John Farndon

Libby Purves

What happens if I drop an ant'? 'What books are bad for you'? 'What percentage of the world's water is contained in a cow'? The Oxbridge undergraduate interviews are infamous for their unique ways of assessing candidates, and from these peculiar enquiries, professors can tell just how smart you really are. John Farndon has collected together 75 of the most intriguing questions taken from actual admission interviews and gives full answers to each, taking the reader through the fascinatinghistories, philosophies, sciences and arts that underlie each problem. This is a book for everyone who likes to think they're clever, or who thinks they'd like to be clever. And cleverness is not just knowing stuff, it's how laterally, deeply and interestingly you can bend your brain. Guesstimating the population of Croydon, for example, opens a chain of thought from which you can predict the strength of a nuclear bomb ... and that's just the start of it.

The Oxbridge Questions

Do You Think You're Clever?

Alice McDonald has escaped all the obvious traps that lie in wait for women. She loves her job but enjoys her clever, spirited children too; her husband (Dan the New Man) does his share at home, and their London house is always full of friends. At her thirty-seventh birthday party, Alice reflects that their life has been a pretty successful production so far. But love can be treacherous, and children are never quite what they seem. Two months later, far from home and alone on a desperate quest through the bleak lanes of Norfolk, Alice wonders how it fell apart so quickly. Were things ever as good as they seemed? Had the McDonalds really been happy, or was it no more than a stage illusion?

A Long Walk in Wintertime

A wonderful collection of famously perplexing questions and dazzlingly brilliant answers from the infamously challenging Oxford and Cambridge University interviews.

The Oxford and Cambridge Questions

Henry is a radio DJ: young hip and single, but fretting about his little son. Philip is an ex-MP, ruined by scandal and disowned by his party; Diana, his long-suffering wife, is struggling to find a life of her own. Marianne is three stone overweight after glumly replacing her husband with chocolate eclairs and gin. Lizzie is battling with illness and trying not to think about it. Into their lives, by accident, comes Eva: a naive and happy Polish backpacker working her way round Europe. As the values of their comfortable world clash with those of emerging Eastern Europe, the five English characters find comedy, tragedy and romance unfolding with bewildering speed.

Continental Drift

A fresh new look brings this parenting classic up-to-date for a new generation of mothers and mothers-to-be. Taking an irreverent and humorous look at the trials and tribulations of motherhood, Radio 4’s Libby Purves has created an invaluable survival guide so that even the most unpromising madonna can cope with the baby years.

How Not to Be a Perfect Mother

A perfect child: * Dresses neatly and practises the violin before breakfast * Comes top of the class and is captain of everything * Is unfailingly obedient and sweet-tempered * Is a perfect credit to its perfect mother A real child: * Prefers shoelaces undone and mismatched socks * Shouts 'Bum!' at Granny * Turns breakfast and bedtime into a battleground * Is the normal offspring of imperfect parents With affectionate lack of illusion and a refreshing honesty about her own shortcomings, Libby Purves examines the pleasures and pitfalls of raising children from three to eight years old. Playgroup, starting school, rude words, pets - all these topics are tackled with frank good humour and down-to-earth advice. Best of all is her reassuring reminder that there is no such thing as a perfect child.

How Not to Raise a Perfect Child

A funny, startling but ultimately hopeful novel of twenty-first century city lives. On the high ground above the great city, Roy and Helen live in brittle affluence inside a weary marriage. Of their four children, three have long vanished into the sprawling, sluttish metropolis beneath: Marcus the dotcom entrepreneur, Shona the shocking Britart princess, and Danny – the one nobody will talk about. But the last child Zack itches to know more about his lost brother; and gets his chance when the smooth surfaces of family life are abruptly blown apart. Roy is sacked on his fiftieth birthday, stages an unconventional protest in the office doorway and rapidly finds himself a homeless exile in the city's darkest streets. It is Zack's chance to escape down the hill in turn, whiile his mother Helen makes a bizarre decision of her own.

Passing Go

Kit Milcourt - impatient, quirky, idealistic and brilliant - has been a climber, diver in exotic waters and affluent young city banker. Now, because of his beloved Anna, he is a teacher. Glumly mediocre Sandmarsh High School, reeling under assaults from Inspectors and its own unpromising pupils, is hard put to contain his maverick ideas. Year Seven, on the other hand, love them. Only the soothing presence of Anna keeps the peace. But Anna can't guard her erratic husband on the school trip: instead a far darker, more malevolent staffroom presence crosses Europe and discovers what Kit has secretly planned for the children amid the dim alleys of winter Venice. But children are unpredictable too, and things move rapidly beyond both teachers' control. Between farce and tragedy the resulting events swiftly change Kit's and Anna's live in unthinkable ways, strain a great love to the limit and open a dark chasm into the past.

More Lives than One

What makes a wife and mother, pillar of the community and partner in a cosy tea-shop (The Bun in the Oven) suddenly run away to sea, alone? Joanna Gurney hardly knows herself. But as she moves along the rocky, dangerous coast of Britain, evading police and press, Joanna meets other cast-off and washed-up individuals in 1990s Britain, and finds that she can also make a voyage into her own past. And, in the end, find her solution.

Casting Off

Sometimes it takes a fresh pair of eyes to see yourselves clearly . . . Henry is a young, hip, radio DJ; Philip is an ex-MP ruined by scandal and disowned by his party; Diana, his long-suffering wife; Marianne's replaced her husband with chocolate eclairs and gin; and Lizzie is battling with illness. When Eva, a naí¿ve and happy Polish backpacker comes into their lives, the values of their comfortable world clash with those of Eastern Europe. And the five English characters find comedy, tragedy and romance unfolding with bewildering speed.

The Andersons are a military family with honours and traditions stretching back two hundred years. When the second Iraq war breaks out, it is only natural that their newest generations should be represented in the ranks of British officers: at 24, Lieutenant Susie Anderson delays her wedding to handsome fellow-officer Callum and joins her regiment on the hot sands of Kuwait. Brother Francis, meanwhile, continues his cabaret career as Madam Fanny Fantoni, drag chanteuse and net-stockinged vamp, with a stinging line in repartee and the most remarkable falsetto top C in Clapham. As the neighbours agree, it must be terribly difficult for their poor parents, especially the General. Real difficulties come, though, when Callum comes home injured, altered and bitter, and Susie and her family feel as though their lives are shattered. The solution to this tangle comes from the most unlikely source of all. Set against a background of desert war, seedy clubs, a hippie sailing-ship and quiet English village life, Libby Purves' latest novel is a commentary on changing social roles, the nature of courage and the futility of prejudice.

Acting Up

A powerful novel from Radio 4 presenter and Times columnist Libby Purves, inspired by the loss of her own son. 'Family love is one of the most powerful elemental forces on earth, and at that moment, our last moment as a unit of three, we rode a great curling triumphant wave of it, all together. Death may have thought that he won, but I think otherwise.' There is no right way to deal with the loss of a beloved son. Marion and Tom are doing their dignified best, but their own relationship is taking a battering. So when a fierce, strange woman turns up and demands to see the dead boy, Marion is almost glad of the distraction. Against Tom's wishes, she determines to find out more about her son's life away from home. The quest takes her out of her comfortable, conventional world to a shabby office in East London, and a series of shocks. Tom, furious, finds his own solution, and amid scandal, sorrow and exaltation the quiet Middle-Englanders discover that there is more than one kind of family.

Shadow Child

Even her closest friend agreed that Shark Grayson wasn't fit to keep her baby. A heroin addict, living in a sordid London squat, she was already close to death when her American lover took charge of the situation by force, and carried off the baby Alexander to give him a loving home in the Mid-West and an affluent future. But now Alex is twenty-seven, orphaned again and afflicted by a sense of lost roots and a romantic vision of England. A business trip provides the chance to go and trace his unknown relatives. He finds friendship; encounters some startlingly predatory girls; and confronts mystery in the eccentric alternative health centre run by the austere Julia. He discovers that while some British people are very hard indeed to get along with, some turn out to be, after all, more closely akin to him than he could ever have imagined.

Mother Country

Sheila Harrison always looks forward to the descent of the summer visitors onto 'Seafret', her tall brick house right on the front at Blythney, in East Anglia. She loves the way her spare bedrooms are full, from June to September, with successive waves of children - schoolfriends of her own three and the waifs and strays sent by the Country Hosts' Association. But Sheila is not prepared for the upheaval caused by one young girl, Anansi, who arrives from a background that Sheila can only guess at. Urban, streetwise, knowing beyond her years, Anansi refuses to be patronised by Sheila's well-meaning attempts to make her feel at home. She looks at Sheila, her family and friends, with eyes unclouded by familiarity - and drops a bombshell. Even when the dust has settled, summers will never be the same again.

Regatta

A perceptive novel from our favourite chronicler of the dilemmas of modern family life. Catherine and Caroline, Toby and Mark were globetrotting siblings: British 'diplo-brats', whose childhood homes lay in Italy or Israel, France or Washington DC – wherever their father was posted at the time. But all that was years ago. Now Catherine is approaching middle-age, married to a life of cheeseparing selflessness looking after young offenders on a chilly organic farm; Mark is a prim supermarket executive, Caroline a wealthy Kensington wife, and Toby – well, Toby is a problem. The joker in the pack. He always was. Amid growing tensions, marriage-fatigue and unspoken resentments, the apparent tragedy of Toby's disappearance jolts his sisters and brother into making angry, anxious journeys: from California to Flanders, back in time and into their own hearts.

Home Leave

Sarah Penn and Maggie Reave are sisters, as different as a tabby and a tiger. Sarah has married kind, reliable Leo and settled contentedly into small-town life. Maggie, light-hearted and footloose, has spent fifteen years drifting round the world with a backpack and a cheerful willingness to do any menial job as long as it has no future. But now Maggie has come home, pregnant, and undecided whether or not to keep the baby. And as she dicusses this with her sister, lets slip that she's had an abortion before, and that the father was Maggie's husband. This throws everything into confusion, but Christmas brings reconciliation and a new baby.

A Free Woman

A Long Walk in the Wintertime

The family is nature's masterpiece' - George Santayana A compendium of practical advice and reflections on modern family life in the age of computer gaming, ever younger drug and drink problems, educational upheaval and concerns about the way children's freedom, health and personal development are threatened by considerations of safety. Libby also considers the maintenance of marriage in an age of rising divorce and stepfamilies, a balanced approach to sexual threats to children, and the dangers and opportunities for family life caused by dual careers, teleworking, and other trends in the modern workplace. Each subject is treated with wit and brevity to make the book a delight to read as well as providing a fund of useful advice.

A Family Survival Book

Nature's Masterpiece

A story about coming of age in 1970s Oxford. Politics and the Pill. Pot and poetry. Glamrock and groupies. The way we were. Love isn't always the answer. Have you ever fallen for the wrong man? Sally does. Handsome, clever Max Bellinger brings a whiff of sophistication into the shabby canalside house they share in that final year at Oxford. And Sally, so steeped in the Romantics that she confuses literature with real life, is content to be his adoring handmaiden. That blind devotion shapes Sally's life for many years. She writes lyrics for Max's wayward rock star brother and stays involved with his family. But the relationship is based on secrets and lies, and when Sally finally wakes up to reality, those deceptions come home to roost . . . Libby Purves perfectly capture what it means to be a woman in the last third of the twentieth century.

Libby Purves

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