From former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins comes his first compilation of new and selected poems in twelve years. Aimless Love combines more than fifty new poems with selections from four previous books – Nine Horses, The Trouble with Poetry, Ballistics, and Horoscopes for the Dead. Collins’s unmistakable voice, which brings together plain speech with imaginative surprise, is clearly heard on every page, reminding us how he has managed to enrich the tapestry of contemporary poetry and greatly expand its audience. His work is featured in the New Yorker, Poetry, and the Atlantic. His poems appeal to readers and live audiences far and wide and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. By turns playful, ironic, and serious, Collins’s poetry captures the nuances of everyday life while leading the reader into zones of inspired wonder. In the poet’s own words, he hopes that his poems ‘begin in Kansas and end in Oz’. Touching on the themes of love, loss, joy, and poetry itself, these poems showcase the best work of this ‘poet of plenitude, irony, and Augustan grace’ (New Yorker).

Alternatively criticized and vilified, embraced and idolized, Courtney Love has been polarizing opinion from the moment she stormed her way onto the music scene over twenty years ago. Yet everything we know about her has come from the media or her music; she has never before shared the whole story of her life.

From the reimagining of the Feast of Stephen in Wenceslas to The Christmas Truce, Carol Ann Duffy’s moving depiction of a Christmas football match in the trenches, the Poet Laureate’s Christmas poems are always brim full of her characteristic wit, warmth and imagination. Christmas 2013 brings us Bethlehem, Carol Ann Duffy’s own take on the much-loved Christmas story.

Anthony Trollope wrote three thousand words every morning before heading off to his job at the Post Office. Toulouse-Lautrec did his best work at night, sometimes even setting up his easel in brothels, and George Gershwin composed at the piano in pyjamas and a bathrobe. Freud worked sixteen hours a day, but Gertrude Stein could never write for more than thirty minutes, and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in gin-fuelled bursts – he believed alcohol was essential to his creative process.

When she fell pregnant as a teenager in Ireland in 1952, Philomena Lee was sent to the convent at Roscrea in Co. Tipperary to be looked after as a fallen woman. She cared for her baby for three years until the Church took him from her and sold him, like countless others, to America for adoption. Coerced into signing a document promising never to attempt to see her child again, she nonetheless spent the next fifty years secretly searching for him, unaware that he was searching for her from across the Atlantic.

Rachael Boast’s first collection, Sidereal, was one of the most highly regarded debuts of recent years, winning the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize. Her second, Pilgrim's Flower, richly confirms and dramatically extends that talent – but where Sidereal’s gaze was often firmly fixed on the heavens, Boast’s focus here has shifted earthward. The book sings life’s intoxicants – love, nature, literature, friendship, and other forms and methods of transcendence – and sees Boast’s pitch-perfect lyrical metaphysic challenge itself at every turn. Pilgrim's Flower gives an almost Rilkean attention to the spaces between things – the slippage between what we think we know, and what is actually there – and in doing so brings the language of rite, observance and rune to the details of our daily lives.

Patsy Kensit is one of our most-loved actresses, a child star who grew up in the public eye and has remained there ever since. Her life has been a roller-coaster mix of adventure, drama and heartache, and it is only now that she finally feels ready to share her journey so far.

Once upon a time there were professional film makers and professional critics. They didn’t always agree, but there was a mutual respect. It is very different now.

All companies, whether small or global, need to innovate in order to survive. But innovation often falters at the idea stage, because companies are focused on efficient performance and are unwilling or unable to devote resources to new ideas.