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Thom Brooks, professor of law and government, Durham University, is reading Robert Hutton¡¯s Would They Lie to You? How to Spin Friends and Manipulate People (Elliott & Thompson, 2014). ¡°This is the ultimate codebreaker guide to the doublespeak and ¡®uncommunication¡¯ used far too often in politics. A must-read for any aspiring politician ¨C or anyone wanting to understand what they¡¯re saying!¡±

Carina Buckley, learning skills tutor, Southampton Solent University, is reading Susanna Hislop¡¯s Stories in the Stars: An Atlas of Constellations (Cornerstone, 2014), illustrated by Hannah Waldron. ¡°In this delightful book, both bedtime reading and reference, Hislop attaches a story to each of the 88 constellations, from histories of astronomers and navigators, to tales of mythological personalities and more personal responses, such as a fiction or a memory. Accompanied by Waldron¡¯s bold graphics, this account presents the sky as a map of storymaking that connects us, however we name the stars.¡±

Stephen Halliday, panel tutor in history, Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge, is reading Jeremy Lewis¡¯ Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English Family (Vintage, 2011). ¡°Twelve remarkable cousins from Berkhamsted; six of them the ¡®Rich Greenes¡¯ and six the ¡®Intellectual Greenes¡¯; Graham, the famous author; Hugh, the director-general of the BBC; Raymond, the distinguished endocrinologist and mountaineer; Ben, the hapless internee; Barbara, the intrepid traveller; Felix, the organisation man and mystic; Herbert, the black sheep; and five others. The references, alas, are incomprehensible to this experienced reader.¡±

Geraldine Perriam, honorary research associate in the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, is reading James Rebanks¡¯ The Shepherd¡¯s Life: A Tale of the Lake District (Allen Lane, 2015). ¡°This book is about ¡®a family and a farm¡¯ and ¡®people who get forgotten in the modern world¡¯. There are pithy observations on education, too. Some soft-palmed urban academic will probably colonise the book, but text and author should be allowed to speak for themselves, which they do here, beautifully. Note: the author also tweets regularly about the shepherd¡¯s life at .¡±

Martin Raul Racca, doctoral candidate in history, Instituto Superior de Profesorado N¡ã 62, Casilda, Argentina, is reading Carlo Ginzburg¡¯s The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). ¡°A brilliant book about a 16th-century Italian miller who was sentenced to death because he said life evolved the way cheese rots. Ginzburg¡¯s approach ¨C big pictures inferred from small clues ¨C was revolutionary at the time, and this 1976 book would go on to spawn an entire new genre of historiography, the ¡®microhistory¡¯.¡±