Given how much we eat, it's amazing that no book has ever been devoted to toast. Here Heidi Nathan provides a true first with contributions from Dame Maureen Lipman and Joanna Lumley. An essential guide to tastier toast toppings featuring delicious recipes sprinkled with anecdotes and facts on the history of toast 'Bread and water can so easily be tea and toast.' was famously written on a tea towel and in the pages of Punch magazine in 1852 where a man cried 'No bread? Then bring me toast!' For Heidi Nathan 'it has become my guilt trip to just stick whatever is left in the fridge on a slice of hot buttered toast. At the expense of my BMI, this, shamefully, has become primarily how I eat.' But for her toast is much more than a grilled slice of bread. In this book she gives the ultimate guide to what you can put on toast. Joanna Lumley explains her own favourite toppings which include Home-made marmalade, quite sour, quite chunky. Marmite: and sometimes peanut butter on top of the marmite, with watercress squashed onto the top of that. Baked beans pronounced baked beings for no reason other than to get an easy laugh. She is a great comedienne after all. Toast also involves technology. The "modern" timed pop-up toaster was created in 1919. Toasters got increasingly thinner and blended into the late 20th century kitchen neatly, until the tide turned as tides tend to do and bulky alloy mock art deco ones emerged.

Life the Lipman way is always unexpected, and the hilarious and witty way in which she recalls her adventures and misadventures has made her a bestselling author and national treasure. Her self-deprecatingly titled Past-it Notes is the ultimate Maureen Lipman Collection, drawing on choice material from her six previous books (re-visited and re-worked) and lacing this with a heady dose of extremely funny new autobiographical material. Past-it Notes is packed with beguiling showbiz anecdotes, wonderful stories, eccentric characters, bizarre situations and memorable encounters - all recalled and recorded with gusto and relish. To compliment all this, Maureen has also included affectionate recollections of her late husband, the playwright Jack Rosenthal, and of her mother and Muse, the inimitable Zelma, source of so much rich comic material. From entertaining the neighbours at the age of four with impressions of Alma Cogan to entertaining the nation on TV, from struggling with her laptop to film-roles and award-winning stage triumphs such as re-Joyce and Oklahoma (and even the Vagina Monologues!) - and not forgetting her iconic creation Beattie, star of thirty five British Telecom commercials - Maureen combines stories of her whirlwind professional life, and confessions of the chaos that often threatens to engulf her personal life, with a style and wit that is utterly and uniquely her own. Born in Hull, actress Maureen Lipman has written six best-selling books, the most recent being Lip Reading. She has won numerous awards for her television and theatrical work including the Laurence Olivier and Variety Club of Great Britain Awards.

One of the best-kept religious secrets has been the revolution that has been quietly taking place within Judaism over the last two decades, as it has sought to grapple with contemporary issues. These include mixed-faith marriages, gay relationships, women's empowerment, declining numbers, atheism and being trans. It has involved a willingness to abandon biblical laws that conflict with modern values. Most ground-breaking of all, it has meant re-defining what it means to be Jewish in the 21st century. Inclusive Judaism not only uncovers this religion revolution, but presents a challenge to all people of faith on how best to marry tradition and modernity. The book also reflects the soul-searching that has prompted rabbis to chart a new course, both out of principle and as a practical way of rescuing British Jewry from possible collapse if it did not adapt to the new social trends that affect us all.