Search results for ""eland publishing ltd""

In "Jackdaw Cake" Norman Lewis recounts the first half of his adventurous life with dry, infectious, laconic wit, observing the transformation of a stammering schoolboy into a worldly wise multilingual intelligence agent on the point of becoming a formidable travel writer.

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Martha was the youngest of sixteen, handpicked reporters who filed accurate, confidential reports on the human stories behind the statistics of the Depression directly to Roosevelt's White House. From these pages, we understand the real cost of sudden destitution on a vast scale. We taste the dust in the mouth, smell the disease and feel the hopelessness and the despair. And here, too, we can hear the earliest cadences of a writer who went on to become, arguably, the greatest female war reporter of the 20th century.

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In "The Missionaries", Norman Lewis brings together a lifetime's experience of travelling in tribal lands in a searing condemnation of the lethal impact of North American fundamentalist Christian missionaries on aboriginal life throughout the world.

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This is the story of a street in London's docklands and of the family who lived on it. The street was built in the 1880s, and the Wheelwright family (originally dockers) lived there until its demolition in the 1960s, when it was replaced with tower blocks. As a social document, the book rings with truth, but it is much more than that: its compelling narrative brings the reader right into the life of the Wheelwright family and their neighbours.

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In 1973, the Afghans still had a King who ruled from a palace in Kabul with his own resident court of musicians when Veronica set up home in Herat. This Afghan city sat close to the Persian frontier and was fully cognisant of its glorious history as the capital of a once vast Central Asian Empire. Veronica was not a casual traveler but a young musician married to a scholar. She was determined to make use of her time in Afghanistan and break out of the charmed circle of the expatriate academic and make real friendships with local women. The tentative story, the growth in these very different friendships, takes the reader into a rare, deep, and privileged insight into the hidden world of Afghan female society. This is more than enough to make this book remarkable, but it has an afterlife of its own. For a Communist coup, then the Russian invasion, a long guerrilla war of Resistance is followed by Civil War and the rise of the Taliban. Veronica was separated from her friends: feared the worst, sought to assist but was also aware that contact from a westerner could be lethal to them. Then a fragile peace allowed her to meet them again and pick up their stories. It is a most exceptional work, which reads like a novel. ‘I was fascinated by this story of ordinary life before the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. The three women are remarkable and unforgettable, and the story of how the author gained their friendship is like a novel.’ – Doris Lessing‘Three Women of Herat is a sensitive, knowledgeable and very moving account of an annihilated civilisation.’ –The Sunday Times‘Her understanding of 'purdah' is certainly the most illuminating by any Western writer for a long time. It is in describing the rituals of the day-to-day life of these women that the author excels, all are minutely depicted with a ravishing eye for detail.’ – Ahmed Rashid

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Nigel Barley travels to the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia to live among the Torajan people, known for their spectacular buildings and elaborate ancestor cults. At last he is following his own advice to students, to do their anthropological fieldwork `somewhere where the inhabitants are beautiful, friendly, where you would like the food and there are nice flowers. With his customary wit and delight in the telling detail, he takes the reader deep into this complex but adaptable society. The mutual warmth of his friendships allows Barley to reverse the habitual patterns of anthropology. He becomes host to four Torajan carvers in London, invited to build a traditional rice barn at the Museum of Mankind. The observer becomes the observed, and it is Barley s turn to explain the absurd complexities of an English city to his bemused but tolerant guests in a magnificent, self critical finale. Not a Hazardous Sport provides a magnificent end to a trilogy of anthropological journeys that began with The Innocent Anthropologist and A Plague of Caterpillars (both published by Eland). A postscript, penned thirty years after these adventures had been concluded, confirms the rich arc of this storyline of role reversals.

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In little more than a century, Fiji islanders have made the transition from cannibalism to Christianity, from colony to flourishing self-government, without losing their own culture. As Ronald Wright observes, societies that do not eat people are fascinated by those that did, and often used this fact as an excuse to conquer, kill and enslave. Touring cities bustling with Indian merchants, quiet Fijian villages and taking part in communal ceremonies, he attributes the remarkable independence of Fiji to the fact that the indigenous social structure remains intact and eighty-three per cent of the land remains in local hands. Wright tells their story with wit and evident pleasure.

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This is the story of a village in East Anglia, astride its common stream, a saga of continuity and change which stretches back across a landscape of two thousand years. It took Rowland Parker thirteen years of detective work to piece this jigsaw together, combing his way through records of archaeological excavations and manor court rolls, and collecting stories at the pub alongside his scholarly inspection of old wills and land tax returns. The intense focus he brought to his work was amplified by his desire to tell the story of the common man, his feuds and fun, his farms, fights, fornications and families.

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The Pacific Ocean calls to mind a world of fabulous kingdoms and noble savages, guilt free sex and gin-clear lagoons, and a perfect idleness fed by lush fruits and fish-rich seas. Ever since Captain Cook first went to Tahiti in 1769 to observe the transit of Venus across the sun, this dream of the Pacific has not lost its force. But Julian Evans's journey through the island archipelagos of the Great Ocean was also informed by a quest into our more modern myths - such as Peacekeeper missiles and nuclear bombs being tested by the US Army. With humour and vivid imagery, honesty and a wickedly sardonic wit, Evans uncovers the reality of these two Pacific dreams: a brave new ocean where the islanders have money and booze, military coups and cold-war politics, atomic explosions and rising sea levels, but where, in the remotest atolls, beyond all our modernity and rationality, the old dream of islands continues to assert itself.

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Presents a portrait of the Greece the author came to know through a lifetime of exploration. This work is a fusion of experience, a gift of insight from one philhellene to all those who have come to love Greece.

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During the war, Gerald Hanley spent several years in the remote and scorching deserts of Somalia. The rigours of living in such heat, and the difficulties of attempting to control blood-feuding nomads, led to the suicide of seven fellow-officers. Despite these problems, Gerald Hanley writes with great affection for the local clans, an affection that is untainted by sentimentality. Of all the races of Africa, there cannot be one better to live among than the most difficult, the proudest, the bravest, the vainest, the most merciless, the friendliest: the Somalis.

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A selection of Norman Lewis's work from Eland founder, John Hatt

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The novel's ostensible story is secondary to the description of relationships within a small Southern-Italian community. Vailland makes us understand how everyone, monarchist lord of the manor, the amorous Donna Lucrezia, the wealthy racketeer, and the landless day-labourer, are all affected by the ancient complexities of an hierarchical society.

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Doreen Ingrams and her husband were the first Europeans ever to live in the Hadhramaut, an extraordinary, isolated region of southern Arabia. Married to an Arabic-speaking British official, she arrived by boat, and during their ten-year residency travelled throughout the region by camel and donkey. Doreen kept a diary in which she detailed their adventures and described her unequalled access to the domestic quarters, to the women and children, the food, the scents, secrets, jewels and privileges of this extraordinarily rich traditional society. "A Time in Arabia" is a precious document - part history, part time-travel, seen through the eyes of a decent, modest and compassionate woman.

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In 1782 an enthusiastic young German landed in England. Through the fresh eyes of a foreigner we get a wonderful insight into what has or hasn't changed within the last two hundred years. In a series of letters home he describes his amazement at the number of English people who wore spectacles, the amount they drank, the dreadful food they ate, the expense of a simple salad, the drunkenness of the dons, the riotous behaviour in Parliament, and the high level of education among ordinary people.

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For two thousand years in China, the empires of politics and of the written word cohabited and depended on one another. The Chinese classics became the bedrock of political and cultural legitimacy, which was centred on the empire's great capital cities. One such classic was the "Book of Poetry", written perhaps three millennia ago. In the centuries that followed, poetry became China's highest art form. This collection gathers poems about four of these venerable cities - Chang'an (now Xi'an), Luoyang, Beijing and Hangzhou. To the Chinese, the city was a depiction of the Confucian ideal of social harmony. To leave the city was to exile oneself from high culture and high politics. This collection also chronicles that Taoist escape and exile: the poetry of personal loss and disappointment, the veiled political polemic and poetry extolling the natural world that lay beyond the Emperor's courts. These are small books that open our vast landscapes of the mind.

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From the present-day street life of Ginza, to the heights of Mount Fuji in the company of 16th-century traveller and poet Basho: the most recent addition of Eland's through writers' eyes series brings together a chorus of voices from Japan and across the globe. Detailed introductions stemming from Elizabeth Ingram's own experiences as a traveller, (later a resident) and journalist in Japan, develop a lively and intimate portrait of towns and provinces, making it an ideal companion. A library in the palm of your hand: extracts of prose, poetry and novels from a rich variety of writers, including Jan Morris, Nicolas Bouvier, Oswald Wynd, Peter Popham, Basho, Yasunari Kawabata, Alan Booth, Futabei Shimei, Angela Carter, Joao Rodrigues and Mary Crawford Fraser. It is a source book for those visiting Japan for the first time and for expatriates. One must never forget that for all the talk of the new Asia, the Japanese economy is still bigger than that of India and China combined.

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Until 1912 Morocco had never suffered foreign domination, and its mountainous interior was as closed to foreigners as Tibet. Walter Harris, though, was an exception. He lived in the country for more than thirty-five years, and as The Times correspondent observed every aspect of its life. He describes the unfettered Sultanate in all its dark, melodramatic splendour. He was an intimate of at least three ruling Sultans and a man capable of befriending his kidnapper. It was said that only three Christians had ever visited the walled city of Chechaouen: one was poisoned, one came for an hour disguised as a Rabbi...the other was Walter Harris.

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A haunting and delicately observed description of the last days of Mandarin culture before the revolution, "Peking Story" is a testimony to a way of life, a culture, an aesthetic and a civilisation which has since completely disappeared. As the American son-in-law of a revered official from an ancient Chinese family, David Kidd had unqiue access to the life - their sprawling mansion, the visits to ancestral temples, the moonlit picnics, demure servants, opulent ceremonies, lavish entertainments and cherished antique heirlooms, such as the set of braziers which had never lost the heat of their original founding due to the meticulous care of successive generations of owners. But it is the brooding sense of the inevitability of great change, and Kidd's sympathy with many of the goals of the revolution, which transforms this memoir into something tragically profound.

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Bruce Wannell was the greatest Orientalist traveller of his generation: a Paddy Leigh Fermor of the East, a Kim for our own time. He lived in Iran through the 1979 revolution, worked for a decade in the North West Frontier during the wars in Afghanistan and could transcribe the most complex Arabic calligraphy by sight. Although he lived in the lands of Islam he also knew all the artistic treasures of Christendom. His curious combination of talents scholar, linguist, musician, translator and teacher - were duplicated by an international network of friendships with poets, spies, aid-workers, diplomats, artists and writers. Speaking Iranian and Afghan Persian with a dazzling, poetic fluency, he could also talk in Arabic, Pushtu, Urdu, Swahili and could lecture fluently in French, Italian, English or German. In the last fifteen years of his life he lived for a third of the year in Delhi with William Dalrymple, hunting down unpublished Mughal histories and providing the author with translations of historical documents. It was an extraordinarily successful double act, which produced four revisionist south-Asian histories that were also international best sellers. The rest of the year was balanced by other travels, working as a dragoman-guide or pursuing his own esoteric researches, based in the modest footprint of a tiny attic in York, triple-lined with books. It was worthy of a medieval wandering scholar or a bare footed Dervish. Bruce had a number of identities, which gives this collection of original essays from trusted friends and old colleagues a dazzling diversity. They give a fascinating insight into a remarkable and diverse life. He was a man who could quote Hafiz from memory, rustle up a lethal cocktail, lose himself in Brahms, open any door, organise a concert within days of arriving in a foreign city or walk across a mountain with just walnuts and dried mulberries in his pocket.

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Lesley Chan Downer set off in the footsteps of Matsuo Basho, Japan s most cherished poet, to explore the country s remote northern provinces.

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Ian Skeet travelled across the vast sand deserts and arid highlands of Muscat and Oman in 1966 8, preparing the wary inhabitants for the coming of oil, visiting its isolated walled cities, fortified oasis communities and independent-minded Bedouin tribes.

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Joe Roberts stayed for five months with the Trivedi family in Bangalore,while travelling all over southern India. Wherever he went he met extraordinary people, but these encounters take second place to his ripening friendship with the Trivedi family, and his exact chronicling of their neighbours.

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Peter Goullart spent nine years in the all-but-forgotten Nakhi Kingdom of south west China. He had a job entirely suited to his inquiring, gossipy temperament: to get to know the local traders, merchants, inn-keepers and artisans to decide which to back with a loan from the cooperative movement. A Russian by birth, due to his extraordinary skill in language and dialects, Goullart made himself totally at home in Likiang, which had been ruled by Mandarin officials descended from ancient dynasties, and was visited by caravans of Tibetan and Burmese travelling merchants, and such mysterious local highland peoples as the Lobos. In his company we get to hear about the love affairs and social rivalries of his neighbours, to attend magnificent banquets, meet ancient dowagers and handsome warriors as well as to catch the sound of the swiftly running mountain streams, the coarse ribaldry of the market ladies and the happy laughter emerging from the wine shops. Through him we are able to travel back to this complex society, which believed simultaneously and sincerely in Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism, in addition to their ancient Animism and Shamanism.

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Those who know the downs and chalk streams of Hampshire are quietly fortunate but rarely boastful. So it is fascinating to rediscover this home county, on the eastern edge of Wessex, as a place of extraordinary richness. Those rounded chalk hills have protected not only the ancient capital of Anglo-Saxon England but also the two-thousand-year-old arsenal-harbour of the Royal Navy. It was in Hampshire that the novel reached its fullest expression through the native genius of Jane Austen, where fly-fishing and cricket were first organized and whence D-day was launched. But not the least of its claims is that it is also the heartland of nature writing, where Gilbert White first opened up a whole universe of observation to the world, by confining himself to the infinite details of his Hampshire parish of Selborne. It is a tradition which was furthered in the county by W H Hudson, observing nature in the wooded heathlands of the New Forest and reached its apogee with the night walks of the poet Edward Thomas before his early death in the trenches. If Hampshire is revealed to be a crystalisation of all quiet virtues of England, we also get to delight in the affectionate mocking attention of Beryl Bainbridge, P G Wodehouse and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

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Since 9/11 the reader has been inundated with academic volumes about radical Islam, the geo-political alliances of Pakistan and the identity of the Taliban. What has been lacking is Travels in a Dervish Cloak, an affectionate, hashish-scented travel book, full of humour and delight, written by a young Irish foreign correspondent living on his wits, on the contacts from his grandmother s address book and with a kidney given to him by his brother. Others might have conserved this gift of a life-saving kidney by living a sober and quiet life, but it had the opposite affect on Isambard Wilkinson, who took to the adventurous life of a Daily Telegraph foreign correspondent like a cat assured of nine lives. His rich and wonderfully intimate picture of Pakistan describes the country in all its exuberant, colourful, contemporary glory. It s a place where past empires, be they Mughal or Raj, continue to shine like old gold beneath the chaotic jigsaw of Baluch, Punjabi, Sindi and Pashtun peoples, not to mention warlords, hereditary saints, bandit landlords, smugglers and party-mad socialites. The only way to understand the contradictions is to plunge into the riot of differences, and to come out grinning.

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The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool presents the unexpected face of Syria. Based on five journeys, undertaken over as many years, Kociejowski's book is entirely concerned with the slow journey towards friendship. So we learn nothing about coups or conspiracies, iconic monuments or historic travellers. Instead we meet a chance handful of Syrians, such as Myrna, a Christian faith-healing stigmatic, Yasser, a Palestinian refugee and political activist, Abu al-Tahib, a prince of fools, a modern desert father, Paolo Dall'Oglio, and the street philosopher and the holy fool of the book's title. It was written during the era of conversation, before the use of mobiles, and long before the current civil war. Saluted as a travel classic on first publication (just 12 years ago) it is now in danger of becoming a testament to the last of the old Levant.

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Features, perhaps the most fashionable, talked about, photographed city in Africa, which is home to Yves St Laurent, the Bransons and others.

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The Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq were one of the most isolated communities in the world. Few outsiders, let alone Europeans, had been permitted to travel through their homeland, a mass of tiny islands lost in a wilderness of reeds and swamps in southern Iraq. One of the few trusted outsiders was the legendary explorer, Wilfred Thesiger, who was Gavin Maxwell's guide to the intricate landscape, tribal customs and distinctive architecture of the Marsh Arabs. Thesiger's skill with a medicine chest and rifle assured them a welcome in every hamlet, and Maxwell's training as a naturalist and writer has left an invaluable record of a unique community and a vanished way of life.

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Two sisters, one beautiful, one plain, return unmarried from their adventures to their parents' hotel on the mountain, where they are caught up in a scandalous relations with an African official and an English botanist. Meanwhile, a heartbroken woman tries to escape the memory of her son's death on a doomed holiday by the sea.

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At the age of nine Janina David was leading a sheltered life with her prosperous Jewish family in Poland. One year later they were all facing starvation in the Warsaw ghetto. In her memoirs of a wartime childhood Janina David describes the family's struggle against insurmountable odds. When it became clear that none of them was likely to survive, the thirteen-year-old girl was smuggled out of the ghetto to live with family friends - a Polish woman and her German-born husband. When their home became too dangerous, she was sent with false identity papers to a Catholic convent, where she lived in constant fear of being discovered.

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Reborn from the ashes of a Pakistan rubbish heap, this volume tells of a friendship between a writer and an artist, forged on an impecunious, life-enhancing journey from Serbia to Afghanistan in the 1950s.

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The Duke of Pirajno arrived in North Africa in 1924. For the next eighteen years his experiences as a doctor in Libya, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somaliland, provided him with opportunities and experiences rarely given to a European. He brings us stories of noble chieftains and celebrated courtesans, of Berber princes and Tuareg entertainers, of giant elephants, and a lioness who fell in love with the author.

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the greatest Moroccan travel book of all time:vital reading for the new upmarket Marrakesh tourism - one of the bibles of British twentieth-century Orientalism - by the author of A Ring of Bright Water - describes the extraordinary medieval nature of Morocco in the twentieth century, focussing on a family who combined the lethal elegance of gangland mobsters with the opulent charm of hereditary Indian princes, fed by a monopoly in drugs and prostitution - a perennial classic for the backlist which will sell and sell - POS material available

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Braving hunger, heat exhaustion, unbearable terrain and cultures largely untouched by civilization, Dervla Murphy chronicles her determined trip through nine countries, through snow and ice in the mountains and miles of barren land in the scorching desert. Full Tilt is a highly individual account by a celebrated travel writer based on the daily diary Murphy kept while riding through Yugoslavia, Persia, Afghanistan, over the Himalayas to Pakistan and into India. Murphy's charm and gracious sensitivity as a writer and a traveler reveals not only civilizations of exotic people and places but the wonder of a woman alone on an extraordinary adventure.

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The Berber tribes of the Mountains of Morocco are one of the great and inspiring survival stories of our times. They have occupied their mountain homelands since before the dawn of history, and travellers have long marvelled at how their music, dance, pre-historic rock carvings, traditional jewelry, tattoos, indigenous pottery, embroideries and carpets have all been impregnated with the wild soul of their fierce mountainous landscape. Never before have their traditional odes – which open up to us a precious window into a Homeric nobility and spiritualized landscape – been translated into English. Michael Peyron who has taught, explored and researched the history of the Berbers of Morocco over the last fifty years, has an exceptional understanding of this region and a unique archive of oral transmissions from some of the last bards uninfluenced by the modern world. This collection is both a gift to travellers and a priceless legacy.

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This is a year of Sicilian life, its seasons and its sacred festivals, its gorgeous fruits and demanding family life, its casual assassinations and village feasts, its weather and the neighbours. It chronicles a life divided between an apartment in the city of Palermo with the weekends and summer devoted to sustaining life in an old family farm. What makes this journal truly exceptional is that Mary Simeti is both an outsider, (an American who had studied medieval history and worked as a volunteer on a social welfare programme) and an insider. For this journal was written after twenty years of immersion in Sicilian life, as wife to a Sicilian, mother to two Sicilian teenagers, as gardener, cook and carer for a suspicious mother-in- law.

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Over the summer of 2011, Dervla Murphy spent a month in the Gaza Strip. She met liberals and Islamists, Hamas and Fatah supporters, rich and poor. Used to western reporters dashing in and out of the Strip in times of crisis, the people she met were touched by her genuine, unflinching interest and spoke openly to her about life in their open-air prison. What she finds are a people who, far from the story we are so often fed, overwhelmingly long for peace and an end to the violence that has so grossly distorted their lives. The impression we take away from the book is of a people whose real, complex, nuanced voice has rarely been heard before. A MONTH BY THE SEA gives unique insight into the way in which isolation has shaped this society: how it radicalises young men and plays into the hands of dominating patriarchs, yet also how it hardens determination not to give in and turns family into a towering source of support. Underlying the book is Dervla's determination to try to understand how Arab Palestinians and Israeli Jews might forge a solution and ultimately live in peace. Dervla looks long and hard at the hypocrisies of Western and Israeli attitudes to peace', and at Palestinian attitudes to terrorism. While this shattered people long for a respite from the bombings that have ripped a hole, both literally and psychologically, in their world, it seems that politicians have an agenda that pays little attention to their plight.

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A Place Apart is a remarkable geographical and psychological travelogue that rises above history, politics, theology and economics. Created by a southern Irishwoman, cycling into the mayhem of Northern Ireland in order to try and sort out her own opinions and emotions about this troubled land. She came equipped with her own childhood experiences of murder and Republican martyrdom, but was otherwise unfettered by sectarian loyalties and armed with a delightful curiosity, a fine ear for anecdote, an ability to stand her own at the bar and penetrating intelligence. She travelled extensively through both town and country, frequently finding herself in horrifying situations, and sometimes among people stiff with hate and grief: but equally, she discovered an unquenchable spirit everywhere that refused to die. Other Dervla Murphy titles published by Eland. Original Hardbacks: A Month by the Sea: Encounters in Gaza, The Island that Dared: Journeys in Cuba, Eland Classics: Wheels within Wheels, Full Tilt: From Ireland to India with a Bicycle, In Ethiopia with a Mule, Where the Indus is Young: A Winter in Baltistan, Tibetan Foothold, The Waiting Land: A Spell in Nepal, On a Shoestring to Coorg.

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Norman Lewis arrives in war-torn Naples as an intelligence officer in 1944. The starving population has devoured all the tropical fish in the aquarium, respectable women have been driven to prostitution and the black market is king. Lewis finds little to admire in his fellow soldiers, but gains sustenance from the extraordinary vivacity of the Italians. There is the lawyer who earns his living bringing a touch of Roman class to funerals, the gynaecologist who specializes in the restoration of lost virginity and the widowed housewife who times her British lover against the clock. Were I given the chance to be born again, writes Lewis, Italy would be the country of my choice.

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An extraordinary collection of interviews with lighthouse keepers and their families, in their own words - a record of a vanished profession and avanished Britain of the 1970s. Described by William Golding as one of the mostfascinating social documents I have ever read. It captures the delights and downfalls of isolation, the mindgames it plays on ordinary people and theromance of the outer reaches of Britain.

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In "The Waiting Land" (first published in 1967) Dervla Murphy affectionately portrays the people of Nepal's different tribes, the customs of an ancient, complex civilization and the country's natural grandeur and beauty. This is the third of Dervla Murphy's early travel books: an exploration of Nepal by a feisty, generous-hearted young Irish woman. Yet it can also be seen as the completion of a trilogy of books concerned with her experience of self- sufficient mountain cultures, first tasted in crossing Persia and Afghanistan in "Full Tilt", and deepened with her experience of working with Tibetan refugees in the frontiers of Northern India, as told in "Tibetan Foothold". Having settled in a village in the Pokhara Valley to work at a Tibetan refugee camp, she makes her home in a tiny, vermin-infested room over a stall in the bazaar. In diary form, she describes her various journeys by air, by bicycle and on foot into the remote and mountainous Lantang region on the border of Tibet. Murphy's charm and sensitivity as a writer and traveller reveal not only the vitality of an age-old civilization facing the challenge of Westernisation, but the wonder and excitement of her own remarkable adventures.

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A masterpiece of local history, by the Queen of the genre; Gillian Tindall has acquired a devoted readership through her lovingly researched works, such as the prize-winning "The House" by the Thames and "Celestine: Voices from a French Village". A journey through time: from a scattering of cottages along a pre-roman horse track, to a medieval parish and staging post for travellers, onwards into a prosperous Tudor village favoured by gentlemen for their country seats and an 18th century resort of pleasure gardens eventually transformed by a warren of railway lines into a thickly populated working-class district. Fragments of this past can still be found by the observant eye. This is one of a precious handful of books (such as Montaillou and Akenfield) that in their precise examination of a particular locality open our understanding of the universal themes of the past. In this case it is Kentish Town in London that reveals its complex secrets to us, through the resurrection of its now buried rivers and wells, coaching house, landlords, traders, and simple tennants.

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"The Island That Dared" is a passionate book from the pen of Dervla Murphy, which begins with a three-generational family holiday in Cuba. Led by their redoubtable hard-walking grandmother, the trio of young girls and their mother soon find themselves camping out on empty beaches beneath the stars with only crabs and mosquitoes for company. This pure Swallows and Amazons experience confirms Dervla in her quest to understand the unique society that has been created by the Cuban Revolution. She returns again and again to explore the island, investigating the experience of modern Cuba with her particular, candid curiosity. Through her own research and through conversations with Fidelistas and their critics alike, "The Island That Dared" builds a complex picture of a people struggling to retain their identity in the face of insistent hostility, and to stand against the all-but-overwhelming fire-power of capitalism. Whatever the fate of Cuba, "The Island That Dared" beautifully fulfils the role of a great travel book, 'to catch the moment on the wing, and stop it in Time' - Colin Thubron.

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This is the patriot's song book, which includes such rollicking word-smiths as Hilaire Belloc, G K Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling and the lyrics of Gilbert and Sullivan. England, as every fan of Flanders and Swan will know, hasn't really got a national song. This collection more than fills the gap. Despite the worldwide spread of the English language in the wake of the Empire, the poets of England were always more interested in personal freedom than political conformity. Those rallying cries from the pens of Blake, Byron and Brook are as relevant as ever. Armed with the clarion calls of Milton and Shakespeare, "England" still calls upon us to do our duty: to cleanse our land of a media monoculture linked by a spreading cancer of motorways, hypermarkets and a rootless, heartless international capitalism that rots the spirit.

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Stuff Dublin into your coat pocket. The perfect companion for a visit to the Fair City, or indeed to any inn, bar or cafe in Ireland. Some of the greatest writers in the English language were born in Dublin and every corner of the city has links with the written word, made explicit in this far-ranging collection. From Oscar Wilde to Rudyard Kipling, from Jonathan Swift to WB Yeats and Samuel Beckett: the city of Dublin has enchanted and inspired some great poetry.

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