Joanna Bannerman, capricious, selfish and warm-hearted, passionately seeks life and 'loveliness'. Certainly the bustling streets of Glasgow at the turn of the century promise much greater excitement than the solid evangelical background she has known hitherto. Her studies in the School of Art open up new horizons - of independence and love - and Joanna reaches for them all. First published in 1920, this novel powerfully evokes the image of a young woman ensnared yet ultimately released by her capacity for emotion. It contains a strong autobiographical element and is also a powerful evocation of the life and industry of the Second City of the Empire.

From Revolution to Revolution (1973) examines England, Scotland and Wales from the revolution of 1688 when William became King, to the American Revolution of 1776. In this period lies the roots of modern Britain, as it went from being underdeveloped countries on the fringe of European civilization to a predominating influence in the world. This book examines the union of the island, development of an organized public opinion and national consciousness, as well as Parliament and its factions, the landed and business classes. Views on religion, art, architecture and the changing face of the countryside are also examined, as is the tension between London and the rest of the island. The important issues of colonial expansions in Ireland, America, India and Africa are also analysed.

The Benaki Museum of Islamic Art in Athens has a substantial collection of Iznik ceramics (tableware, tiles and sherds). Although well-known to those who visit the museum, this collection has never been fully published. John Carswell first studied the objects in the 1980s and started cataloguing them with a view to publication. The project was revived and guided to fruition by the curator of the museum, Mina Moraitou. She has contributed a chapter on Antonis Benakis and the formation of the Iznik collection as well as working on the catalogue which includes 111 objects, 83 tiles and 143 sherds. All the objects are illustrated in colour, some with line drawings.

As a fine novelist, critic and biographer Catherine Carswell led a passionate and various life, full of intellectual commitment and a wide range of social interests. She worked on this original, modest and yet richly remarkable autobiography over a number of years, coming back to it again and again, almost as an act of meditation. The younger daughter of a Glasgow shipping merchant, Catherine Macfarlane studied music in Frankfurt before returning to Glasgow and then moving to London where she worked as a literary and dramatic reviewer and met her second husband, Donald Carswell, and a wide circle of literary and cultural figures, including a succession of Soviet ambassadors, Lady Tweedsmuir and D.H. Laurence. In fact she became one of Laurence's close friends, and it was he who encouraged her to write her first novel, Open the Door!, based on her own background and a sense of growing social and spiritual independence. Carswell's interests and enthusiasms encompassed (among others) Herzen, Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Rabelais, Burns and Boccaccio, but Lying Awake is the distillation of her thoughts on her own life and indeed on the nature of identity and autobiography itself. Left unfinished when she died in 1946, the manuscript was edited by her son John and has not been reprinted since it was first published in 1950.

In the summer of 1974, against the backdrop of the Lebanese Civil War, ceramics expert and Morgan sports car enthusiast John Carswell set off with his young family from their home in Beirut on an expedition across Asia and the Middle East. Their mode of transport was their beloved motor car, a Morgan 4/4 four seater, named 'Speedy'. Following in the steps of Ibn Battuta, their destination was the Maldives, where Carswell hoped to find evidence of the Chinese blue and white pottery which he was researching. The family travelled via Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, from where they sailed to Bombay (Mumbai). What followed was an extraordinary journey across the length of India to Sri Lanka and from there to the Maldives. Speedy Motor tells, with wit and sparkle, the trials and tribulations of one family car over several decades in the Middle East and latterly Europe. When the family were forced to flee Beirut during the Civil War, Speedy temporarily fell into the hands of Hizbollah but years later 'he' was reunited with his family in England. John Carswell's vivid account of a unique expedition and a much-loved car provides a vibrant portrait of a region in the grip of change.

This classic account of the first great British financial scandal is a brilliant recreation of eighteenth-century social and economic life and will interest anyone fascinated by scandal, corruption, and human vanity.