Learn all about the different kinds of meetings - brainstorms, catch-ups, face-to-face, virtual, unattended - and how to avoid them completely . . . Elia created her own retro pictures, but Hazeley and Morris had the entire Ladybird archive to riffle through. The once cutting-edge illustrations had become a gift for pastiche. In The Ladybird Book of the Meeting – which has sold 165,000 copies – five middle-aged white men sit in earnest discussion around a table. The caption reads: “These important people are discussing work-place diversity.” The fun of the series lies in the relationship of mid-20th-century iconography aimed at children to 21st-century comedy for adults. As Brexit reaches its final stretch, find a way to laugh through the pain and or celebrate the end with Ladybird's hilarious and essential guide, The Story of Brexit. And when Donald is told it is time to stop being the President, who knows what exciting things will happen next?' THE PERFECT GIFT for anyone who not only loves watching their favourite TV series over and over, but also enjoys reading online forums about their favourite TV series over and over.

Furthermore, it doesn’t just look at these topics from a standard business point of view. It also includes these dynamics for remote workers participating in meetings by conference calls, meetings for self-employed people and the effect on profit and loss when people are unable to attend a meeting for any reason. It even includes this analysis for other organisations with a captivating case study about The Worshipful Company of Victorian Time Travellers. Whilst some of the jokes here are not dissimilar to the ones you may find on Facebook memes in groups about work, there are some unexpected gems here. The jokes about the cupboard and the cement were amusing in their surprise, being slightly out of place amongst some of the more standard jokes, but there are other lines that caught me by surprise. And you sit there trying not to sleep, thinking about all the things you could have been doing with your time. Indeed, there is so much information captured in so few words, it’s entirely possible this review has a higher word count than the book. Arguably, this makes the book one of the most fact-rich business texts available today, a powerhouse of business knowledge that punches well above its weight, which is exactly 127 grams.

The large clear script, the careful choice of words, the frequent repetition and the thoughtful matching of text with pictures all enable grown-ups to think they have taught themselves to cope. Featuring original Ladybird artwork alongside brilliantly funny, brand new text. The essential guide for those looking to reinvent themselves starting next week, next month or next year . . . And by the time they get home, Jonathan's father might have finished being racist and fallen asleep in his liquorice allsorts.'

At a minimum, this book should be on the desk of every chief executive or senior manager of every business in the world. It’s possibly one of the greatest books ever written about business, delving into the complex dynamics of meetings in the workplace, including individual and group psychology, the influence on productivity and how meetings effect the bottom line. To Prof Lawrence Zeegen, dean of design at Ravensbourne College, London, and author of Ladybird by Design, published to celebrate the imprint’s centenary in 2015, the problems of the latest batch of serious Ladybird books start with the quality of the illustrations. “I think it shows how well designed and illustrated the original series were,” he says. “I understand where they are coming from, but the books do sit rather uncomfortably alongside their existing series, which utilised the original illustrations. They’ve made a reasonable stab at replicating the work, but while not terrible, it’s not nearly as good.” This is short book that investigates the need for and execution of work-placed meetings in an easy to understand manner. The text is kept simple and lively whilst the messages it delivers hit home hard with laser-focused precision. As with all the books in this series we are given simple explanations about the topic with pictures from childhood Ladybird books and a simple but highly amusing explanation.For what it's worth, the books in this series are published in the U.K. as "Ladybirds for Grown-Ups". The "Fireside Grown-Up Guides" are now starting to be published in the U.S. by Simon & Schuster, and are fairly faithful adaptations. Either way you can find them, as Ladybirds or as Fireside Grown-Up Guides, these books are a hoot.

The series pokes fun at issues that we as adults take so seriously and it says things that we all think but which we are much too polite or proper to say out loud. Although read in about ten minutes this was thereby granted more attention than many gifts presented to my husband over the years. But he is keener on the Penguin Experts. “I think they’re an entirely different beast. They look like great access points to complex subjects from some brilliant writers.” Where these books differ from the old Ladybird series for younger readers is that the tone of the text is sardonic and, for the most part, sarcastic. The authors clearly have some experience of meetings and didn’t much enjoy it, and that comes across wonderfully here. Indeed, it’s the particular meetings that I have direct experience of that made me laugh the most, particularly the one about the self-employed person.

Kelly has had to come to terms with the idea that though they spent half their lives together, Gareth was not really paying attention for most of it.' Over the years, Gareth has bought his sister Kelly every possible birthday present he can find related to the film he remembers her enjoying in 1989. In July 2014, together with her brother, Ezra, she produced a book called We Go to the Gallery, in which Peter and Jane were introduced by mummy to some of the masterpieces of 20th-century art. THE PERFECT GIFT for anyone who spends Christmas Day counting the minutes until the Boxing Day sales start. They write for Charlie Brooker's BAFTA award-winning Wipe shows, and co-wrote Cunk on Shakespeare, Cunk on Christmas and Cunk on Britain. They have also written for the award-winning Murder in Successville, the award-winning Miranda, the award-winning Mitchell & Webb, the award-winning Armstrong & Miller and a long list of shows and people both award-winning and so-far-award-avoiding.

A small random road test would seem to bear out his optimism. Polly, an artist and former primary teacher, had given Hazeley and Morris’s How It Works: The Wife to her daughter for Christmas, while her partner received The Ladybird Book of the Meeting from a friend. She recalls using Ladybird books in her London classroom. “We were still buying On Volcanos in the 1990s: it was about finding books for kids who wanted to learn – often boys – which could act as a stepping stone to other books.” The Ladybird imprint began life in 1940 with Bunnikin’s Picnic Party, the first of a new series dreamed up by Loughborough-based printer turned publisher Wills & Hepworth, which had set itself up in 1915 as an outlet for “pure and healthy literature” for children. Between 1940 and 1980, it published 646 titles, in 63 series, on topics that ranged from British history to fairytales and how to make a transistor radio. They present the podcast Rule of Three ( Guardian Guide Best 50 Podcasts 2018 - is that an award?) and divide their time between their office, where they keep their awards, and an award-winning pub.T]he original satire on the Ladybird children’s education series was an art project written and illustrated by Miriam and Ezra Elia – We Go to the Gallery – and published under their own imprint, Dung Beetle Books. When the book first appeared in 2014, Penguin erupted in fury and demanded that the entire print run be withdrawn and destroyed. When this didn’t work, they decided it was a case of “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”, and published their own comic series under a different creative team. Unlike these subsequent titles, such as The Dad, We Go to the Gallery was genuinely funny – a brilliant spoof on both the Ladybird style of education and the contemporary art world. Anyone disappointed by the official Ladybird parodies and with a glancing interest in contemporary art is advised to get hold of the Elia version, which will have them laughing out loud. I believe the authors are currently preparing a sequel." Except that the women in Sex And The City never stay in for two weeks watching old episodes of Sex And The City. From the people who gave you classics such as The Ladybird Book of The Hangover and The Ladybird Book of The Mid-Life Crisis, they bring you this collection of what could have been. Imagine a world where there aren't just the thirty-two Ladybird Books for Grown-Ups you've seen in your local bookshop or downstairs toilet but hundreds and hundreds more . . . But it was the Key Words Reading Scheme, which brought siblings Peter and Jane to primary schools in the 1960s, that opened the floodgates to the new retro spoofs – and it wasn’t the idea of Ladybird’s own publisher, Penguin Random House, but of an artist provocateur, Miriam Elia.