Nicolette Jones

Go all in for the National Year of Reading 2026 with this inspiring, accessible and powerful collection of words that matter. Featuring a stunning cover and inside illustrations by best-selling illustrator Axel Scheffler and expertly selected extracts with accessible, thoughtful commentary by Nicolette Jones, children's book expert for The Sunday Times. The perfect gift for every occasion. Celebrate the joy of reading with this inspiring collection of poetry, prose, letters, song lyrics, speeches, quotations and more! From Shakespeare to Stephen Hawking; Greta Thunberg to Galileo; Malala to Martin Luther King, Jr.; and Lin-Manuel Miranda to Alfred Lord Tennyson - these are all in turn powerful, funny, moving, wise, and thought-provoking. Previously published in hardback as Writes of Passage

An inspiring, accessible and powerful collection of words that matter. Published in a gorgeous hardback edition, with a stunning neon and foil-stamped cover, ribbon marker, and beautifully designed insides, Writes of Passage is the perfect gift for every occasion - birthdays, Christmas, school leaving celebrations, confirmations, bar and bat mitzvahs, and more. An inspiring collection of over 100 pieces of writing - poems, prose, letters, speeches, song lyrics, quotations, and more - from Shakespeare to Stephen Hawking; Greta Thunberg to Galileo; Malala to Martin Luther King; and Lin-Manuel Miranda to Lord Tennyson - which are in turn powerful, funny, moving, wise, and thought-provoking, and expertly selected and with accessible, thoughtful commentary by Nicolette Jones, children's book critic for The Sunday Times.

In 1965, British artist and university lecturer John Jones left the UK with his wife and daughters to live in the US for a year and interview some 100 artists. There the family lived in Greenwich Village, and spent three months on a road trip west to visit artists beyond the immediate reach of New York. Some of the artists (Yoko Ono and Claes Oldenberg for instance) became John Jones's personal friends. Jones's daughter Nicolette was young, but her memories of New York and their trans-American adventure are vivid. Published here for the first time, this book presents a fascinating selection of Jones's edited conversations with American artists practising in 1965-6. A foreword by Nicolette Jones contextualises the setting in which these interviews took place, and a further introduction amalgamated from Jones's lecutres in which he drew on these conversations, illustrates and explores the range of contrasting ideas behind what became known as Pop Art. Thanks to his personal interaction with the artists, and his knowledge of their work, Jones became the foremost expert in the art of this period in the UK. Amidst a unique family story, this is art presented not through the filter of art critics, but from the mouths of the practitioners. Jones's interviews explore a specific place and time: the USA in the 1960s, and are crucial reading for those wishing to understand the decade, the influence of American art and the British tradition on each other, and also anyone interested in the famous figures of the time, and the thinking that gave rise to this extraordinarily fertile creative moment.

Raymond Briggs has changed the face of children’s picture books, with his innovations of both form and subject. Stylistically versatile, he has illustrated some sixty books, twenty of them with his own text, and first became a household name in the late 1970s and early 1980s with a handful of books – Father Christmas, Fungus the Bogeyman, The Snowman, When the Wind Blows – that were entertaining and subversive and appealed to both children and adults. The refrains of his work are class, family, love and loss. Nevertheless, his default mode of expression is humour. Briggs is always funny, and the balance between this and melancholy is his defining characteristic, though his style ranges from the romantic to the grotesque, from the fanciful to the direct. Encompassing sixty years of Raymond Briggs’s work, from political picturebooks to children’s classics, this study explores his themes of class, family and loss, and how he demonstrates both emotional power and great technical skill.

The story of a Victorian philanthropist who reformed shipping laws, saved thousands of sailors' lives and became a national hero'A story of ambition, treachery, libel, political intrigue and cold-blooded murder on a mass scale' Herald'Nicolette Jones charts Plimsoll's course with skill, insight and elegance' Sunday Telegraph'Splendid and meticulously researched' GuardianIn the second half of the nineteenth century, an astonishing campaign stirred a nation to save the lives of the hundreds of British sailors who were drowning unnecessarily every year. Overladen and ill-repaired ships set sail, their doomed crews sacrificed while mercenary shipowners profited from the insurance. Samuel Plimsoll blew the whistle on these scandalous practices, devoting his life to a campaign for maritime reform. Plimsoll caught the public imagination: under his banner working men and women stood side by side with enlightened aristocrats and industrialists, their clamour almost toppling a prime minister.