the best, most elegant, and most sparkling of such books on my shelf at the moment is Richard Godwin's The Spirits: A Guide to Modern Cocktailing. It's one thing to mix drinks, but another to know their joy by heart, and the author serves up truths like the veritable philosopher of the art form. Not many books, and certainly not the Bible, can offer to save your marriage, but The Spirits might do that and a little more.

Simple to navigate and fun to read, it's the only book I reach for on a Friday evening. The weekend starts here.

I truly love this book. No one writes about drinks like Richard Godwin - I enjoy his prose as much as anything in the glass.

Richard is a charming and fantastically engaging guide, and this marvellous book captures all that great and glamorous about drinking well-made drinks.

The Spirits is debonair, indispensable and easy enough to use after a few.

In this humorous, amateur guide to cocktailing, London journalist Richard Godwin offers a wealth of modern and classic recipes

This is the ultimate in cocktail books

The Spirits is much more than mere drinks recipes: it is thoughtful, well-researched, witty, well-written and even inspirational

Richard Godwin knows how to take the nonsense out and put the pleasure back into cocktail-making. Intelligent, humorous, crammed full of recipes and knowledge- my new ‘little black book’ guide to cocktailing at home

Informative recipes blended with whimsy and anecdote are given a dash of fun, and finished with a twist of brilliantly wry humour

A pleasing account of the art of the cocktail...Life enhancing

If you’re going to buy one cocktail book, you can’t go far wrong with this one

Richard Godwin is such a smart, funny and intoxicating drinks writer. And The Spirits - accessible, authoritative and crisply written - is the perfect companion for cocktail-curious drinkers looking to seriously up their game.

'The Spirits is the best all-rounder... this stylish recipe book covers a lot of ground with hilarious anecdotes, essential recipes and easy to follow methods'

A fantastic read. After I started it, I read it straight through. For more than spaceflight geeks, this is the story of an astonishing adventure that, despite the outward confidence of NASA, could have and perhaps should have gone horribly wrong.

A work of great importance … Highly readable and impossible to put down.

A riveting account of the origins, development, and first flight of the Space Shuttle.

Into the Black isn’t just spectacularly researched, it’s told like a thriller, unfolding the edge-of-death tale of the Space Shuttle Columbia’s maiden voyage in riveting fashion. Rowland White performs a rare feat here, stitching together comprehensive research—countless interviews, declassified files, flight documents—into a tale of courage and daring as streamlined and elegant as the spacecraft herself. Buckle in and hold on tight—this thing's got rocket propulsion.

White's research is thorough, his writing style is superb, and he has a gripping and fresh story to tell. This is a genuine 'must-have' book for anyone fascinated by the sharp end of space flight.

With Vulcan 607, Rowland White demonstrated his mastery of gripping aviation history. Now he ventures beyond the atmosphere, not only taking you inside the Space Shuttle Columbia on its challenging maiden flight, but also into the secret hallways of America’s military space establishment, as he uncovers the heretofore untold relationship between NASA and the world of space reconnaissance. Into the Black is an impressive and unique achievement.

I’ve been privileged to read this fizzer of a book. I grew up in the world of experimental test flying which spawned the first astronauts, some of whom actually I served with, and they popped out at me from almost every page of this book. An astonishing amount of research has gone into this splendid work. I found it totally absorbing.

A tour de force … blends hardcore science and history with colourful characters of the Tom Wolfe Right Stuff mould and a taut countdown to produce a genuine, real-life, edge-of-the-seat thriller … a masterpiece of journalistic investigation and a compelling piece of story-telling that reminds us that - when it comes to the decades-old space programme - there are still secrets waiting to be told.

White’s work is authoritative and reeks of authenticity, but it also rattles along at breakneck speed. Non-fiction is rarely written like this - Into the Black is infectiously page-turning and impossible to put down.

With this superb book, Rowland White has given us not only the true account of an epic aerospace achievement, but in vivid prose he brings to life the human drama behind the Space Shuttle.

Into the Black is an extraordinary, carefully researched, tale of the evolution of America’s space program … Anyone who has ever dreamed of being an astronaut will find themselves feeling they are indeed in the orbiter Columbia with Bob Crippen and John Young on that first flight.