Search results for ""Eland Publishing Ltd""

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 travelers back in the days of Herodotus and Julius Caesar. This book includes descriptions about a myth from a papyrus next to Naguib Mahfouz's account of Alexandria, and Florence Nightingale describing Abu Simbel side by side with Ahdaf Soueif's description of Sinai.

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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.

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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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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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