To lark is to get out and about, to explore the world around us and to discover the little treasures hiding in plain sight. We think, of course, of mudlarking, but there is also beachlarking, fieldlarking or even simply exploring your own home with fresh eyes. In this field guide, Lara teaches us how to lark for ourselves. There are charts, tips and lists throughout to help identify finds. From tide tables for mudlarkers to a flint guide for fieldlarkers, this book is richly informative. Like a journal, it invites you to interact - to make notes and record finds along the way.

We often think of Britain springing from nowhere with the arrival of the Romans. But in Ancestors, pre-eminent archaeologist, broadcaster and academic Professor Alice Roberts explores what we can learn about the very earliest Britons – from their burial sites. Although we have very little evidence of what life was like in prehistorical times, here their stories are told through the bones and funerary offerings left behind, preserved in the ground for thousands of years.

Mudlarking, the act of searching the Thames foreshore for items of value, has a long tradition in London. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, mudlarks were small boys grubbing a living from scrap. Modern-day mudlark Ted Sandling shares his passion for unearthing relics of the past from the banks of the Thames and describes his 50 most evocative finds.

If you could travel back in time, the period from 1660 to 1700 would make one of the most exciting destinations in history. It's the age of Samuel Pepys and the Great Fire of London, bawdy comedy and the libertine court of Charles II, Christopher Wren in architecture, Henry Purcell in music and Isaac Newton in science. In The Time Traveller's Guide to Restoration Britain, Ian Mortimer answers the crucial questions that a prospective traveller to 17th-century Britain would ask.

The Great Storm of 1987 is etched firmly into the national memory. Everyone who was there that night remembers how hurricane-force winds struck Southern Britain without warning, claiming 18 lives, uprooting more than 15 million trees and reshaping the landscape for future generations. Thirty years on, the discovery of an old photograph inspires the author to make a journey into that landscape.

Danie Couchman grew up on the move, her family never staying still long enough for her to say where she's from. At 25, and living in her 17th home, she finds herself drowning in the rush of London life and makes an impulsive decision: to buy a narrowboat and make it her home. Surrounded by an eclectic and itinerant community in the uncharted territory of the capital's urban wilderness, Danie becomes fully immersed in this hidden world. Each day on board her boat, Genesis, is an adventure full of disaster and magic.

In 2018 Britain will celebrate the centenary of women getting the vote; during the intervening 10 decades the lives of women in this country have been transformed. Told in their own voices, The Century Girls celebrates seven centenarians who lived that change: what they saw, how they were treated, who they loved, what they did and where they are now. With stories that are intimately knitted into the history of these islands, The Century Girls is a time-travel adventure featuring society’s oldest, most precious national treasures.  

James Naughtie, the acclaimed author and BBC broadcaster, now brings his unique and inquisitive eye to the country that has fascinated him and drawn him across the Atlantic for half a century. In looking at America, from Presidents Nixon through to Trump, he’ll tell the story of a country that is grappling with a dream. What has it come to mean in the new century and who do Americans now think they are?

In 1876, Sophia Duleep Singh was born into Indian royalty. Her father Maharajah Duleep Singh was heir to the Kingdom of the Sikhs, one of the greatest empires of the Indian subcontinent, a realm that stretched from the lush Kashmir Valley to the craggy foothills of the Khyber Pass and included the mighty cities of Lahore and Peshawar. It was a territory irresistible to the British, who plundered everything, including the fabled Koh-I-Noor diamond.

The Christmas Chronicles is the story of Nigel Slater's love for winter, for the scent of fir and spruce, for ghost stories read with a glass of sloe gin, and beeswax candles with shadows dancing on the ceiling. With recipes, decorations, fables and quick fireside suppers, Nigel guides you through the essential preparations for Christmas and the New Year, with everything you need to enjoy the winter months.

East Sussex, 1914. It is the end of England's brief Edwardian summer, and everyone agrees that the weather has never been so beautiful. Hugh Grange, down from his medical studies, is visiting his aunt Agatha, who lives with her husband in the small, idyllic coastal town of Rye. Agatha's husband works in the Foreign Office, and she is certain he will ensure that the recent sabre rattling over the Balkans won't come to anything.

The remoter parts of the English Fens are forlorn, lost and damp even in the height of summer. At Lyot Lock, a large decaying house, two young cousins, Leonora and Edward are parked for the summer with their ageing spinster aunt and her cruel housekeeper. At first the unpleasantness and petty meanness’s appear simply spiteful, calculated to destroy Edward's equanimity.

Is the Greek alphabet all Greek to you? Is geometry your Achilles heel and does your knowledge of Homer have more to do with The Simpsons than the Sirens? From engineering and architecture to drama and democracy, the world around us is founded on the principles and discoveries of the Ancient World, yet our understanding of it is episodic at best. But it's never too late to learn.

Growing up in 1970s Suffolk in a crumbling giant of a house with wild, tangled gardens, Alex Monroe was left to wreak havoc by invention. Without visible parental influence, but with sisters to love him and brothers to fight for him, he made nature into his world. Creation became a compulsion, whether it was go-karts and guns, crossbows and booby traps, boats, bikes, or scooters. And then, it was jewelry.

Adam Ford is an archaeologist. Not only has he been on expeditions to unlock the mysteries of the past in the Caribbean, British Isles, Jordan, Syria, Israel, United Arab Emirates and Australia, he's also had heat stroke, hypothermia, and dysentery; been chased by camel spiders; been walked on by scorpions; and been pestered by bugs big enough to ride.