Bragg was a choirboy at the Anglican church of St Mary’s in Wigton, so his childhood was steeped in church music and the glorious language of the King James Bible. He says the church gave him a vast unintended education, as well as a lot of intended guilt. He may be a man of lost faith now, but a residue remains and anyway, he thinks the ruins of belief ‘like the ruins of castles, are often more interesting then the castles themselves’. The Lion House in Istanbul was once the church of St John. But in the 16th century, its congregation was made up of wildcats, wolves, porcupines, leopards, bears, boars, elephants, and lions. Tended by Moorish keepers, this menagerie was kept for the pleasure of Suleyman the Magnificent, the tenth Sultan of the Ottomans, whose empire stretched from Baghdad to the walls of Vienna. Here is a story of more ordinary female existence in the middle ages to balance against that of the ferocious Birka warrior or the eccentric Margery Kempe. While Ramirez’s clunky prose doesn’t always serve her particularly well, there is no disguising her excitement as she sets these revelatory scenes before us.

About the Author: Melvyn Bragg is a writer and broadcaster whose first novel, For Want of a Nail, was published in 1965. His novels since include The Maid of Buttermere, The Soldier’s Return, A Son of War, Credo and Now is the Time, which won the Parliamentary Book Award for fiction in 2016. His books have also been awarded the Time/Life Silver Pen Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the WHSmith Literary Award, and have been longlisted three times for the Booker Prize (including the Lost Man Booker Prize). He has also written several works of non-fiction, including The Adventure of English and The Book of Books about the King James Bible. He lives in London and Cumbria. The best thing he's ever written . . . What a world he captures here. You can almost smell it' Rachel Cooke, Observer

In this captivating memoir, Melvyn Bragg recalls growing up in the Cumbrian market town of Wigton, from his early childhood during the war to the moment he had to decide between staying on or spreading his wings. The alarm was raised by the town’s chemist, Fred Davies. His daughter was married to a rival solicitor, Oswald Martin. When Martin suddenly fell ill with violent vomiting and diarrhoea after being invited for tea and scones at Armstrong’s house in October 1921, the chemist became suspicious. Fred had sold Armstrong arsenic to use as weedkiller just before his wife died in February. She had suffered from similar symptoms. Wonderfully rich, endearing and unusual . . . a balanced, honest picture’ Richard Benson, Mail on Sunday

The whole community took pride and pleasure in the author’s achievements and he gives us some insight into the challenge of “thinking” himself into the role of elite scholar. We see how the old boy network was very much a part of acceptance into Oxford. A greater part of the marks were given to the interview process rather than the exam results, thereby ensuring that intake was very much skewed in favour of public school pupils who would have had much broader life experience as the sons and daughters of wealthy parents. His mother, Ethel, was illegitimate. Fostered, “she must have felt branded” in such a small town, and yet “she made illegitimacy the springboard of her character” and lived into her 90s: “she did not smoke, rarely drank and never swore”. His mother left school at 14 and worked in a clothing factory. His father, Stanley, had been a gifted child and had won a school scholarship when he was 12, but could not take it up because his parents could not afford to lose him. His life was hard and yet Bragg admires his hard-won tolerance and approach to life: “Never be a coward. Respect those who are less fortunate. You are better than no one. But no one is better than you.” The “severe stress” we are causing to the ecosystems that emerged after the last mass extinction 66 million years ago may lead to “a biological and social catastrophe unlike any other”. And yet, Halliday argues, as “natural ecosystem engineers”, we may still be able to change our behaviour and collaborate globally to avert disaster: “the spire may have fallen, but the cathedral yet stands, and we must choose whether to douse the flames”. But this is more than just an exercise in intellectual curiosity. As Halliday shows, “Earth’s dynamism throughout geological history provides a natural laboratory”. The ecological principles at work in each period remain the same across millennia: “although the cast is different, the play is the same”. From this emerge important lessons that we need to learn at a time when our pollution of the planet is causing the sixth extinction in the long history of our world. Indeed, the fossil record holds a warning for us all, revealing “how fast dominance can become obsolescence and loss”. If you're coming to Coles by car, why not take advantage of the 2 hours free parking at Sainsbury's Pioneer Square - just follow the signs for Pioneer Square as you drive into Bicester and park in the multi-storey car park above the supermarket. Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you. You don't need to shop in Sainsbury's to get the free parking! Where to Find Us

Then, over the last 10 years, murmurs of doubt started to surface. The skeleton’s pelvis was suspiciously wide, the bones of his forearm remarkably slender. In 2017, DNA was extracted from a tooth and the truth was finally out: not a Y chromosome in sight. The Birka warrior was female. At a stroke ideas about Norse women, and about women in medieval culture generally, were turned upside down. Out went the wimples and the prayer books, the mute looks and downcast eyes, and in came something altogether fiercer and more interesting. Indeed, no sooner had the news of Bj 581’s misgendering flashed around the world than its effects started to register in popular culture. Suddenly Norse wonder-women were everywhere, from film franchises to lunch boxes.