Search results for ""eland publishing ltd""

A Russian Upstairs, Downstairs, but one scented with the cordite and fear of revolution, and with a cast of devotedly loyal and capable British governesses. Miss Emmie is an intimate and revealing portrait of pre-Revolutionary Russian society which, contrary to received wisdoms, reveals a complex, liberal and humane society, full of enormous potential and past achievement. It is also the biography of five intrepid women who, by travelling abroad and working as governesses in Russia, achieved an intellectual dignity, a purpose and an authority which was denied them in their homeland. The extraordinary personal adventures of these women, as they negotiate the turmoil and terrifying anarchy of Revolution and Civil War, turns the book into a page-turning thriller.

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All roads lead to Rome, the eternal city, the centre of Christendom, the lodestone of the pilgrim and the artist, the seat of the only Empire that has ever succeeded in uniting the European landmass. No literate traveller can escape its fascination, and many get drawn back year after year. Despite the triumphant remains of the forum, Imperial arch, public baths, gilded basilica and palace, it is only the bright flame of passion-filled poetry that can bring it to life. Glyn Pursglove has woven a delicate tapestry of ancient, medieval and modern poetry, from Virgil to Pasolini. It is a truly Olympian cast enough to fill the Pantheon, whose voices magically echo the city and its lessons to us. Who can equal the sensuality, power and crude honesty of Martial and Catullus. An extraordinary treat to read these masters of hungry sexuality, not banished amongst the ancient histories and the classics, but brought hungrily to life beside their poet peers.

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"Walled Gardens" is a brilliant portrait of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, struggling through the post-war depression aided by drink, horse-racing and religion, and their own idiosyncratic adaptations to modern life. Seen from the troubled perspective of the daughter of an aristocratic family in decline, we watch the disintegration of a marriage in elegant but emotionally chilled surroundings, and the struggle to keep up appearances, and a collapsing roof, in front of the neighbours. By turns sad, absured and funny, the story is ultimately liberating as failure leads to freedom.

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The English tend either to look towards the Lord in his moated castle or the poor peasant at his gate, to polarise between nob and mob, capitalist and communist. This book takes us into another English landscape. It is the tale of an ordinary family, quietly proud of their parish, pub and position, who treat their children as equals. The only extraordinary thing about them is that they have kept hold of their stories, which now reach back over fifteen generations. This chronicle told backwards from yesterday s gossip to the times of the Tudors reveals a contented England, lived in and loved by a family of vicars and farmers, colonels and brewers, naval commanders and horse-lovers. It is also an honest narrative, recording scandals and suicides beside occasional successes, be they on the battlefield, in the boardroom or the bedroom.

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The Station follows three high-spirited young men as they visit twenty monasteries on Mount Athos in 1927.

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Lewen Weldon was mapping the eastern desert of Egypt when World War I broke out. A fluent Arabic speaker, he was recruited to run a network of spies and confidential agents who were landed from a steam yacht onto the Syrian coast behind Turkish lines. He took his men to the shore in small boats at night, which also allowed him to land and conduct personal interviews before returning back through the surf. This vivid tale of adventure becomes eyewitness history as we encounter Armenians escaping the massacres, passionate Arab nationalists, resolute Turkish soldiers and a heroic network of Jewish volunteers. Weldon s modesty and self-deprecating Irish wit, complete with a few prejudices, take us to the vivid heart of his experience, in which each man depended for his life on his colleagues. This is a story that simply had to be told. 'We were extraordinarily lucky with our agents. I don t think more than seven were actually captured. Six of these were hanged and one had his head cut off.'

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Unique eyewitness account from 1917 of Morocco as a French protectorate.

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We get to share in his personal discoveries through the humour and good fellowship of the road, full of entertaining misadventures. But there is never any doubt that there is an ultimate purpose to these journeys: a passionate need to bear witness to the truth about the past, after centuries of persecution by an alien ruling class. So through the dense clouds of historical tragedy, Wright exchavates hope that a revival of pride and dignity in Andean culture is possible.

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'A valuable book and a necessary one. One of the funniest and cleverest voyages on record.' Christopher Hitchens, New Statesman 'The finest writer afloat since Conrad.' Geoffrey Moorhouse, The Guardian 'Unfailingly witty and entertaining.' Salman RushdieCoasting round Britain single-handed in an antique two-masted sailing boat, Jonathan Raban conducts a masterly exploration of England and the English at the time of Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands War. He moves seamlessly between awkward memories of childhood as the son of a vicar, a vivid chronicle of the shape-shifting sea and incisive descriptions of the people and communities he encounters. As he faces his terror of racing water, eddies, offshore sandbars and ferries on a collision course, so he navigates the complex and turbulent waters of his own middle age. Coasting is a fearless attempt to discover the meaning of belonging and of his English homeland.

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If you want to know about writing, about how to make others share the horror and intensity of an experience, try the first piece in this collection, Justice at Night. Martha Gellhorn wrote it as a 28-year-old, having just returned home to the States after four years in Europe, in 1936. What follows is a selection of fifty years of peacetime journalism, history caught at the moment of its unfolding, as it looked and felt to those who experienced it. It's about revolutions in the making, guilty acts of state terrorism, poverty, injustice and recovery. It vividly captures the range and intensity of Gellhorn's courageous work and is also a passionate call to arms, not only to remember the wronged and to bear witness to evil, but to stand your ground in the face of it.

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There are only a handful of destinations left in the world that have retained their ability to shock the traveller with their unique perspective. These places still awaken a sense of deep wonder as they offer the rare opportunity to observe the world from a different angle. Ethiopia is one of those rare countries. This book is the perfect companion to any exploration of Ethiopia, be it in the precarious saddle of an Abyssinian pony, or from the folds of an armchair. A compendium of all things Ethiopian, the book throws wide open precious windows of understanding, allowing you to gaze deeper into the landscape and people with additional wonder. As well as peopling the land with its own caste of priest kings descended from Solomon and Sheba, Ethiopia has long attracted the attentions of eccentric adventurers, Jesuit explorers, foolish would-be conquerors, as well as saints and sinners in equal measure ...and the keen interest of writers of all stripes. What you have here is quite literally the best bits from whole libraries of past travel accounts, hand-picked by Yves-Marie Stranger, a long time Ethiopia resident, trilingual interpreter and writer.

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Carla Grissman spent the better part of a year in the '60s living in a farming hamlet in remote Anatolia, some 250 km east of Ankara. The hospitality, the friendship and the way in which the inhabitants of Uzak Koy accepted her into their community left a deep impression, and were remembered and treasured in a private memoir. Not for some forty years was it published, and yet it is one of the most honest, clear-sighted and affectionate portraits of rural Turkey, testimony to Proverbs 15:17, 'Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than feasting on a fattened ox where hatred also dwells'.

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No land on earth has been so long observed as Egypt, which was attracting awestruck travelers back in the days of Herodotus and Julius Caesar. Then came pilgrims to Sinai, crusaders and Napoleon, followed by the grand tourists of the eighteenth century, and those less grand with Thomas Cook in the nineteenth. The range of voices gathered here is dazzling: an ancient myth from a papyrus next to Naguib Mahfouz's account of Alexandria, Florence Nightingale describing Abu Simbel side by side with Ahdaf Soueif's description of Sinai. A description of medieval Cairo by Ibn Jubayr walks hand in hand with one of the modern city by the Egyptian thinker, Taha Hussein. Lucie Duff-Gordon sails up the Nile, Edward Lane crawls through a sand-filled temple and Isambard Kingdom Brunel struggles up the cataract above Aswan.

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Aims to unearth the life story of the creator of The Leopard, one of the novels of the twentieth century. This book stands as a meditation on what it is that makes a writer.

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Chantemesle is a lyrical evocation of growing up on the banks of the Seine. In this minutely observed landscape, where even the wind is a character in its own right, we meet blind Battouflet, the singing hermit of the hillside, solemn Clotilde, who lives in a chateau in the heart of the forest and a desiccated and disturbing spinster, Mlle. Firman. Robin Fedden writes with preternatural clarity, taking the reader with him into a long-forgotten yet echoingly familiar world. When Fedden finds himself expelled from this realm by his emerging sexuality, he leaves us reeling with nostalgia for that timeless sense of the present that is the magic of childhood.

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This exciting new series will bring together both classic texts and the writing of the leading Travel writers working today, which will inform and inspire the inquisitive traveller. It is an essential companion for anyone travelling to Syria. Selected authors include: Edward Gibbon, William Dalrymple, Barnaby Rogerson and Gertrude Bell. This new series is not a guide of where to stay and what to do, rather it is collection of writing that aims to invest the traveller with a cultural and historical background to Syria, which will breath life and meaning into the sights, sounds and tastes that the inquisitive traveller will experience.

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The story of Koestler's imprisonment in France in 1940, his escape and his extraordinary and adventurous journey to the safety of London, which unfolds like some travel nightmare by Kafka. The 'scum of the earth' are those heroic individuals, like Koestler himself, who had fought the tide of fascism and come to live in liberal France under the mistaken impression that they would be safe.

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This is what Eland is always looking out for - a scholar letting his hair down. Frustrated by the limitations of his professional career, Kaufmann chose to express his true understanding and deep affection for the Tuareg in fiction. A lifetime of detailed study, research and harrowing experience has gone into the creation of this seemingly effortless tale.

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Having learned to appreciate Muslim life while living in Pakistan, Peter Mayne settled down to live in the back streets of Marrakesh in the 1950s. Rather than watch from the shelter of a hotel terrace, he rented rooms, learned the language, made friends, and became embroiled in conspiratorial picnics, hashish-laced dinners and in the enchantments and misunderstandings of the street, with its festivals, love affairs, potions and gossip. By turns used, abused and cherished by his neighbours, Mayne wrote their letters for them and captured the essence of their lives in this affectionate and hilarious account.

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Between these covers, the millennia of mercantile and cultural exchange along the Silk Route are celebrated by travellers and writers from Marco Polo to Sven Hedin, from William of Rubrick to Ella Maillart. Kathleen Hopkirk has spent a lifetime researching this vital heartland, traversed by five, inhospitable deserts but united by ancient chains of trading oases: from the Buddhist Empire of Kushan, to the scholarly Islamic centre at Bukhara, from the military conquerors massing in both directions to the saintly missionaries and monks who moved between its centres of learning. This mysterious homeland of the Tartars, Turks, Mongols, Uzbeks, Uighurs, Tajiks, Scythians and Sarmatians, gave the world terrifying conquerors of the stature of Gengiz Khan and Tamberlane. Later it became the focus of the Great Game, a rivalry for influence in the area between the empires of Russia and Britain played out by spies, ambassadors, agents and travel writers for 150 years, itself a continuation of the old cultural rivalry between Persia and China for the soul of this vast region.

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Alexander Burnes travelled up the Indus to Lahore and to the Khanates of Afghanistan and Central Asia in the 1830s, spying on behalf of the British Government in what was to become known as the 'Great Game'. His account of these travels was a bestseller in its day and this brand new edition brings the heady sense of excitement, risk and zeal bursting from the pages.

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'Evliya Çelebi was the widest-eyed, most intensely curious … and prolific travel writer the Ottoman world ever produced. A learned and perceptive gentleman-observer from courtly Istanbul at the height of its power, Evilya's work records and preserves an entire world otherwise lost to history. A proper edition of his massive work has long been overdue, and Robert Dankoff magnificently translates the highlights … a book which is likely to change for ever our perceptions of the Ottoman Empire.' — William Dalrymple

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From time immemorial Afghanistan has been both a fortress of faith and a mountainous crossroads. Through its high valleys merchants traded Chinese porcelains, bundles of indigo cloth, sacks of lapis lazuli, golden jewellery, emeralds and fine carvings from both east and west. Ancient scrolls and beliefs entered the land in the satchels of Buddhist pilgrims and in the baggage of military invaders - from Alexander the Great to Mughal, Persian and Arab conquerors and even the ill-fated armies of the British Raj. In this resonant account, Peter Levi seeks the clues which each migration left, in the company of the young Bruce Chatwin. Since his journey in the 1970s, Afghanistan has suffered forty years of invasion and civil war, making it all the more poignant to rediscover, with Levi, not a rocky wilderness guarded by fearsome tribes, but 'this highway of archangels/this theatre of heaven/the light garden of the God-forgiven angel King.'

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Every year a quarter of a million well-healed, well-read travellers take the holiday of a lifetime to the Galapagos. To feed the book-buyers on this annual pilgrimage, there are a lot of beautifully illustrated guides to the fauna of the islands on the shelves, but very little about the scurrilous human adventurers who also passed this way. John Hickman presents an intriguing cast of characters, from Incas to whalers, pirates to Robinson Crusoes, the original Swiss Family Robinson and the revered Charles Darwin.

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This collection On Travel is clever, funny, provoking and confrontational by turn. In a pyrotechnic display of cracking one- liners, cynical word play and comic observation, it mines three thousand years of wit and wisdom: from Martha Gellhorn to Confucius and from Pliny to Paul Theroux.

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Life at Full Tilt is a whirlwind tour of Dervla Murphy s travels. It begins in Spain in 1956, before her first book, and follows in her tracks for over fifty years, including descriptions of her beloved Afghanistan in 1963, of the Peruvian Andes, of South, West and East Africa and most recently of the troubled territories of Palestine and Israel. Dervla s style of travel, to go somewhere that interested her and see who she met, made for fresh encounters every day, recorded faithfully each evening in her journal. She read hungrily to prepare for her journeys and folded her learning seamlessly into her books. Finally, between these covers, we are able to catch up with her work in its entirety. What shines through is her passionate engagement with the world and its injustices, and her utter independence of mind. Ethel Crowley, an Irish sociologist, has for the first time looked at all Dervla s writing her journalism and her twenty-four books selecting half-a-dozen extracts from each. She introduces us to a complex character, hard to pin down, but a role model for women and environmentalists, Irish to her fingertips and a crucial part of the larger English tradition of travel writing. With a preface by Colin Thubron

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Norman Lewis avoids the easy pleasures of travelling through the hill-forts of Rajasthan, visiting palace hotels and the Taj Mahal. Instead his travels in India begin in the impoverished, overpopulated and corrupt state of Bihar - the scene of a brutal caste war between the untouchables and higher-caste gangsters. From these violent happenings, he heads down the west coast of Bengal and into the highlands of Orissa to testify to the life of the 'indigenous tribals who have survived in isolation. As William Dalrymple observed in The Spectator, 'the great virtue of Norman Lewis as a writer is that he can make the most boring things interesting; whatever he is describing whether it is a rickshaw driver, an alcohol crazed elephant, or a man defecating beside the road Lewis senses are awake for sounds or smells, and he can make you think twice about scenes you have seen ten thousand times before the book is full of some of the strangest facts imaginable ...It is a joy to read. Other Norman Lewis titles published by Eland: Jackdaw Cake, The Missionaries, Voices of the Old Sea, A View of The World, Naples 44, A Dragon Apparent, Golden Earth, The Honoured Society, An Empire of the East, In Sicily and The Tomb in Seville.

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The novelist E. M. Forster opens the door on life in a remote Maharajah's court in the early twentieth century, a 'record of a vanished civilization.' Through letters from his time visiting and working there, he introduces us to a 14th century political system in 'the oddest corner of the world outside Alice in Wonderland' where the young Maharajah of Devas, 'certainly a genius and possibly a saint,' led a state centered on spiritual aspirations. The Hill of Devi chronicles Forster's infatuation and exasperation, fascination, and amusement at this idiosyncratic court, leading us with him to its heart and the eight-day festival of Gokul Ashtami, marking the birth of Krishna, where we see His Highness Maharajah Sir Tukoji Rao III dancing before the altar 'like David before the Ark.'‘A classic account of a vanished side of India that has never before been so graphically painted.’ – Raymond Mortimer, Sunday Times‘I spent a lot of time laughing, it’s so weird, and so very British and very Indian at the same time, and so much of what he writes feels very contemporary. For all these reasons, I really love this book.’ – Damon Galgut

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The Maya of Central America created one of the most dazzling civilizations on this earth, which is often compared to Ancient Greece. The Maya had a delight in creation, expressed in art, architecture, pottery, astronomy, mathematics and mythology, all combined with a deep, metaphysical fascination with time. This civilization seems to have collapsed in the ninth century, some five hundred years before the Spanish conquest of America. Ronald Wright travelled through the old territories of the Maya (the jungles and mountains of Guatemala, Belize and Mexico) to explore the ancient roots of their culture and to map out what has survived. Despite civil wars and centuries of oppression by first an Hispanic, then Mestizo culture, he discovers a region where seven million people still speak Mayan languages and struggle to maintain their resilient, indigenous culture. It is at once a riveting journey, written with wit and wisdom, but also a study of a civilization. It is travel writing at its broadest and its best.

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This very failure, compounded by the plague of caterpillars of the book s title allows Nigel Barley to concentrate on everyday life in Dowayoland and the tattered remnants of an overripe French colonial legacy. Witchcraft fills the Cameroonian air; add an earnest German traveller showing explicit birth?control propaganda to the respectable Dowayos, an interest in the nipple?mutilating practices of highlanders, unanswered questions of the link between infertility and circumcision and you have the ingredients of a comic masterpiece. But beneath all the joy and shared laughter there is a skilful and wise reflection on the problems of different cultures ever understanding one another. The Dowayos are a mountain people that perform their elaborate, fascinating and fearsome ceremony at six or seven year intervals. It was an opportunity that was too good to miss, a key moment to test the balance of tradition and modernity. Yet, like much else in this hilarious book the circumcision ceremony was to prove frustratingly elusive.

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Growing is a portrait of a young man sent straight out from university to help govern Ceylon. It is doubtful that any Empire at any time has been served by such an intelligent, dutiful, hardworking and incorruptible civil servant as the young Leonard Woolf. He was determined to do what was good but discovered for himself that colonial rule, be it ever so high-minded, is fated to do wrong. Growing is also a deeply affectionate account of the mystery, magic and savage beauty of Ceylon at the turn of the century, an island whose diverse beliefs and cultures Woolf had the time and wit to explore in detail.

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Throughout the 1960's John Freely and Hilary Sumner-Boyd explored every alley, cove and monument of their adopted home of Istanbul in between their teaching jobs. They created a legendary guidebook, covering 1,500 years of Byzantine and Ottoman architecture, to a city that was still innocent of tourists. But the passages that were too personal, too capricious, too idiosyncratic, too indulgent of eccentric personalities, too melancholically obsessed with lost monuments, too wrapped up in the love of mid-afternoon banter, too indulgent of musicians, dancers, gypsies, dervish, drunks, beggars, fishermen, poets, fortune-tellers, folk healers, mimics and prostitutes were cut from their scholarly guidebook. Stamboul Sketches is a slim book compiled from these editorial floor off-cuts. Inspired by travelling in the footsteps of Evliya Celebi, the Puck-like Pepys who wrote about 17th century Istanbul, Stamboul Sketches is a beautiful, quirky portrait of a city caught like a bird on the wing, so much changed but so much the same.

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In a ruined temple along the Nile, Anthony Sattin sees a woman praying to the gods of ancient Egypt to bless her with a child. Later that day, a policeman stops his taxi to ask to borrow a mobile phone to call his mother. The ancient rubs up against the modern just as dramatically as when Flaubert wrote, 'Egypt is a wonderful place for contrasts - splendid things gleam in the dust". Anthony Sattin has tracked down extraordinary examples of ancient survivals in the hurly-burly of modern Egypt.

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This is the first travel book that tested the idea that a five-year-old daughter makes for a useful international travelling companion. Together Dervla Murphy and her daughter Rachel with little money, no taste for luxury and few concrete plans meander their way slowly south from Bombay to the southernmost point of India, Cape Comorin. Interested in everything they see, but only truly enchanted by people, they stay in fisherman's huts and no-star hotels, travelling in packed-out buses, on foot and by local boats. Instead of pressing ever onwards, like so many travellers, they double back to the place they liked most, the hill province of Coorg and settle down to live there for two months. Anchored by her daughter's delight in the company of her Indian neighbours, Dervla Murphy creates an extraordinarily affectionate portrait of these cardamon-scented, spiritually and agriculturally self- sufficient Highlands. If travel is underwritten by an unwitting search for a lost paradise, this is a quest that was achieved - made possible with the right sort of travelling companion.

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The Villa Ariadne is a meditation on the island of Crete, centred on the house built by Sir Arthur Evans, the famous archaeologist of Knossos. Dilys Powell captures the spirit of a place she loved dearly and a group of people she knew well, from local Cretans to the archaeologists Evans and Pendlebury, and the German General Kreipe who was famously kidnapped on the island by Paddy Leigh-Fermor in one of the most audacious actions of World War II. Weaving the myths of the island with its archaeology, ancient history and modern tales, she gives us a loving portrait of this classical land.

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A Year in Jamaica is a complex memoir telling the story of two simultaneous journeys: Diana Lewes' 1889 trip from England to visit her family's sugar plantations in the Caribbean, and more intriguingly, the internal rite of passage of a Victorian girl on her journey to adulthood. For it is in Jamaica that Miss Lewes tries to find a place for herself in the mysterious adult world, to understand its coded rules and hidden passions. Set primarily on a plantation called Arcadia, overlooking the sea and a distant Cuba from on high, Miss Lewes alternates between the acceptable pursuits of a Victorian gentlewoman - sewing, social visits, riding - and trying to find a more meaningful role for herself in this man's world. She delights in the exhilarating freedom of careering across the countryside on horseback with her sister, is cowed by the roaring rains and horrified at watching a hen peck a lizard to death. Against this background, we see this intelligent and competent young woman appraising the society around her, and struggling with its contradictions. Quite how complex those contradictions were is only finally revealed in the publisher's afterword.

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Gaia Servadio is an Italian writer, long settled in Britain, who has retained a passionate relationship with her motherland and those who have expressed this in verse. The cast she has assembled has a spell-binding intensity, so that the reader twists between Byron and Dante, flickers between the imagery drawn by St Francis, Baudelaire and Milton, Gabriele D-Annunzio and Joseph Brodsky. Through her choices we see the two opposing natures of Italy, united by their differences.

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This book brings the forgotten pages of history back to passionate life. Doreen Ingrams has sieved through secret cabinet documents, Foreign and War office memorandum and their cryptic annotations to observe the creation of a Zionist homeland out of the Palestine Protectorate. Cock-up or conspiracy? Judge Curzon, Churchill, Weizmann, Blafour, TE Lawrence by their own words.

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A first-hand account of the life of travel writer Dervla Murphy in which she tells of her early life in Lismore, Co. Waterford, in her rather unusual household. Her father was the county librarian and her mother a chronic invalid. An only child, Dervla was allowed from the age of seven to freely roam on her own. At ten, she cycled ten miles to a local mountain, climbed it, then lost herself on the way down, and was forced to stay out all night - much to the distress of her parents. Living in a house that was crumbling around their ears, she reveals how her family hid a Republican who was later hanged, how she tested herself (with hot water) to increase her pain threshold, how she avoided an insane and shrieking maid, who was convinced that Dervla's parents were fried eggs, and how she helped another maid give birth under the kitchen table. An early love of books and writing, led her to enter a writing competition arranged by a local newspaper, and she won first prize for five weeks in a row.

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For travellers through the Aegean from Odysseus onwards, the Greek islands have proved to be places of beauty and enchantment, but also of violence, of love and death. "Isles of Greece" doesn't plot a course from island to island. Instead it groups together poems and prose extracts in order to provide some sense of the glittering delights and dark tragedies that are part of the history and the present of all Greek islands. Solomos, the Greek national poet, was born on the island of Zante, as was his contemporary, Kalvos. Byron, was perhaps the first non-Greek of modern times to sing the island's praises, but there have been many since including the English poets Lawrence Durrell and Michael Ayrton, the Americans Rachel Hadas and David Mason and Australia's Chairman Clift. These are small books that open our vast landscapes of the mind.

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"Valse des Fleurs" recreates one glittering day in the life of St. Petersburg in its heyday. It summons up a lost generation of courtiers, servants, guards, officials and dignitaries otherwise swept to oblivion by the Russian Revolution. Though slim enough to read on the train from Moscow, "Valse des Fleurs" has a haunting and evocative power. It is the perfect introduction to the Imperial capital of the Tsars.

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Through a dialogue between two lovers, a young physicist in England and an anthropologist in Germany, Nicholas Mosely retells the history of Europe of the twenties and thirties. The destructive power and attraction of fascism and communism is unveiled and set against the changing relationship between man and science in the time of atomic power. Their story weaves together disparate strands of landscape to take the reader on a journey through Spain, London, Soviet Russia, North Africa and middle Europe. Simultaneously taking us through a new intellectual landscape from the new scenes of physics, biology, anthropology and psychology. 'A novel of enormous ambition, a book that takes on just about every social movement, every significant political event of our time - a virtual intellectual anthology of the 20th century, in fictional form' - Daniel Stern, "New York Times" Book Review.

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The Turkish Coast from Izmir to Antalya is an area of incredible natural drama, rich in the ruins of antiquity. It is a prime focus for many cultured holiday makers visiting the region by land, yacht and gulet. It has been at the centre of Mediterranean culture and history for thousands of years, with a rich and varied literature. With accounts ranging from the excitement of archaeological discovery, or the route march of Alexander's army, to the pleasures of the hammam and Turkish cooking, this latest addition to the "Through Writers' Eyes" series will satisfy the appetites of travellers real and armchair. Sources range from the classical to the contemporary: from The Odyssey and Plutarch to Freya Stark, Jeremy Seal and Louis de Berniere. 'Eland has hit a goldmine with its "Through Writers' Eyes" series...like buying a best of compilation...you don't have to listen to the 'B' sides and you don't have to wade through the boring bits' - "The Tablet".

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Nicolas Bouvier was an image merchant and photographer as well as a writer. The Eland edition of "Japanese Chronicles" will be accompanied by many of his startling images of Japan. "The Japanese Chronicles" is a distillation of Bouvier's lifelong quest for Japan and his many travels, so that the reader is able to discover the country through the eyes of both a passionate young man, the sensual appeciation of a middle-aged artist and the serenity of an experience writer. 'Like other great literature, [Bouvier's] Chronicles pulls the reader into a timeless dimension where all is transformed and there is no separation between the reader and the work' - "San Francisco Review of Books". 'Some of the most resonant and perceptive travel writing in recent years'. - "Kirkus Reviews". 'Bouvier's distinguished accomplishments have culminated here in a book that succeeds in transforming personal experiences into a series of epiphanies for the reader'. - "Booklist".

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A pocket-sized collection of all the favourite verses that have inspired desert travellers. This collection of poems delights in constructing a sensual Orient of the imagination, from the seven golden odes of Pre-Islamic Arabia to the fevered visions of Coleridge. It is a place where sand dunes bear the impress of a lover, a land ruled by honour and hospitality, where poets and warriors are esteemed, where the sons of noble sheikhs labour in dignity as shepherds, but Kings are imprisoned within the cruelties of their palaces.

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In Africa Dances Gorer takes the reader on an odyssey across West Africa, in the company of Feral Benga, one of the great black ballet stars of 1930s Paris. It is a devastating critique of colonial rule, which is shown to be destroying African society just as effectively as Christian missionaries undermine indigenous morality. Africa Dances captures the rich physical and psychological detail of African village life from food and architecture to dance and magic. Gorer witnesses men diving for three-quarters of an hour without coming up for breath, witch-doctors conjuring thunderstorms out of clear blue skies, and chameleon fetishists whose skin changes from a dirty white to almost black. This is a place where if you believe, you can.

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