn hedges around prehistoric settlements to the rage for decking and ornamental grasses today. It tracks down the ordinary folk who worked the earth - the apprentice boys and weeding women, the florists and nursery gardeners - as well as aristocrats and grand designers an...