Alexis Gauthier: Vegetronic
by Alexis Gauthier

VEGETRONIC will change the way you think about and cook vegetables and fruit ... and it's so easy.

Michelin-starred chef, MasterChef judge and Saturday Kitchen regular Alexis Gauthier is not a vegetarian, but he knows how to create fabulous recipes where vegetables are the star turn.

When Alexis Gauthier started his cooking apprenticeship, he was told that he should know every classic dish that made up French gastronomy, and in the process became just another recipe follower.

Then in 1993 he entered the three-Michelin-starred kitchen of Alain Ducasse in the south of France and slowly rediscovered the fundamentals of cooking, learning to trust his instincts and intuition and opening up his mind to the possibilities of individual ingredients and combinations that enhance the depth of flavour of both ... and that is what VEGETRONIC is all about.

Gauthier lovingly introduces each ingredient, saying what he likes about it, its season, its best partners, how his Provencal grandmother prepared it in her kitchen, and considers its health benefits.

Each recipe is graded according to ease of preparation and execution (most are easy or medium). And, where appropriate, he suggests what to do with early- or late-in-the-season ingredients that may be over- or under-ripe - those unforgivably hard peaches, woody strawberries, and end-of-season broad beans and peas.

Just a little of Alexis's knowledge will change your approach to and enjoyment of vegetables.

All At Sea: One man. One bathtub. One very bad idea.
by Tim FitzHigham

All At Sea is a celebration of the epic absurd, an attempt to explain just how out of hand things can become from a very simple starting point. The book follows the author's death-defying 200-mile journey in his antique Thomas Crapper bath - not just across the Channel, but around Kent - right up to the tremendous reception and huge media attention which awaited him under Tower Bridge. Tim met the Queen, and his bath now resides in the National Maritime Museum of Great Britain.

An A-Z of Hellraisers: A Comprehensive Compendium of Outrageous Insobriety
by Robert Sellers

An A-Z of Hellraisers is the last word on inebriated misbehaviour, and the miscreant mob in this whopper of a book constitute the most amazing grouping to see print, from Alexander the Great, whose drunken revelries once ended with the destruction of an entire city, to W. C. Fields, who passed critical judgement on a brass band by urinating over them from a hotel balcony, Dylan Thomas, who drove a sports car onto Charlie Chaplin's private tennis court, to Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, suffocating on his own vomit after consuming forty measures of vodka - what a night out that was!

This hilarious volume makes for an ideal bedsife companion, or pub reading fodder, as it scrutinises and salutes these glorious individuals from Winston Churchill to Keith Moon, George Best to Ernest Hemingway, Wild Bill Hickok to Sam Peckinpah, Ozzy Osbourne to Errol Flynn. Just thank God we didn't have to live next door to any of them.

Another Point of View
by Lisa Jardine

'I want to use the moment as a springboard for some big ideas. I want to use the past and present to stimulate and challenge the listener and seduce them into thinking differently.' Lisa Jardine

Provocative and inspirational, Lisa Jardine is one of our pre-eminent thinkers. A leading academic, she is a polymath who embraces both the arts and the sciences with equal passion and has that rare gift of being able to make her subject and her thinking accessible to a mainstream audience.

Lisa presents 'A Point of View' on Radio 4 on Sunday mornings, replacing Alistair Cooke's 'Letter From America'. Another Point of View is a collection of twenty-two of the hugely popular and critically-acclaimed talks from the programme, on subjects as wide-ranging and topical as commuting, national identity, Christmas, Latin, knife crime, the mortgage crisis and the credit crunch.

The book contains drawings by Nick Wadley.

Bad Boy Drive: The Wild Lives and Fast Times of Marlon Brando, Dennis Hopper, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson
by Robert Sellers

'I don't know what people expect when they meet me. They seem to be afraid that I'm going to piss in the potted palm and slap them on the ass.' Marlon Brando
'I should have been dead ten times over. I believe in miracles. It's an absolute miracle that I'm still around.' Dennis Hopper
'The best time to get married is noon. That way, if things don't work out, you haven't blown the whole day.' Warren Beatty
'You only lie to two people in your life: your girlfriend and the police.' Jack Nicholson

They're the baddest bad asses Hollywood has ever seen: Marlon Brando, Dennis Hopper, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson. These are men for whom rules did not apply, men for whom normal standards of behaviour were simply too wearisome to worry about. These are men who brawled, boozed, snorted and shagged their way into legend-hood - but along the way they changed acting and the way movies were made forever.

Bad Boy Drive is a whistle-stop tour of jaw-dropping sexual activity, misbehaviour of an Olympic standard, all-out excess and genuine madness. It's a wonder Hollywood survived.