There might be more books on Oxford than students who have attended the world’s greatest university, but there has never been one as dynamic and exciting as 111 Places in Oxford That You Shouldn’t Miss. Author Ed Glinert has sifted through all the college histories, records and lists of alumni; examined all the quads and cloisters of the great colleges; explored the glorious villages hewn from honey-dripping Cotswold stone; luxuriated in the glamorous coffee houses of High Street; imagined society’s earliest motor cars built at the Morris garages; been struck dumb by the never-ending peal of bells at Tom Tower; relaxed at Carfax, the very centre of the universe; and tippled at each of the legendary pubs between St Giles and Merton. This is a volume which will send residents into paroxysms of laughter, remind students why they’re there, and warn prospective undergrads of the joys of living in one of the world’s most beautiful and cleverest cities.

They call Yorkshire God's own country. This is because England's biggest county is also England's most epic and most historically exciting. It has everything: unimaginably beautiful countryside, derelict castles, cliff-hugging coastlines, brutally bleak moors, quirkily quaint villages, wondrously winding waterways and industrial monsters of cities. Many of the most interesting episodes in English history have happened here: the Wars of the Roses, the English Civil War, the birth of the industrial revolution, the rise of the Labour movement. But when people think of Yorkshire they also think of the unusual and the unsung: Bettys delightful tea rooms, cricket at Scarborough, the windswept steps of Whitby Abbey, the steam railway of the Railway Children, Mother Shipton's Cave, and racing at Doncaster and York. Yorkshire has also given birth to some of the greatest and most talented figures in English history: Brian Clough, Harold Wilson, John Wycliffe, William Wilberforce, the Bronte Sisters, David Hockney and Barbara Hepworth.

"Good evening. I'm from Essex, in case you couldn't tell." Thus spoke the inimitable punk poet of the flat lands, Ian Dury, in 1977. Few other parts of England have so distinctive an identity, sent up by a hundred comedians since the 1990 birth of Essex Man, epitomised by the rise of the 'Mockney' radio celeb, and incarcerated through their hideous offspring in TV's The Only Way is Essex. It's not just an accent, it's a way of life, a culture shaped by the Diaspora from London generation after generation, the lure of the sea and powerful Thames estuary, the encroaching of the waters from innumerable creeks and inlets, the dream seaside resort of Southend, the longing for the most succulent of seafood indulgences, the delicious countryside of copses and boughs painted by Constable, but also the threat of invasion by hostile forces repelled by Britain's most formidable forts. It's Essex. You can tell.

Mediaeval no-go zone, Victorian hell-hole, war-ravaged bomb site, 21st century shining city, the most exciting area in one of the most exciting cities in the world - the East End has often been London's strange alter ego. Ed Glinert trawls through the strange stories, the crazed characters, the violent vignettes, the dried-up docks, the imaginative immigrants, the proud philanthropists to give a different history of the most misunderstood sector of the capital, from the Princes in the Tower to the Ratcliffe Highway murders; from Jack the Ripper to the Kray twins; the Jewish ghetto to Banglatown; Cable Street to Canary Wharf; Mahatma Gandhi to George Orwell.

When a body is discovered in a bloodstained room in Brixton, the only clues are a wedding ring, a gold watch, a pocket edition of Boccaccio's Decameron, and a woman's name scrawled in blood on the wall. So begins the first investigation by Sherlock Holmes to be recorded by his new room-mate Dr Watson. Their search for the murderer uncovers a story of love and revenge which began years before in Salt Lake City.

Yellow fog is swirling through the streets of London and Sherlock Holmes himself is sitting in a cocaine-induced haze until the arrival of a distressed and beautiful young lady forces the great detective into action. Each year following the strange disappearance of her father, Miss Morstan has received a present of a rare and lustrous pearl. Now, on the day of the summons to meet her anonymous benefactor, she consults Sherlock Holmes.

This collection brings together some of Sherlock Holmes earliest cases which appeared in the Strand magazine in 1892 and 1893. The stories here take place the now-familiar Holmsian stomping ground: the foggy streets of London, the docks, the cocaine dens, and the new suburbs as Holmes and Dr Watson grapple with the extremes of treachery, duplicity and evil. Together they solve some of their most intriguing cases including 'The Speckled Band', 'The Scandal in Bohemia', 'The Silver Blaze', and 'The Final Problem'.

Also known as Dulcimer Street, Norman Collins's London Belongs to Me is a Dickensian romp through working-class London on the eve of the Second World War. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Ed Glinert, author of The London Compendium. It is 1938 and the prospect of war hangs over every London inhabitant. But the city doesn't stop. Everywhere people continue to work, drink, fall in love, fight and struggle to get on in life. At the lodging-house at No.10 Dulcimer Street, Kennington, the buttoned-up clerk Mr Josser returns home with the clock he has received as a retirement gift. The other residents include faded actress Connie; tinned food-loving Mr Puddy; widowed landlady Mrs Vizzard (whose head is turned by her new lodger, a self-styled 'Professor of Spiritualism'); and flashy young mechanic Percy Boon, whose foray into stolen cars descends into something much, much worse... Norman Collins (1907-1982) was a British writer, and later a radio and television executive, who was responsible for creating Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4, and became one of the major figures behind the establishment of the Independent Television (ITV) network in the UK. In all Norman Collins wrote 16 novels and two plays, including London Belongs to Me (1945), The Governor's Lady (1968) and The Husband's Story (1978). If you enjoyed London Belongs to Me, you might like Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'One of the great city novels: a sprawling celebration of the comedy, the savagery, the eccentricity and the quiet heroism at the heart of ordinary London life' Sarah Waters, author of The Night Watch

The streets of London resonate with secret stories, from East End lore to Cold War espionage, from tales of riots, rakes, anarchy and grisly murders, to Rolling Stones gigs, gangland drinking dens, Orwell's Fitzrovia and Lenin's haunts. Ed Glinert has walked the length and breadth of the city to unravel its mysteries, travelling through time from the Romans' London wall to the new Olympic site at Stratford. This is London as you have never seen it before.

‘I fail to see – because I do not happen to be a “Somebody” – why my diary should not be interesting’

Mr Pooter is a man of modest ambitions, content with his ordinary life. Yet he always seems to be troubled by disagreeable tradesmen, impertinent young office clerks and wayward friends, not to mention his devil-may-care son Lupin’s unsuitable choice of bride. Try as he might, he cannot avoid life’s embarrassing mishaps. In the bumbling, absurd yet ultimately endearing figure of Pooter, the Grossmiths created an immortal comic character and a superb satire on the snobberies of middle-class suburbia – one which also sends up late Victorian crazes for Aestheticism, spiritualism and bicycling, as well as the fashion for publishing diaries by anybody and everybody.

This edition contains the original illustrations by Weedon Grossmith, further reading and an introduction by Ed Glinert discussing the novel’s initial serialization in Punch, reactions to Pooter, the growth of suburbs and the figure of Mrs Pooter.