Search results for ""Author T. J. Gorton""
The American University in Cairo Press A Beirut Anthology: Travel Writing Through the Centuries
Beirut has seen many armies and empires come and go, but the legacy of this long history is not so much in surviving monuments as in the quintessential Levantine spirit of the people. A commercial hub since the days of the Phoenicians, it was a centre of learning under the Romans, its law school preeminent in the Empire. Beirut was the point of entry to the Levant for many Europeans and Americans undertaking a Grand Tour or a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and visitors (whether their focus was piously Biblical or more prosaic) recorded their impressions of this effervescent port city where East rubs against West. A Beirut Anthology gathers the choicest of these, from writers as diverse as Alphonse de Lamartine and Mark Twain, providing a surprising and vivid glimpse behind the veil of this elusive and alluring city.
£12.82
Interlink Publishing Group, Inc Renaissance Emir: A Druze Warlord at the Court of the Medici
£14.99
The American University in Cairo Press A Jerusalem Anthology: Travel Writing Through the Centuries
Jerusalem has a special status as a city that is both terrestrial and celestial. The name includes a cognate for 'peace, ' but the old stones of the city have witnessed epic bloodshed and destruction over the centuries. The three great monotheistic religions all regard it with especial fervor, and it has for at least two millennia attracted pilgrims intent on seeing it before they die. This rich and compelling anthology of travelers' writings attempts to convey something of the diverse experiences of visitors to this most complex and enigmatic of cities. A Jerusalem Anthology takes us on a journey through a city, not just of illusion and powerful accumulated religious emotion, but of colors, lights, smells, and sounds, an inhabited city as it was directly experienced and lived in through the ages. Memoirs of visitors such as as sixth-century AD pilgrim Saint Silvia of Bordeaux, medieval Jerusalemite al-Muqaddasi, Grand Tour voyagers Gustave Flaubert and Alexander Kinglake, the humorous Mark Twain, or the cynical T.E. Lawrence provide vivid and sometimes disturbing vignettes of the Holy City at very different times in its tumultuous history.
£12.82
Eland Publishing Ltd Arabia: A Thousand Years of Arabic Verse
Even before Islam, poetry was at the heart of Arabic culture. It spread and developed wherever the Arabic language came to be spoken, from Damascus to Fez, Baghdad to Cairo as well as in the Arabian heartland. This book takes us on a poetic journey through the Classical age of Arabic poetry, from about the year 600 AD to about 1000 AD. Poignant images of solitude, impossible love and the austere beauty of the desert pervade Arabic poetry from its beginnings, even when the poet lived in an urbane, courtly milieu. There are mystical poems, and blasphemous ones; war poems, political ones; satires, joke poems and overwrought if ingenious nature poems.
£7.20
Eland Publishing Ltd Andalus: Moorish Songs of Love and Wine
Medieval Andalucia is famous as a land of regrets, the place of the Moorish King's last sigh, where travelers sense the desecration of the great mosque of Cordoba and feel the haunted emptiness of the Alhambra's gilded, plastered domes. This collection of poetry fills those deserted halls with a powerful and convincing lust for life, a near-suffocating desire for love and for the rich enchantments of wine, laughter, moonlit picnics, and bare flesh.
£7.20
