When the eminent novelist and biographer Peter Ackroyd finished writing London: The Biography, he almost immediately had a heart attack, such was the effort of his 800-page work about the "human body" that is this most fascinating of cities. And not just any human body either, but "envisaged in the form of a young man with his arms outstretched in a gesture of liberation ... it embodies the energy and exaltation of a city continually beating in great waves of progress and of confidence". Probably there is no one better placed than Ackroyd—the author of mammoth lives of Dickens and Blake, and novels such as Hawksmoor and Dan Leno and the Lime House Golem which set singular characters against the backdrop of a city constantly shifting in time—to write such a rich, sinewy account of "Infinite London". Ackroyd's London is no mere chronology. Its chapters take on such varied themes as drinking, sex, childhood, poverty, crime and punishment, sewage, food, pestilence and fire, immigration, maps, theatre, war. We learn that gin was "the demon of London for half a century", and that "it has been estimated that in the 1740s and 1750s there were 17,000 'gin-houses'". Fleet Street was an area known for its "violent delights" where "a fourteen-year-old boy, only eighteen inches high, was to be seen in 1702 at a grocer's shop called the Eagle and Child by Shoe Lane". By the mid 19th-century "London had become known as the greatest city on earth". By 1939 "one in five of the British population had become a Londoner".

Though the variousness of London's chapters mean that it can be dipped into at random, Ackroyd is employing a skilful and continuous theme throughout, which constantly links past and present—the similarities of children's games in Lambeth in 1910 and 1999; the obsession with time——"in twenty-first century London time rushes forward and is everywhere apparent", while in 18th-century London the church clock of Newgate "regulated the times of hanging". Above all, he insists that the "dark secret life" of the metropolis is as relevant today as it was in perhaps its most appropriate period, Victorian London. Again and again Ackroyd returns to the image of London as a living organism, hence his use of the word "biography" in the title. At once awed by and intimate with this "ubiquitous" city, he stresses that "it can be located nowhere in particular ... its circumference is everywhere". —Catherine Taylor

When the eminent novelist and biographer Peter Ackroyd finished writing London: The Biography, he almost immediately had a heart attack, such was the effort of his 800-page work about the "human body" that is this most fascinating of cities. And not just any human body either, but "envisaged in the form of a young man with his arms outstretched in a gesture of liberation... it embodies the energy and exaltation of a city continually beating in great waves of progress and of confidence."

Probably there is no one better placed than Ackroyd—the author of mammoth lives of Dickens and Blake, and novels such as Hawksmoor and Dan Leno and the Lime House Golem which set singular characters against the backdrop of a city constantly shifting in time—to write such a rich, sinewy account of "Infinite London".

Ackroyd's London is no mere chronology. Its chapters take on such varied themes as drinking, sex, childhood, poverty, crime and punishment, sewage, food, pestilence and fire, immigration, maps, theatre and war. We learn that gin was "the demon of London for half a century", and that "it has been estimated that in the 1740s and 1750s there were 17,000 'gin-houses'." Fleet Street was an area known for its "violent delights" where "a 14-year-old boy, only 18 inches high, was to be seen in 1702 at a grocer's shop called the Eagle and Child by Shoe Lane." By the mid 19th century "London had become known as the greatest city on earth." By 1939 "one in five of the British population had become a Londoner."

Though London's chapters vary meaning that it can be dipped into at random, Ackroyd is employing a skilful and continuous theme throughout, which constantly links past and present—the similarities of children's games in Lambeth in 1910 and 1999; the obsession with time——"in 21st-century London time rushes forward and is everywhere apparent", while in 18th-century London the church clock of Newgate "regulated the times of hanging." Above all, he insists that the "dark secret life" of the metropolis is as relevant today as it was in perhaps its most appropriate period, Victorian London.

Again and again Ackroyd returns to the image of London as a living organism, hence his use of the word "biography" in the title. At once awed by and intimate with this "ubiquitous" city, he stresses that "it can be located nowhere in particular... its circumference is everywhere." —Catherine Taylor

A miniature cloth bound edition with coloured end papers and jacket, this is one of a trilogy of adventures starring Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent. Travelling throughout the galaxy in his bathrobe, Arthur meets Vogons and Marvin the paranoid robot, aided by the knowledge of the Hitch Hiker's Guide.

Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time...Edited and with an introduction by Christopher Cerf, The Salmon of Doubt & Other Writings comprises 50 pages of the late Douglas Adams' unfinished novel, The Salmon of Doubt, along with writings from 3,000 unpublished files stored on his computer harddrive. This collection is the unique last word from one of the world's most successful and best loved science fiction writers and represents an important, fascinating and characteristically hilarious legacy. Other potential inclusions are transcripts of the radio series Hitchhiker's Guide to the Future and Adams' essays, articles, and lectures.

Cartoonist Scott Adams gives us still more corporate belly laughs with a point in Dogbert's Management Secrets Revealed, the 10th book based on his wildly popular Dilbert comic strip. Taken this time directly from the word processor of world-class consultant Dogbert, it focuses on critical management responsibilities like keeping up with fads, implementing pointless reorganizations and demanding status reports. "Leadership isn't something you're born with," it declares. "It's something you learn by reading Dogbert books."

This book is freedom for those who feel imprisoned in a cubicle. Called "the cartoon hero of the workplace" by the San Francisco Examiner, Dilbert is revered by technology and computer workers, engineers, white-collar types, scientists and everyone who works these days (in cubicles or not). This collection captures it all, from clueless management decrees to near revolts among the cubicly confined.

Scott Adams' latest work is not a collection of Dilbert cartoons (though recycled strips are liberally sprinkled throughout); it's a dialogue between the man and his fans disguised as a tongue-in-cheek guide to surviving the corporate life. There are chapters on "Office Pranks," "Surviving Meetings," and "Managing Your Co-Workers," with enough weird stories and practical jokes to make any middle manager nervous, especially as many of the tricks and tips come from e- mails sent to Adams by his fans (one tip: never let anyone else use your computer). If these messages are any indication, the creative tide has turned, and now the corporate world is following Dilbert's lead. In the office blocks of America, life is imitating art imitating life, creating a pleasantly postmodern working environment. The final chapter of The Joy of Work, "Handling Criticism," includes a response to Norman Solomon's The Trouble with Dilbert, which accuses Adams of selling out and supporting the corporate hierarchy that he claims to satirise. Adams' response is thorough and convincing, with just enough nastiness (jokes about Solomon's hair, for example) to demonstrate that though Dilbert may not have a mouth, he certainly has teeth. —Simon Leake, Amazon.com

12 short stories by Cogswell, Fyfe, Clarke, Porges, Miller Jr., Knight, kornbluth, Chandler, Tenn, Brunner, Blish and van Vogt.

With first-chapter allusions to martial arts, "flow", "mind like water", and other concepts borrowed from the East (and usually mangled), you'd almost think this self-helper from David Allen should have been called Zen and the Art of Schedule Maintenance.

Not quite. Yes, Getting Things Done offers a complete system for downloading all those free-floating gotta-dos clogging your brain into a sophisticated framework of files and action lists—all purportedly to free your mind to focus on whatever you're working on. However, it still operates from the decidedly Western notion that if we could just get really, really organised, we could turn ourselves into 24/7 productivity machines. (To wit, Allen, whom the New Economy bible Fast Company has dubbed "the personal productivity guru", suggests that instead of meditating on crouching tigers and hidden dragons while you wait for a plane, you should unsheathe that high-tech sabre known as the mobile phone and attack that list of calls you need to return.)

As whole-life-organising systems go, Allen's is pretty good, even fun and therapeutic. It starts with the exhortation to take every unaccounted-for scrap of paper in your workstation that you can't junk. The next step is to write down every unaccounted-for gotta-do cramming your head onto its own scrap of paper. Finally, throw the whole stew into a giant "in-basket".

That's where the processing and prioritising begin; in Allen's system, it get a little convoluted at times, rife as it is with fancy terms, subterms, and sub-subterms for even the simplest concepts. Thank goodness the spine of his system is captured on a straightforward, one-page flowchart that you can pin over your desk and repeatedly consult without having to refer back to the book. That alone is worth the purchase price. Also of value is Allen's ingenious Two-Minute Rule: if there's anything you absolutely must do that you can do right now in two minutes or less, then do it now, thus freeing up your time and mind tenfold over the long term. It's common sense advice so obvious that most of us completely overlook it, much to our detriment. Allen excels at dispensing such wisdom in this useful, if somewhat belaboured, self-improver aimed at everyone from CEOs to football mums (who, we all know, are more organised than most CEOs to start with). —Timothy Murphy

Michael Allin's Zarafa is a delightful piece of popular cultural history, which draws on the current fascination with exotic animals and their even more exotic owners, seen most recently in Lawrence Norfolk's novel The Pope's Rhinoceros.

Zarafa recounts the history of a Masai giraffe captured in the Sudan in 1826 and shipped to France for presentation to the French king, Charles X. The giraffe was initially intended as a diplomatic gift offered to Charles by Muhammad Ali, the despotic Viceroy of Egypt, in an attempt to curry favour with the French as Muhammad set about his invasion of Greece. But in the midst of this potentially unremarkable event, Allin uncovers a weird and wonderful story of the tangled, momentous events which surrounded the giraffe's extraordinary journey: Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and the beginnings of Egyptology; the giraffe's dramatic journey along the route of the North African slave trade; quarantine off Marseilles on the island of If, the former residence of the Count of Monte Cristo; and the giraffe's enchanting encounter with the scientific community of post-Revolutionary France. These remarkable events culminated in the giraffe's triumphant entry into Paris in 1827 in front of crowds of thousands following a walk of 550 miles from Marseilles to Paris, led by none other than Etienne Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, the founding professor of the National Museum of Natural History.

Allin's stories are indeed remarkable, though he often seems bewitched by the richness of his own material. At times, the book seems as though it cannot make up its mind as to whether it is a travel narrative, an account of Zarafa, or the 19th century's fascination with exotic animals. This is partly due to a loss of pace in crucial moments of the book; Allin's account is so breathless by the time the giraffe reaches Paris that the final sections of the book seem rather anticlimactic. Nevertheless, this is a great story with a remarkable cast of characters—both human and animal. —Jerry Brotton

One of the great mysteries is what happened to the dinosaurs, and it has taken great detective work to give us an answer. In T. Rex and the Crater of Doom, some brilliant, not to mention determined, scientists roam the world and seek out the clues. What they conclude is that the earth sustained a colossal impact from a meteor (or perhaps a comet) 65 million years ago. The resulting cataclysm destroyed half the life on the planet.

Walter Alvarez, a geologist at the University of California at Berkeley, and one of the four scientists who present this theory on the mystery, tells the story in a clear narrative that contains a wealth of scientific material. The book does require an investment of attention, but the presentation is quite readable and the story itself is fascinating.

SF anthology, w/ contributions from Blish, Aldiss, Dick, Asimov, van Vogt & others. Black cloth boards w/ yellow lettering to spine.

UK edition. A Technic League novel, with van Rijn.