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Limited Edition and Weekend

Wilkie Collins by Peter Ackroyd

2:54pm Tuesday 24th April 2012

Wilkie Collins by Peter Ackroyd This is a good, clear, short guide to the life and work of Wilkie Collins (1824-89), Bohemian, friend of Dickens and creator of the modern detective novel. Born into a family of artists (his brother Charles was the painter of Convent Thoughts), he soon decided he did not want a nine-to-five job. His early novels were sensational, rather than remarkable, but in 1859 he produced the brilliant Woman in White, which has mesmerised readers ever since. I’m not sure that any thriller writer before Ruth Rendell is as good. He wrote three other outstanding novels, No Name, Armadale and The Moonstone, which is about the theft of a sacred Indian diamond and is unusual for its time because it suggests that Westerners ought not to plunder Third World countries. Indeed, he disagreed with most ‘Victorian values’. He wasn’t religious. His heroines are not good and passive like Dickens heroines but intelligent, strong-minded women, often tormented and living on the margins of respectability.

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Local author Roger Smith

2:55pm Tuesday 24th April 2012

Oxford motorsport writer Roger Smith, who has attended countless Formula 1 races across five continents, has distilled his knowledge into his latest book. Formula 1: All the Races (Haynes, £30) details all 858 World Championship races since the beginning of Formula 1 in 1950.

Felling the Ancient Oaks by John Martin Robinson

8:20am Thursday 12th April 2012

FELLING THE ANCIENT OAKS John Martin Robinson (Aurum Press, £30)

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Robert Lyman’s Operation Suicide

8:20am Thursday 12th April 2012

The cockleshell raid on Bordeaux is one of the finest and Robert Lyman’s Operation Suicide (Quercus, £18.99) gives us the blood, guts and glory of an event that at the time Churchill predicted would shorten the war by six months.

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Rapid-fire tales for computer age

8:10am Thursday 12th April 2012

The Phoenix is Oxford publisher David Fickling’s exciting venture into the world of comics. Acclaimed by Jacqueline Wilson and Michael Rosen, the adventure strips burst with action and humour that will appeal to reluctant readers and those who have succumbed to the easy allure of fast and furious computer games.

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Prue Leith at Chippy festival

8:50am Thursday 5th April 2012

Cook, writer and businesswoman Prue Leith, left, has managed to squeeze in writing her autobiography, Relish, between myriad other commitments and finding time for her two grown-up children and two grandchildren.

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Local author Ali Shaw

8:50am Thursday 5th April 2012

Ali Shaw worked at Blackwell’s bookshop and at the Bodleian Library before the publication of his first novel The Girl with Glass Feet, which won the Desmond Elliot Prize and was shortlisted for the Costa First Book Award. His second novel, The Man Who Rained (Atlantic, £14.99), is another fable of impossible love — the story of a girl who falls in love with an outcast with a thunderstorm inside him.