Marcella Hazan Classic Italian Cookery (or something to that effect!). Love the pasta, the bread, the vegatables especially. We're not frequent meat eaters but those recipes are good too. Oh, and the puddings aren't bad either!

Anything by Maddhur Jaffrey for Indian food.

Anything by Claudia Roden for Mediterranean/Middle Eastern/Jewish food and for history and glimpses of Middle Eastern life.

I've just discovered Lindsey Bareham's A Celebration of Soup, which is an exhaustive and fascinating book about soup, stock and all the things that go with them.

Kerri - I have about the same attitude as you to Jamie Oliver, I'm not a big fan of the Delia Smith recipes, but deliaonline.com is good for basics and classics and also has many Delia recipes.

I need to find a good slow cooker book - I'm going to see if Judith Finlayson is published in the UK.

I'm going to stop now - I could probably go on for several pages!!

Zillah