John Lewis-Stempel reveals what motivated British officers, facing an average life expectancy of six weeks once they reached the frontline. He shows the life they led in the trenches, how they kept up the spirits of their men, & how they tried to behave with honour in a world where their codes of conduct were being shot to pieces.

The last untold story of the First World War: the fortunes and fates of 170,000 British soldiers captured by the enemy.
On capture, British officers and men were routinely told by the Germans 'For you the war is over'. Nothing could be further from the truth. British Prisoners of War merely exchanged one barbed-wire battleground for another.
In the camps the war was eternal. There was the war against the German military, fought with everything from taunting humour to outright sabotage, with a literal spanner put in the works of the factories and salt mines prisoners were forced...

What really goes on in the long grass? 'Meadowland' give an unique and intimate account of an English meadow's life from January to December, together with its biography. In exquisite prose, John Lewis-Stempel records the passage of the seasons from cowslips in spring to the hay-cutting of summer and grazing in autumn, and includes the biographies of the animals that inhabit the grass and the soil beneath: the badger clan, the fox family, the rabbit warren, the skylark brood, the curlew pair, among others. Their births, lives, and deaths are stories that thread through the book from first...

Nothing from a shop and nothing raised from agriculture. Could it even be done? This book presents the author's account of twelve months eating only food shot, caught or foraged from the fields, hedges, and brooks of his forty-acre farm.

Traditional ploughland is disappearing. The corncrake is all but extinct in England. And the hare is running for its life. This book tells the story of the wild animals and plants that live in and under our ploughland, from microbes to the patrolling kestrel above the corn, from the linnet to seven-spot ladybirds that eat aphids that eat the crop.

The natural history of the Western Front during the First World War by the award-winning author of Meadowland.

But owls - with the sapient flatness of their faces, their big, round eyes, their paternal expressions - are also reassuringly familiar. We see them as wise, like Athena's owl, and loyal, like Harry Potter's Hedwig. In The Secret Life of the Owl, John Lewis-Stempel explores the legends and history of the owl.

Lyrical and informative, steeped in poetry and folklore, The Wood inhabits the mind and touches the soul. For four years John Lewis-Stempel managed Cockshutt wood, a particular wood - three and half acres of mixed woodland in south west Herefordshire - that stands as exemplar for all the small woods of England.

it considers the life-cycle of the oak, the flora and fauna that depend on the oak, the oak as medicine, food and drink, where Britain's mightiest oaks can be found, and it tells of oak stories from folklore, myth and legend.

THE PERFECT GIFT FOR NATURE LOVERS'To see a hare sit still as stone, to watch a hare boxing on a frosty March morning, to witness a hare bolt . They are arrogant, as in Aesop's The Hare and the Tortoise, and absurd, as in Lewis Carroll's Mad March Hare.