Simon appleby

In The Forager’s Calendar, John Wright shows us what species can be found when and where, how to identify them, and how to store, use and cook them. Fully illustrated throughout, with tips on kit, conservation advice and what to avoid, this is an indispensable guide.

In the first part of John Wright’s What to Forage Now blog series, he tells us about the wild food that can be found on your doorstep. Perfect for these self-isolating times.

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 What to Forage Now: Wild Food on your Doorstep

With interest in foraging unabated and, indeed, increasing, I am often asked where is the best place to start. One would imagine that it might be a wild, rocky seashore, maybe an old oak wood or a well-established hedge. It is natural to consider wild food to exist in wild places, but urban and even domestic landscapes are often the best.

So, the answer to the question of ‘where’ is ‘in your garden’.

My Forager’s Calendar, as its name implies, is devoted to the seasonal nature of wild food. Some species are highly seasonal; Birch sap is only available for two weeks in March and with Flying Ants it is two hours in July! Many are around all year; for example, Sorrel which is found in old pasture, and the Jelly Ear fungus that grows on Elder trees.

The period between the ides of March to those of April is a little too early for most things, with mid-April being the time when spring really gets underway. But there are a surprising number of wild foods found in gardens in early spring and most of them are, of course, weeds.

The endlessly pernicious Hairy Bittercress establishes itself in every flowerpot, shrubbery or crack in the patio. It is, however, excellent to eat, with a peppery flavour identical to that of the cress that is grown in little tubs. Uproot it whole and snip off the roots, wash before serving.

A fellow denizen of odd corners is wild Cornsalad (left). This, or one of its cousins, is fairly well known as a cultivated salad and the wild version is just as good, if a little less succulent. Pick it when the tiny, pale blue flowers have developed – they will impart a floral component to your salad.

Unless you are lucky enough to have Wild Garlic growing in a shady corner, the most interesting and useful garden weed is the Stinging Nettle. It is particularly good in early spring, with bright young leaves which can be picked (carefully) as an entire sprig from the growing tip.

Nettles (right) are not suitable in a salad unless fire-eating is a hobby of yours, but they do make a famously excellent soup  when thickened with potato and enhanced with a good stock. But there is much more that can be done with this highly nutritious plant. Individually deep-fried leaves make a splendid decoration on a dish; blanched and drained, they can be squeeze-dried in a tea towel then chopped up to a powder which is then mixed into a pasta dough, or even pastry. Indeed, if a (cooked) dish can be made with spinach, it can be made with nettles. By the way, you can eat raw nettles if you are careful, and they have a rather pleasant, fresh flavour. Just screw up a leaf into a tight ball and pop it in your mouth. The ‘screwing up’ breaks all the needles so that they cannot penetrate the skin. Try it!

You may find yourself uprooting dandelions from your lawn and borders about now. I certainly have. The roots are edible, if a little too bitter to eat unless starvation is the alternative. But if cleaned, dried, roasted (190C, 25 minutes) then coarsely ground, they make a genuinely good substitute for coffee. Honestly.

Finally, a gentle word of warning. The above mentioned plants are easy to identify, but do make sure you get it right. The average garden is full of dangerously poisonous species (I had Henbane appear in mine for a couple of years!), so do ensure that your wild supper will not be your last supper.

Order your copy of The Forager’s Calendar from Amazon, Waterstones or Hive.

‘Formidable …  [this] book bled a dormant discomfort out of me with surgical precision.’ Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror

What happens when an immigrant believes the lies they’re told about their own racial identity?

For Cathy Park Hong, they experience the shame and difficulty of “minor feelings”.
 
The daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up in America steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these “minor feelings” occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality. With sly humour and a poet’s searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and artmaking, and to family and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche – and of a writer’s search to both uncover and speak the truth.

Read the opening below

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My depression began with an imaginary tic.

For an hour, I stared at the mirror, waiting for my eyelid to flutter or the corner of my mouth to tingle.

“Do you see my tic?” I asked my husband.

“No.”

“Do you see my tic now?” I asked my husband.

“No.” “Do you see my tic now?” I asked my husband.

“No!”

In my early twenties, I used to have an actual tic in my right eyelid that spread so that my right facial muscles contracted my eye into an occasional Popeye squint. I found out I had a rare neuromuscular condition called hemifacial spasm, triggered by two cranial nerves behind my ear that became twisted. In 2004, when I was twenty-six years old, a doctor in Pittsburgh corrected my spasms by inserting a tiny sponge to separate the two entwined nerves.

Now, seven years later, I was convinced my spasms had returned—that somehow the sponge had slipped and my nerves had knotted themselves up again. My face was no longer my face but a mask of trembling nerves threatening to mutiny. There was a glitch in the machine. Any second, a nerve could misfire and spasm like a snaking hose hissing water. I thought about my face so much I could feel my nerves, and my nerves felt ticklish. The face is the most naked part of ourselves, but we don’t realize it until the face is somehow injured, and then all we think of is its naked con­dition.

My self-conscious habits returned. I found elaborate ruses to hide my face in public, cradling my cheek against my hand as if I were in constant dismay, or looking away to quietly ponder a question about the weather when all I could think of was my ticklish nerves that could, any second, seize my face into a tic.

There was no tic.

It was my mind threatening mutiny. I was turning para­noid, obsessive. I wanted someone to unscrew my head and screw on a less neurotic head.

“Stinking thinking,” my husband called my thinking.

To try to fall asleep, I ingested whiskey, then whiskey with Ambien, then whiskey with Ambien, Xanax, and weed, but nothing could make me sleep. When I could not sleep, I could not think. When I could not think, I could not write nor could I socialize and carry on a conversation. I was the child again. The child who could not speak English.

I lived in a beautiful rent-stabilized loft on an unremark­able corridor of Lower Broadway known for its retail jeans stores that pumped out a wallpaper of Hot 97 hits. I was fi­nally living the New York life I wanted. I was recently mar­ried and had just finished writing a book. There was no reason for me to be depressed. But anytime I was happy, the fear of an awful catastrophe would follow, so I made myself feel awful to preempt the catastrophe’s hitting. Overtaxed by this anxiety, I sank into deep depression. A friend said that when she was depressed, she felt like a “sloth that fell from its tree.” An apt description. I was dull, depleted, until I had to go out and interface with the public, and then I felt flayed.

I decided to see a therapist to treat my depression. I wanted a Korean American therapist because I wouldn’t have to ex­plain myself as much. She’d look at me and just know where I was coming from. Out of the hundreds of New York thera­pists available on the Aetna database of mental health care providers, I found exactly one therapist with a Korean sur­name. I left a message for her and she called me back. We set up a consultation.

Her small, dimly lit waiting room had a framed Diego Rivera poster of a kneeling woman holding a giant basket of calla lilies. The whole room was furnished in Rivera’s tran­quilizing palette: the brown vase of cattails, the caramel leather armchair, a rug the color of dying coral.

The therapist opened her door. The first thing I noticed was the size of her face. The therapist had an enormous face. I wondered if this was a problem for her, since Korean women are so self-conscious about the size of their faces that they will go under the knife to shave their jawlines down (a common Korean compliment: “Your face is so small it’s the size of a fist!”).

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“Superbly researched and written” FRANCIS FUKUYAMA

“It’s been a long time since I learned so much from one book” Rutger Bregman, author of Utopia for Realists

“Few books are as well-matched to the moment of their publication as Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized” Dan Hopkins, The Washington Post

“It is likely to become the political book of the year… Powerful [and] intelligent” Fareed Zakaria, CNN

“A thoughtful, clear and persuasive analysis” New York Times

America’s political system isn’t broken. The truth is scarier: it’s working exactly as designed. In this book, journalist Ezra Klein reveals how that system is polarizing us – and how we are polarizing it – with disastrous results.

In Why We’re Polarized, Klein reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture.

Klein shows how and why American politics polarized in the twentieth century, what that polarization did to Americans’ views of the world and one another, and how feedback loops between polarized political identities and polarized political institutions drive the system toward crisis. This revelatory book will change how you look at politics, and perhaps at yourself.

Pre-order the ebook from Amazon, Apple, Google Play or Kobo.

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Ezra Klein is the editor-at-large and cofounder of Vox, the award-winning explanatory news organization. Launched in 2014, Vox reaches more than 50 million people across its platforms each month. Klein is also the host of the podcast the Ezra Klein Show, cohost of the Weeds podcast, and an executive producer on Vox‘s Netflix show, Explained. Previously, Klein was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, a policy analyst at MSNBC, and a contributor to Bloomberg.

Join Ezra Klein’s 2.5 million followers on Twitter: @EzraKlein

We were delighted to announce this week that Souvenir Press will reissue Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, the bestselling guide to creativity, with a brand new design. 

With a new contemporary text design and lavish covers, Profile will publish The Artist’s Way in hardback in April 2020 in its Souvenir press imprint with the paperback to follow in October. Profile will publish the companion volume of practical exercises, The Artist’s Way Workbook, in September.

Originally published in 1991, The Artist’s Way offers techniques to free up blockages, opening up opportunities for growth and self-discovery. Its fans include Tim Ferriss, Elizabeth Gilbert, Alicia Keys, Russell Brand, Kerry Washington and Reese Witherspoon. Globally, The Artist’s Way alone has sold over 5 million copies, and has been credited with launching hundreds of novels, plays, films, startups, and other creative projects.

Rebecca Gray, Publisher at Souvenir Press, said, ‘Julia Cameron’s message, that anyone can be creative and enjoy their creativity, has inspired millions and is more relevant today than ever. When it comes to self-care, self-improvement and self-esteem, she is the original and the best teacher, and we are very proud to be working so closely with her on these new editions of her classic works.’

Julia Cameron said, ‘I am delighted to be working with Profile Books, an innovative and exciting venture. I believe the new look of The Artist’s Way will bring to us a new audience, attracted by the clean, up-to-the minute design, which is at once classic and energetic.’

About Julia Cameron

Creativity guru, novelist, playwright, songwriter and poet, Julia Cameron has multiple credits in theatre, film and television.  

She has written over 30 books and been translated into some 40 languages.  She directed episodes of Miami Vice and was an uncredited writer on Taxi Driver before developing The Artist’s Way. Other screenwriting credits include New York, New York and The Last Waltz.  Cameron wrote, produced and directed the award-winning independent feature film God’s Will, which premiered at the Chicago international Film Festival and was selected by the London Film Festival, the Munich International Film Festival, and the Women in Film Festival, among others. 

Follow Julia Cameron on Twitter

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Annie Gray’s Victory in the Kitchen is the story of a woman who was not royal, rich, or famous. And yet, Georgina Landemare was instrumental in the diplomatic success that led to victory in the Second World War. She started her career as a nursemaid, and ended it cooking for one of the best-known figures in British history, a man to whom food was central, not only as a pleasure by itself, but as a diplomatic tool in a time when the world was embroiled in a worldwide war. Our intern, Elizabeth Hitti, highlights five interesting facts about Georgina’s extraordinary life.

To learn more about Georgina Landemare, order your copy of Victory in the Kitchen today from Amazon, Waterstones or Hive.

1. Georgina cooked during two world wars and for 16 monarchs in her lifetime.

She began working in kitchens as a scullery maid at 15 years old and didn’t stop until she was 73, when she retired from her work for the Churchills. During this time, her guests included prominent figures, such as Lord Kitchener, Ian Hamilton and Charles De Gaulle.

2. Georgina was the Churchills’ longest-serving domestic servant. 

She wrote to the Churchills in 1939 and offered herself as their wartime cook. She then worked for the family from 1940 to 1954, the entirety of which was during rationing in Britain. With her ability to create extravagant meals from rations and to adapt to Churchill’s hectic schedule, she was a highly valued member of the household. She was even included in the Churchills’ evacuation list, her cat, Smoky, was welcomed as family, and she was frequently seen admonishing Churchill for walking around 10 Downing Street naked.

3. Georgina almost died when the kitchen window of 10 Downing Street was blown up during the Blitz.

She was usually the last to enter the bunkers during bombings and Churchill often had to hustle her out of the kitchen, exclaiming “If Mr Hitler gets you, I won’t get my soup!” On one of these occasions, she was finishing a pudding when Churchill demanded that she leave and seek shelter. The 25-foot window in the kitchen exploded moments later and the pudding was, presumably, ruined.

4. On VE Day Churchill shook Georgina’s hand, brought her up to the balcony, and said he could never have achieved victory without her.

She was crucial in enabling Churchill’s dinner-table diplomacy. He believed that face-to-face contact, over good food and wine, was the secret to political success. Georgina thus provided the stage for Churchill’s rituals around food, often attracting repeated guests who returned for her cooking. Georgina’s ability to efficiently use rations was also key to protecting Churchill’s public image, as he was never seen to be receiving special treatment. Rationing worked because it was equal for all, and Georgina made sure of this.

5. Georgina destroyed most of her memoir, before her granddaughter stopped her and saved twenty-six and a half pages.

In despair after her daughter and son-in-law declared that no one would be interested in her life, Georgina tore her memoir apart and washed it down the sink. Twenty-six and a half pages remain, which Annie Gray has supplemented in her book with Georgina’s recipe book from 10 Downing Street and research from the time period. 

Why are you kind?

And also:

Why aren’t you kinder?

Henry James Garrett has written and illustrated for The New York Times, created Valentine’s cards for The Fawcett Society, provided a drawing of Meghan Markle’s dog as a gift for her, cartooned for the i Newspaper, Buzzfeed and London Pride, had solo exhibitions in London and a beautiful phonebox in Brighton and made greeting cards. You can join his 145,000 followers on Instagram @henryjgarrett.

And now he has a book.

This book will make you kinder by introducing you to your empathy, and by pointing out what limits that empathy. Not just the everyday kindness of taking out your neighbour’s bins – the strong, courageous, moral kindness of fighting cruelty. It’s needed now more than ever. Unkindness has been given new energy in recent years.

So get to know your empathy a little better. Where it comes from, and why every human – and some animals – have it. Empathy is what makes us kind, but it must be combined with aconscious effort to learn about different kinds of people. A world in which everyone acted on their empathy would be a very kind world indeed. Let’s work toward that world.

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Amazon

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Georgina Landemare saw herself as ordinary but her accomplishments, and the life she lived, were anything but. She started her career as a nursemaid, and ended it cooking for one of the best-known figures in British history, a man to whom food was central, not only as a pleasure by itself, but as a diplomatic tool in a time when the world was embroiled in a worldwide war.

Victory in the Kitchen is a culinary biography: a life lived through food, ranging from rural Berkshire to wartime London, via Belle Epoque Paris and prohibition-era New York. Through one eager eater, and one skilled cook, Annie Gray contextualises twentieth century food through two figures who were both intimately involved with it. Recipes include Georgina’s German Kougelhof, Curried Brains, macaroons, Boodles Orange, Mousse de Maple and ‘Chocolat Cake Good’. 

Annie Gray is an historian, cook, broadcaster and writer specialising in the history of food and dining in Britain from around 1600 to the present day. She has presented TV history documentaries including Victorian Bakers and The Sweetmakers, and appears on BBC Radio 4’s The Kitchen Cabinet. Find Annie on Twitter and Instagram.

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Amazon
Waterstones
Hive

One day in 1977, an elderly lady stood weeping in her bedsit kitchen, methodically shredding her memoir into tiny pieces and washing them down her sink. Her son-in- law and her daughter had told her that no one would be interested in her life. It was a bad time, tensions were high, and so she took the loose pages, written in slightly shaky, crabby handwriting, and watched as the blue ink ran, and the scraps of her life disappeared down the drain. That any of the pages survived was only due to her granddaughter, who discovered her, and saved twenty-six and a half pages, written and rewritten, crossed out and corrected, and which detailed the first fourteen years of the ninety-five she’d so far lived.

In some ways, they were right. This is a book about an ordinary woman, born and brought up in average conditions, and who had, on the face of it, a career like thousands of others. She’d been in service, like so many thousands of other women born in the late Victorian period, rising from scullery maid to cook, and eventually retiring, somewhat later than those brought up with the expectation of guaranteed pensions and a generally accepted retirement age. But this was also a woman to whom Winston Churchill, fresh from addressing the crowd on VE Day, said that he couldn’t have achieved what he had without her.

Georgina Landemare worked for the Churchills from 1940 to 1954, the longest-serving of any of their domestic servants. They were, in turn, her longest employers. Her relationship with the family became one of friendship and respect, although she never forgot the ingrained line between servant and served. She was particularly close to Clementine Churchill, who valued her skills, her loyalty and her ability to turn out meals with minimum fuss despite rationing and the upheavals of war. In the course of her career she’d been Georgina Young, a schoolgirl; Georgie, a sweetheart and friend; Mrs Landemare, wife, mother and jobbing cook; and now she was known to the Churchill clan as ‘Mrs Mar’, an endearing mixture of nickname and the standard cook’s honorific (cooks were always Mrs, regardless of marital status). She had been in daily personal contact with Clementine, a stalwart providing sustenance and delight to Winston, and, throughout the war years especially, a key element in his particular brand of dinner-table diplomacy, believing, as he so firmly did, that personal contact, especially over good food and wine, was the secret to political success.

Unfortunately, public history sometimes slips into a blur of great people doing great deeds: tales of the rich and famous, easy to research and easy to sell, for people have heard of them. In 2017 alone there were two major biographic films and a TV series with Winston Churchill as a key character. There are over a thousand books about him, which include titles such as Hero of the Empire, An Unexpected Hero and A Study in Greatness: there is a definite theme. But look through the indexes of these books: even the magisterial multi-volume Martin Gilbert biography gives scant room to his domestic servants. Georgina does appear occasionally, but it’s in passing, as a stock figure, vaguely imagined as a benevolent and buxom shadow, apron-clad among her pans. But great though Churchill may have been, his greatness was certainly made much more achievable by having someone on hand to pick up his pants – and cook his dinner.

Happily, this is not reflective of the wider historical discipline, and there’s a thriving academic and popular interest in studying the lives of once marginalised figures, either because they reflect wider society or through the light they shed on specific events or better known individuals.1 The working classes, women, black and other minority ethnic groups are all being firmly (re)integrated into the historical narrative, whether in the form of biography, letters and diaries, or narrative history. This is particularly true when it comes to servants, for a long time dismissed as the subject of serious study. In the 1970s, when Georgina was writing down her experiences, domestic service was still a tense topic, something repudiated by the generation represented by Georgina’s daughter, who had often been brought up with parents in service, but were now in a changing world, where it was increasingly seen as undesirable and not really to be talked of.

Domestic service remains deeply emotive, due either to family experience or simple modern politics. There are many excellent and nuanced studies of servant life, from the eighteenth century to the modern day, and a number of service wings at country houses are open with costumed interpreters or volunteers specifically tasked with tackling the tendency toward easy assumptions about servant life.2 But media depictions, with some notable exceptions, still tend to emphasise either the cosy, nostalgic view, where over-stuffed houses were staffed by bobbing parlourmaids in black gowns with white caps; or the miserable, exploitative aspect, this time centred around young teenagers weeping as they scrubbed floors until their knees bled. At its peak, and although reliable statistics are impossible to obtain, domestic service was the single biggest employer of women in the UK. It’s generally thought that it employed around 14 per cent of the working population by the beginning of the twentieth century. In the 1911 census, one in three women who gave their status as ‘occupied’ (i.e. having an occupation) was in service. This ignores all the women who had part-time jobs, took in laundry, went out to char, or who preferred, for reasons of status or social form, to state that they were unoccupied, and that their husbands or fathers could afford to keep them.3 Service was, in short, a huge area, and very few women would live their lives without either being a servant or employing servants – sometimes both in the course of a life. Indeed, the history of service and that of women in the Victorian period through to the Second World War are so intertwined that it is inconceivable to consider one without the other. A study of domestic service is, in many ways, the study of all women at this time.4

 Georgina’s memoir was deeply political. She wrote in response to her son-in-law’s view of the past – through which she had lived – beginning with the words ‘to my son-in-law, who always talks about the bad old days’. By the time she started writing, she had become, like many of those who worked predominantly in large establishments, and were career servants, rather reactionary. There should be no dichotomy between her view of herself as a servant who knew – and valued – her place, and the very real achievements of her life, during which she went from rural poverty to the top of her chosen profession; but for her daughter and son-in-law, the very fact that she’d been in service negated the value of her opinions. Her own words suggest that service, a profession that she’d had little choice but to enter, was nevertheless empowering: ‘I feel I did give my whole life to the work I loved and enjoyed, and not only that but the most interesting people I served & liked who gave me the courage and inspired me to work hard and not to feel that I had no standing in life as a cook, but to feel on a par with other walks in life.’ (The lack of grammar is her own.)

Researching the life of an unknown working-class woman in the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century is not easy. Apart from the fragmentary memoir, which stops in about 1895, the evidence of Georgina’s life and her career is hard to trace. I first came across her when idly browsing a cookery book collection, and came across a copy of Georgina’s Recipes from N0.10, which was published in 1958 with a foreword by Clementine Churchill. Through that, and talking to her granddaughter, Edwina (who, in her late 70s, is Britain’s oldest Ironman competitor, and clearly follows in her grandmother’s footsteps in terms of determination and longevity), I became hooked, and determined to tell the story of a woman whose very averageness at the start of her life was part of her appeal. Georgina’s life was so much like that of so many other women, except that it was not: for she was one of only a handful of female society chefs in a profession dominated at its highest levels by men, and she remained part of the workforce throughout marriage and childrearing. Her life covers a time of enormous change in British food, from Edwardian excess to 1940s rationing, and into the era of frozen TV dinners and the wholefood movement. She cooked through all of it, gaining a reputation as ‘a superb cook, combining the best of French and English skills’.5 She was highly driven, highly motivated, very talented and determined. However, I would not be writing about her had she not had an equally driven, motivated, talented and determined final employer. Churchill continues to be central to the British sense of national identity, a figure of apparently endless fascination. There are books about all sorts of topics and people related to him. But, although you can read about his secretaries, his bodyguards and his nurses, the servants who fetched and carried, and served and cooked remain invisible. This is a start at filling that gap.

This is a book about Georgina Landemare. It’s about her life, her times and some of her employers, including Winston and Clementine Churchill. It’s about workingclass life, and women’s work and expectations, and it’s about domestic service at the highest level. It’s about British food, and French influence, and the impact of war on the way we ate. It’s the story of a woman who lived, loved and cooked her way through much of twentieth- century Britain, and, while her life is made more resonant by her relationship to her last employers, it remains, above all else, Georgina’s story.

What does it take to make it in modern Britain?

Ask a politician, and they’ll tell you it’s hard work. Ask a millionaire, and they’ll tell you it’s talent. Ask a CEO and they’ll tell you it’s dedication. But what if none of those things is enough?

Raised on benefits and having attended some of the lowest-performing schools in the country, barrister Hashi Mohamed knows something about social mobility. In People Like Us, he shares what he has learned: from the stark statistics that reveal the depth of the problem to the failures of imagination, education and confidence that compound it.

Read an interview with Hashi Mohamed at the Guardian

Listen to Hashi discussing social mobility with Grayson Perry and Theresa Lola on BBC Radio 4

Read an extract below

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What Does it Sound Like? Language

Even the closest shall cause each other pain. For there is nothing closer than the tongue and the teeth, and yet one sometimes bites the other unintentionally. Somali word play

In the summer of 2002, when I was eighteen, I was homeless for a year. I had left school, and, since I was no longer in full-time education, I had become eligible to pay council tax: something we didn’t have a hope of affording. As a result, I ended up at Centrepoint in Soho, the hostel for young homeless people. At the time, the system was this: you had a bed for the first nine nights, but you had to use that time to secure your next hostel, which meant spending your early mornings ringing around anywhere that might have a spare bed, trying to persuade them that they should give it to you. Your next hostel would allow you to stay for two weeks, which you had to spend securing the next hostel, which would be for six months, and so on. The stakes were high: if you couldn’t secure somewhere, you’d be faced with the choice of a night on the streets, or returning to the situation that you’d left behind.

Maybe, to you, this doesn’t sound very difficult – it’s only making a few phone calls, after all. But it was immediately clear to me that many of the young people I shared Centrepoint with were struggling. Their stories varied – one person had been thrown out by a parent who believed they were possessed, another was escaping a violent home, someone else was fleeing a forced marriage – but the themes remained the same: poverty, violence, danger and trauma. Phoning the hostels meant finding the numbers, calling round, not being put off, telling a persuasive story about why it should be you who gets the bed, and insisting, calling back, arguing your corner, winning people round. Many of these young people lacked the confidence to make the calls in the first place, or to insist that they should be considered, or they couldn’t explain why they needed the bed in a way that made sense to the busy people on the other end of the phone. Despite the fact that they were so vulnerable, they weren’t getting anywhere.

So, once I had sorted out my own accommodation, I started calling on behalf of other people. I sat down with them, talked with them, worked out what to say about their particular situation, and then hit the phones. It gave me pride and purpose to help others like me. It was the first time I’d ever done something like this, but somehow, it worked: everyone got a bed. And I learned a valuable lesson about the importance of language, the often random advantages that dictate who gets listened to and who gets ignored – and the power of knowing how to use your voice effectively.

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Profile Books and Aitken Alexander are delighted to announce Peter Riley as winner of the inaugural Profile Aitken Alexander Non-Fiction Prize for the best debut trade non-fiction proposal from an academic.

Peter Riley’s winning proposal, Strandings—for a book about beached whales and the remarkable people whose secret lives revolve around them—earns him a £25,000 publishing contract with Profile Books and representation by Aitken Alexander Associates literary agency. 

“I entered this prize because I was interested in speaking to a broader audience than conventional academic publishing usually allows,” says Riley; “being shortlisted for this prize was brilliant enough; winning it has been life-changing.” A literary academic and Melville scholar at The University of Exeter, Riley has been on the trail of the mysterious whale scavengers since an unforgettable encounter in his teens.

 “Strandings wasn’t at all the sort of thing we thought we would find when we launched the prize,” says Ed Lake, Editorial Director at Profile Books. “Peter is a Melville expert, and in Strandings, with its wild cast of characters, oblique political meditations and sense of the absurd, he channels a very Melvillian spirit. But this is a strange and bold take on contemporary nature writing, and it emerges from a lifelong personal obsession as much as it does from Peter’s scholarly interests. The one thing we were clear about was that his story and his writing were just extraordinary.”

Chris Wellbelove said: “Strandings is on the one hand about British eccentricity, but on the other is about ideas that are universal: obsession, our connection with the animal world, and the plight of our oceans and the creatures that inhabit them. We can’t wait to share it with readers and publishers all over the world.”

Lake and Wellbelove, alongside Matthew Reisz, Books Editor at Times Higher Education, historian and professor Margaret MacMillan and mathematician and author Eugenia Cheng, selected Riley’s proposal from more than eighty entries submitted from academics across the UK and internationally, writing on subjects ranging from the uses of graphene to the history of Fire Island. 

Scholar Claire Horn’s Eve, a proposal about the likely social ramifications of artificial human gestation, was highly commended by the judges. 

The 2020 Profile Aitken Alexander Non-Fiction Prize

Owing to Covid-19 restrictions, the deadline for the Profile Aitken Alexander Nonfiction Prize has been extended to June 30, 2020. The prize was set up to encourage popular writing from expert voices. It offers a £25,000 publishing contract to the author of the best trade nonfiction proposal, as determined by a panel of judges.

The competition is open to those with a PhD or an equivalent qualification, graduate-level lecturers in a University or College, and senior researchers at an institute or think-tank. The submission must be for an author’s first trade non-fiction book and must be focused on an area in which the entrant holds a post-graduate qualification. Submissions must be written in English and take the form of a 3,000-4,000 word outline or essay setting out the intended subject, argument and approach for a non-fiction trade book. The closing date for entries is June 30, 2020, and the winner and three runners-up will be selected by a panel of judges.

The inaugural 2019 prize went to Peter Riley’s Strandings, a proposed work of literary nonfiction about whale strandings. “I entered this prize because I was interested in speaking to a broader audience than conventional academic publishing usually allows,” said Riley, a literary academic and Melville scholar at the University of Exeter. “Being shortlisted for this prize was brilliant enough; winning it has been life-changing.”

To enter, please email your proposal in Word format to: [email protected]

Further details here.

Full terms and conditions of the prize

1) Eligibility

1. The competition is only open to those with a PhD or an equivalent qualification, graduate-level lecturers in a University or College, and senior researchers at an institute or think tank.
2. Submissions must be focused on a subject in which the submitter holds a post-graduate qualification.
3. The submission must be for the author’s first trade non-fiction book. Submitters who have been previously published trade non-fiction in their field will not be eligible.
4. The decision of the Prize Judges as to whether a work is eligible shall be final and binding.

2) Submission Format

1. The submission should take the form of a 3,000-4,000 word outline or essay setting out the intended subject, argument and approach for a non-fiction trade book.
2. The authors of the three best submissions as determined by the panel of prize judges will receive guidance from agents at Aitken Alexander, either in person in London or by phone, to produce an expanded book proposal. The best proposal as determined by the judges will receive a £25,000 advance and a publishing agreement with Profile Books, care of Aitken Alexander Associates.

3) Rules of Entry (how to submit a proposal)

1. [email protected] 
2. Proposals must be written in the English language.
3. Proposals must be submitted directly by the author.
4. Proposals may have no more than two authors.
5. Only one proposal may be entered by each author.
6. Proposals must be submitted by June 30, 2020.

4) Conditions of the Prize

1. Profile Books retains the right of first refusal to publish every submission, which persists until the announcement of the winner.
2. Any publication agreement entered into as a result of the prize may only be cancelled in accordance with normal warranties as set out in the contract.
3. Any offers of publication will include all rights including audio, eBook, and translation.

Licensed therapist and mental health writer Dr. Kathleen Smith offers a smart, practical antidote to our anxiety-ridden times. Everything Isn’t Terrible is an informative, and fun guide – featuring a healthy dose of humor – for people who want to become beacons of calmness in our anxious world.

In short chapters containing anecdotal examples alongside engaging, actionable exercises, Everything Isn’t Terrible will give anyone suffering from anxiety all the tools they need to finally be calm.

Buy your copy from Amazon, Waterstones or Hive.

Procrastination and Productivity

Martha’s New Year’s resolution was to start therapy, but she didn’t show up until April. In her defense, she came in to talk about her trouble with deadlines. Martha worked remotely as a pop culture reporter for a popular website. Five years into her career, she no longer felt that she was soaring toward a successful one. It felt more like flailing toward mediocrity.

Martha’s biggest challenge was procrastination. Her job had become uninteresting, and she would delay rewrites on an article or interview. She would wait too long, until she convinced herself that there wasn’t enough time left for an article to be great. This generated anxiety, which further fueled the procrastination. She asked for extensions often, and her once generous editors were growing frustrated.

Martha’s brain was like a car alarm. If she didn’t shut the worry off in time, it would kick up to the next level of frantic wailing. “Are you even a writer if you can’t write?” it would ask. Super helpful.

Why do we procrastinate on tasks that aren’t life-threatening? You would think that after a few five a.m. paper submissions in college, we’d learn that living on the edge isn’t that great. I don’t know about other countries, but the capacity for Americans to be simultaneously great at procrastinating and obsessed with productivity is comical.

It doesn’t help that humans are terrible at estimating how long a task will take us. Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky call this the “planning fallacy.” We assume we won’t have any difficulties, we delay getting started, and this optimism gets us into trouble. Ask someone what’s the latest possible date they’ll complete a task, and the odds are they won’t be finished by that date.

But Martha’s problem wasn’t a matter of optimism. Like most human challenges, it originated in her relationships.

Procrastination Is a Relationship Problem

Unless you’re a doomsday prepper living off the grid, your job is relational. Therefore, procrastination is often a relationship problem. Assuming that a problem or symptom exists independent of a relationship system is to ignore what it means to be human. How you react to your colleagues, your family, and the larger world can tell you a lot about how you end up anxiously stalling on a project. Rather than observing how we function in relationship to others, we end up labeling our productivity problems as personality flaws. This leaves us feeling ashamed and stuck.

Martha certainly saw her procrastination as a character flaw. She had read many time-management books but always failed to apply the ideas in them. She believed that if she could teach herself to get up at five a.m. or abandon her reality show addiction, she would unlock the superhero power of mass production. But the transformation never seemed to happen.

Martha was so busy shaming herself that she failed to see the bigger picture. She needed to take the astronaut’s view, zoom high above herself, and observe that her procrastination was not a solo endeavor. There were other people editing, reading, and responding to her work. Because she worked at home, it was easy to forget that there were other humans in the game.

I encouraged Martha to think about her procrastination as a relationship problem. She started by listing all the people who inhabited her brain when she felt anxious about her work. She worried what her editors thought about giving her extensions, since she couldn’t gauge their reactions through email. She wanted to impress a new girl she was seeing. She didn’t want to disappoint her sweet grandmother, whose house was wallpapered with years of her bylines. If she was being honest, she also wanted to look good in front of Twitter followers she’d never even met.

By focusing on the reactions of others, Martha had invited an entire audience of people to watch her write a first draft. It was like sight-reading a cello piece at Carnegie Hall when you don’t even play the cello. No wonder her brain shut down and refused to work when she had an assignment.

There are so many ways that our relationships influence our level of productivity. Here are just a few:

Anxiety in relationships can lead to:

• worrying about how people will respond to your work

• slacking when someone else will do it for you

• distancing yourself from those who expect you to do well

• pretending that you’re more capable than you are • focusing on getting approval instead of developing ideas

Buy your copy from Amazon, Waterstones or Hive.

Despite a resurgence in popularity, horoscopes are generally considered to be pseudoscience today – but they were once a cutting-edge scientific tool. In this ingenious work of history, data scientist Alexander Boxer examines a treasure trove of esoteric classical sources to expose the deep imaginative framework by which – for millennia – we made sense of our fates. Astrology, he argues, was the ancient world’s most ambitious applied mathematics problem, a grand data-analysis enterprise sustained by some of history’s most brilliant minds, from Ptolemy to al-Kindi to Kepler.

A Scheme of Heaven explores the wonderful subtleties of astrological ideas. Telling the stories of their inventors and most influential exponents, Boxer puts them through their paces using modern data sets – finding that the methods of today’s scientists are often uncomfortably close to those of astrology’s ancient sages.

Buy your copy from Amazon, Waterstones or Hive.

Introduction

Do the stars and planets really have something to tell us about the cycles of history, the secrets of love, the reasons your last job was no longer right for you, and why everyone born in May is so incredibly amazing? Astrology’s unflinching reply is: yes, yes, yes, and definitely yes. That the configurations of the heavens above can influence our lives here on Earth below is, of course, the basic idea of astrology. Modern science has flatly rejected astrology’s claims but this hasn’t hobbled astrology’s charms, certainly not if the continued popularity of online and magazine horoscopes is anything to go by. Let’s leave to one side for a moment all the arguments about whether astrology is wrong, or right, or still wrong even when it’s sometimes right. I’m here to make the case that astrology is fascinating and still tremendously relevant as a challenge to what we think we know and why we think we know it.

For starters, the questions astrology asks— questions about the patterns of the universe and our place within them— are about as deep and as captivating as they come. If there really is a way to tap into the hidden rhythms of the cosmos, wouldn’t you want to know about it? But even more intriguing, at least from where I stand, is how astrology uses mathematics and data to investigate these questions. Over two thousand years ago, astrologers became the first to stumble upon the powerful storytelling possibilities inherent in numerical data, possibilities that become all the more persuasive when presented graphically in a chart or figure. Although it took a while for the rest of the world to catch on, the art of weaving a story out of numbers and figures, often to encourage a specific course of action, is used everywhere today, from financial forecasts to dieting advice to weather models.

And yet numbers still mislead, figures still deceive, and predictions still fail— sometimes spectacularly so— even those that rely on exceptionally sophisticated mathematics. So, are the techniques being used today to parse and package quantitative information any more effective than what was devised by astrologers millennia ago?

In order to make that assessment, it’s first necessary to have a basic understanding of what astrology is and how it works. But that sort of understanding— one that’s at least adequate to resolve some seemingly straightforward technical questions— is surprisingly hard to come by for such a long- lived and influential craft. Being frustrated in my own search for a simple yet competent overview of astrology, I decided I might just as well write one myself. This, curious reader, is the book you now hold in your hands.

Buy your copy from Amazon, Waterstones or Hive.

To commemorate Trump’s impeachment, read a very timely story from the book that could save your sleep this Christmas: Stuart Heritage’s Bedtime Stories for Worried Liberals.

‘The funniest book I’ve read this year’ Will Storr
‘The perfect Christmas present’ The Herald

Get your copy half price at Amazon

TRUMPLESTILTSKIN

Once upon a time there was a miller who had a daughter. A beautiful daughter. People said she was the most beautiful daughter you’ve ever seen. I mean, she was a total knockout; a real ten, that one. If I weren’t the narrator, I’d want to kiss her. I would. I would.

Now, this miller was a real loser. A real loser. It was a shame. He went to visit the king – who is a great friend of mine, does a wonderful job, great guy – and he said, ‘My daughter can spin gold out of straw’. She couldn’t. Total fake news.

The king believed this guy, though. Lyin’ Miller, I called him. So Lyin’ Miller said ‘My daughter can spin gold out of straw,’ and the king – a terrific man in many ways – said, ‘Great, bring her to my palace tomorrow.’ And that was smart of him. Really, it was. Because if she can spin gold out of straw, that’s great. Lots of gold for everyone. But if she can’t, he’s got a pretty girl locked up in his palace forever. And I’m not saying he’d do anything to her. I’m not. If I was the king, who knows, but I’m not. I’m just the narrator. That’s all.

So the next morning, Lyin’ Miller brings his daughter to the king’s palace – beautiful place, very nice – and she gets taken to a room filled with straw. ‘What am I doing here?’ she asks, and the king says, ‘Your fat pig of a father told me you could spin gold out of straw.’

Listen, you should have seen her face, I’m telling you. She was all ‘No, no, no,’ and ‘My dad’s a gross old phony’, but it was too late. The king wanted gold, so he gave her a spinning wheel and said that he’d kill her if she hadn’t spun any gold by the next morning. A good man, the king. Very, very tough. Sometimes you’ve got to be tough, you know? Gotta be tough.

The daughter sat down on the straw and cried. ‘My father is frankly a huge disgrace,’ she whined. ‘I might be just about the hottest thing anyone has ever seen, but I can’t work magic. Oh no, I’m gonna get killed. What a waste of this beautiful body.’

But then this little guy walked in. Strange little guy, very small, weird looking guy. I don’t like to talk this way about people, you know, but you brought it up. I don’t bring it up. I could say I have no comment on how he looked, but that’s not me. Ugly. He was ugly. Grotesque. But you shouldn’t have brought it up. It’s your fault.

This guy said, ‘Why are you crying?’ and the daughter said, ‘I have to spin straw into gold or else I’ll be killed, but I don’t know how to spin straw into gold’. The guy said ‘Why not?’ and the daughter said ‘Because I’m only fifteen years old’. I mentioned that she was only fifteen, right? No? I meant to.

This put the guy in a really terrific bargaining position, because he held all the cards at this point. Very, very smart. He waited until he had all the cards. ‘What will you give me if I spin straw into gold for you?’ he asked.

‘I have nothing to give you,’ she said. ‘I have no possessions in the whole entire world, because my father is a fat loser.’

‘Then give me that ring on your finger’, said the guy. This was very smart, because she had no choice. All the cards. Very smart.

So, the daughter gave the guy her ring, and the guy sat down at the spinning wheel, and he started spinning gold. The girl was blown away. She’d never seen anything like it. Nobody had. Unbelievable.

Now, a stupid guy would have spun all the straw into gold right there and then, but not this guy. He was a real high-quality guy, a great negotiator. He filled bobbins with gold, said goodbye and then walked off with the ring.

The next day, the king – very nice man, very smart, pretty good golfer, not as good as me – came in and saw the gold. ‘Great, good, OK’, he said, ‘But where’s the rest?’

‘What do you mean, the rest?’ said the daughter. She was beautiful – very sexy, very hot, fifteen-yearsold – but maybe not the smartest. The king said ‘Make me more gold, or I’ll chop you up and feed you to my pigs.’ And sometimes that’s how you’ve got to be, OK? It’s nothing personal. It’s just business.

So again the daughter started crying and crying. It was embarrassing, quite frankly. But then the guy showed up again. Very smart. Not as smart as me, but very smart. ‘What will you give me if I turn the rest into gold?’ he said.

‘I don’t have anything,’ she replied. ‘You already took my ring; which, by the way, is a very bad ring, not good quality, it sucks, my fat, dumb, loser dad gave it to me, it’s a shame.’

‘Then I’ll marry you,’ said the guy.

The daughter didn’t want to get married to the guy, because he was gross. So ugly. The worst. I hate bringing it up, but you asked me about him. She could do so much better than him – she could stay in all night and kiss a handsome narrator on the lips like a good girl maybe – but she didn’t have a choice. He held all the cards. Very smart. So what could she do? She agreed to marry him.

The guy sat at the spinning wheel and span gold all through the night. It was incredible. By morning the room was totally covered in gold. The place looked spectacular, like how a poor person would imagine a rich person’s house. Very, very classy.

The king saw all the gold, and he was very happy. Very happy. ‘Look at all this gold!’ he said. ‘I could make something real classy with this, like a toilet paper holder shaped like a swan.’ And he let her go, which was a bad move if you ask me because there’s always more straw, you know? It isn’t what I would have done. The king was a nice guy. Maybe too nice. Who knows? I don’t know.

So the daughter goes home to her fat, lazy father, and she says ‘Hey, Lyin’ Miller! How could you do this to me?’ and she shoots him, and he dies, and maybe it’s a good thing. It’s not pretty, you know, but now he’s out of the picture so everyone’s happy.

Happy ever after, right? Wrong, because then the weird-looking guy came back again. ‘Remember you said we’d get married?’ he said to the daughter, and the daughter started crying again, and that was a shame because crying made her much less sexy. The guy looked at her, face all ugly and scrunched up, and he thinks ‘Wow, this girl’s only a six when she cries,’ so he tries to back out of the deal by asking her an impossible question. Sensible guy. Maybe he could marry someone younger and less emotional instead. Who knows?

‘Listen,’ he says. ‘I know I said I’d marry you – and I still could marry you, because we had an agreement, remember? There’s nothing in the law to stop me from marrying you – but if you can guess my name, I’ll let you go free. You can have three guesses.’

‘Is it Rumpelstiltskin?’ asked the daughter.

‘No, it’s Paul Manafort’, said the guy, who frankly always had a problem keeping his mouth shut if you ask me, not that it proves anything. No collusion. No collusion. Total no collusion witch-hunt hoax.

‘Oh, so you’re Paul Manafort. So now I know your name and I don’t have to marry you,’ said the daughter, who could actually be pretty smart for a woman sometimes, as she skipped away.

‘Not so fast,’ said Paul Manafort, who was having a very, very tough time and I felt very badly for him. ‘Didn’t you see who the king was? Didn’t you recognise him?’

The daughter thought about the king. She thought about his kind eyes, his gentle smile, his huge bulging muscles, and the penny finally dropped. ‘Oh wow,’ she said. ‘That was Vladimir Putin.’

And it was. It was Vladimir Putin, who I have a great relationship with, maybe the best relationship that anyone’s ever had. He’s a nice guy. I like him. America first.

The daughter was confused. ‘So what does that mean?’ she asked.

So Paul Manafort – who, really, was a marginal figure in my life, I barely even met the guy – explained that the whole gold/straw deal was part of a widespread scheme to launder money obtained illegally from the Russians, and he’d flipped to the feds, and now she was implicated, and he was going to take her down with him. And that was smart. Sometimes you gotta throw people under the bus, am I right?

And so Paul Manafort went to jail for multiple felonies, and so did the daughter. But I didn’t. Why would I? I’m just the narrator here. You can’t pin me to any of this. No collusion. Total witch-hunt. MAGA.

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It’s here! Our Christmas gift guide, which has on it a list of the brightest and best and most beautiful books you could possibly wish for.

Here are our picks – from the Sunday Times bestselling The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, to a funny and fascinating cheesemonger’s history, to the second installment of hilarious diaries from Shaun Bythell’s Wigtown Bookshop, Confessions of a Bookseller. Enjoy!

Go to the Profile Christmas Book Gift Guide >>

Two of our brilliant books are on the André Simon Food & Drink Book Awards shortlist! Congratulations to Ned Palmer, shortlisted for A Cheesemonger’s History of the British Isles, and John Wright, shortlisted for The Forager’s Calendar.

The nominated books celebrate the best of contemporary food and drink writing.

In A Cheesemonger’s History of the British Isles, expert cheesemonger travels the country and through time to explore how cheese features in our colourful history. In The Forager’s Calendar, John Wright advises the reader on what – and what not – to forage, and when. Both are beautifully designed hardbacks, and have been loved by readers since they were published.

Find out more about the award

Buy your copy of A Cheesemonger’s History of the British Isles

Buy your copy of The Forager’s Calendar