Who are the English? And what images spring to mind when you think of the English and England? Ask a tourist and they would probably say Big Ben, English 'bobbies', black taxi cabs and the late Queen and royal family. Ask a Scot, Welshmen or Irishman and you may get a different answer. However, ask an Englishman (or woman) and you will probably get more intimate answers... mowing the lawn, going down the pub or maybe braving the beach on a frigid summer's day. Ask Chris Steele-Perkins, an internationally acclaimed and award-winning Magnum photographer of over 50 years, and he'll have a multitude of answers all captured through his lens. In this new edition of his wonderful photobook, Chris presents a sweeping, unique record of what he thinks makes England truly English. From Sunday cricket matches to snoozes in a deckchair, intimate family portraits to carefree children at play, circus shows with performing bears to the wilder performers of a street carnival, and from Saturday night dancing to race riots. Each picture tells a story of time and place and many of the images in this collection will strike a chord or a memory in the viewer. These natural and authentic photographs are a personal selection of the best and most important of Chris' photographs that he has taken over 40 years of photographing in England. Some are drawn from books he has made on English themes, others from stories he has worked on, others from pictures of family and friends, from random events encountered. This book is an honest testament to this odd but magnificent country that is England, the England of the people.

Throughout a year, Magnum photographer, Chris Steele-Perkins photographed at Holkham Hall, a 23,000 acre estate set on the Norfolk coast with a history stretching back to the 1700s. He photographed not only the various activities there, from hunting and shooting through to concerts and weddings, but also the groups of workers that form the backbone of day to day life on the Estate. Holkham combines tradition with more contemporary activities such as pop and classical concerts, and businesses such as the rental and sale of holiday caravans. It was this mix of past and present, alongside the fact that the Hall was a lived-in family home, that most interested Steele-Perkins. For him the challenge was to look at the reality of Holkham, and explore where that reality overlapped with the cliches we cling to. Country estates bedevil the British imagination, and much of the rest of the world's too. Perhaps this is not surprising given that they feature in so many of our novels, historical films and TV dramas - Downton Abbey for example, or Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. The focus of these fictional accounts, however, is almost always resolutely fixed on the past, yet the estates themselves continue. They are institutions with both a past and a future. Whilst there are many photographic projects on country life - from hunting through to country house gardens or the art collections - there is very little that gives a rounder view of life on an estate. An estate is more than an old house, it is a farm, a business, an eco-system, a community, a venue, a confluence of history - a world in microcosm.

It was the amazing statistic which got Chris Steele-Perkins attention. There are 10,000 people aged over 100 in the UK and that number is growing rapidly. The Office of National Statistics predicts that 5% of the people alive today in the UK will live to be over 100. That is 3 million people. However, this book is not about statistics and the implications, it is about the people. In Fading Light Chris creates a portrait of this new generation. They are a mixed bunch of people who have seen many changes throughout their lives and have many stories to tell. Fading Light is a moving book showing the increasing number of centenarians and their miraculous ability to survive until the great age of 100.

Returning to the North East in 2001 to document the Durham Coalfield, at one time the heartland of the British coal industry, Chris Steele-Perkins found himself in that exurban culture that we now associate with "Billy Elliot". This world of "lamping" (for rabbits), ferreting, whippet racing, grouse shooting, pigeon fancying and the rearing of birds of prey is a survival of what D. H. Lawrence once described as "a curious cross between industrialism and the old agricultural England of Shakespeare and Milton". Chris Steele-Perkins has memorably recorded this with visual wit, and a constant eye for the extraordinary. Nor is he at all sentimental: the harsh realities of blood-stained slaughter-houses and the vandalism of fly-tipping in the open countryside aren't excluded. His photographs, he says, "serve as both eulogy and elegy".

In November 2011, Geoff Dyer fulfilled a childhood dream of spending time on an aircraft carrier. Dyer's stay on the USS George Bush, on active service in the Arabian Gulf, proved even more intense, memorable, and frequently hilarious, than he could ever have hoped. In Dyer's hands, the warship becomes a microcosm for a stocktaking of modern Western life: religion, drugs, chauvinism, farting, gyms, steaks, prayer, parental death, relationships and how to have a beach party with 5000 people on a giant floating hunk of steel. Piercingly perceptive and gloriously funny, this is a unique book about work, war and entering other worlds.