blog at BBC Shop

Welcome to our BBC Shop Blog! Check back here on a regular basis for the latest news on new BBC releases. We will also feature regular guest bloggers, authors and BBC talent. All your BBC favourites at BBC Shop.

Rupert Majendie
Marketing Manager - BBC Shop.com

Children in Need cupcake recipes from BBC Good Food

Try these cupcake recipes by Raymond Blanc, Gordon Ramsay, James Martin and other celebrity chefs and sell them to raise money for Children in Need!. - Find the recipe at bbcgoodfood.com or support the cause and visit our Children In Need Store

Haley Johnson
Online Marketing Executive - BBC Shop.com

Upsy Daisy in Dream Dozen Toys for 2008

The Toy Retailers Association today included Hasbro's Upsy Daisy and her Chase and Play Bed in the Dream Dozen Toys for 2008. The Dream Dozen Toys 2008 list is the only official prediction of best-sellers for the festive season. - Buy Upsy here or visit our Toy Store

Haley Johnson
Online Marketing Executive - BBC Shop.com

Radio Times Dalek cover voted the best UK magazine cover of all time!!

The Periodical Publishers Association (PPA) has announced that ‘Vote Dalek', the iconic Radio Times front cover from May 2005, has been voted the best UK magazine cover of all time. More than 10,000 people across the country voted in the poll for ‘The Great Cover Debate' which was organised by the PPA in support of Magazine Week, which starts today. - why not subscribe to Radio Times & other magazines at our Magazine Store!

www.bbcshop.com/magazines

Rupert Majendie
Marketing Manager - BBCShop.com

Top Gear License Plate Sells For Ł10,000!!!

Top Gear Store at BBC Shop

In an auction of personalised number plates held by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA), one of the stars was the plate 'THE 571G', which sold for 26 times its Ł400 reserve. If you are a fan of Top Gear and can't quite afford this price - why not visit our Top Gear Store for a great range of DVDs, Merchandise & Books!

www.bbcshop.com/topgear

Rupert Majendie
Marketing Manager - BBCShop.com

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy voted the nation’s favourite audio book

The Primary Phase
Release date: 02/04/2001. Our price £11.79

Great news!

The winner was chosen from a selection of 40 titles which appeared in a special Guardian supplement on 28th June, the public were then invited to vote for their favourite title on a dedicated website:

www.40bestaudiobooks.co.uk

The top five titles reflect the wide range of audio books available covering everything from modern fiction to Shakespeare with another BBC Audiobooks title I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue: Anniversary Special being voted into 5th place.

Matt Master
freelance motoring correspondent - Top Gear magazine

Following up on Crap Cars and My Dad Had One of Those, Top Gear celebrates the midlife crisis with the definitive collection of the flashest, fastest, most impractical cars to be found in the driveways of otherwise perfectly sensible men.

Midlife Crisis Cars
Published by BBC Books on 8th May 2008, £9.99

The kids have flown the nest, taking with them any last vestige of parental responsibility or self-respect. Time to trade-in that practical estate car for something lean, fast and powerful – a car that allows you to refute your mortality. A car that gets a choke-hold on the very essence of your fleeting youth.

Part celebration, part condemnation, but all of it uncomfortable, irrefutable truth, Top Gear’s Midlife Crisis Cars identifies over 50 classics of the genre across four desperate decades. Scoring each with a ‘crisis rating’, it charts the successes and failures of middle-aged man and his machines, from the timeless class of Aston Martin to the South Beach sleaze of an Eighties Ferrari, from certain death in old Porsches to spiritual enlightenment in an innocuous Japanese super-saloon.

A showcase of the most ridiculous attempts to hide the bald spots and expanding midriffs, Top Gear’s Midlife Crisis Cars honours the age-old tradition of flushing your children’s inheritance on something you’re probably too arthritic to get into in the first place.

Matt Master is a freelance motoring correspondent. He writes for Top Gear magazine as a features writer and road tester but lives down a muddy lane only passable by tractor. This is his first book.

Laurence Rees
Historical writer and documentary filmmaker

Laurence Rees, award winning historical writer and documentary filmmaker, chooses his six favourite books on the Second World War. His own latest book, a collection of his encounters with people tested to the extreme in WW2, Their Darkest Hour, has just been published in paperback by Ebury Press. His new book World War Two: Behind Closed Doors will be published by BBC Books this autumn.

BEST BOOKS… LAURENCE REES

Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning (Penguin £9.99)
At one level a cool analysis of the actions of a Nazi Reserve Police Battalion during the Holocaust; at another a devastating insight into the behaviour of human beings in crisis, and the power of the situation to shape us all.

Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte (New York Review Book Classics £8.99)
Part novel, part WW2 history book; Malaparte’s triumph in this evocative work was to create a semi-autobiographical, descriptive novel that still offers the insights of a great work of history. Notable in particular for his bizarre dinner with Hans Frank, Nazi ruler of central Poland.

Stalingrad by Antony Beevor (Penguin £16.99)
A masterpiece of historical narrative and a book that will still be read in a hundred years. Beevor manages to make military history accessible to readers who aren’t interested in tanks or guns – and all because of his immense capacity for emotional empathy.

War Without Mercy by John Dower (Random House)
One of the most insightful books about Japanese mentality during the war, and an examination of the racism of many of the Allied soldiers who fought against them. Dower’s book reveals that there were far fewer ‘good guys’ in the War in the Pacific than we might like to imagine.

Commandant of Auschwitz by Rudolf Hoess (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £9.99)
Written in prison after the war, shortly before he was executed, these are the personal memoirs of the man who ran the largest murder factory in the history of the world. An astonishing glimpse into the mentality of one of the most cold hearted of all Nazi perpetrators.

Hitler (vol 1 Hubris, vol 2 Nemesis) by Ian Kershaw (Penguin £14.99 each)
Kershaw is a scholar of genius, and this two volume biography of Adolf Hitler is the product of nearly thirty years academic research. Worth reading even for those not particularly interested in this period in order to be humbled by the clarity of Kershaw’s thinking.