Search results for ""author ian strathcarron""

Ian Strathcarron follows Mark Twain and his caravanserai as it sways across the Holy Land and the two writers' contrasting adventures and observations are told in Innocence and War. Twain's pilgrims landed in Beirut and went on to Baalbec and Damascus. They then headed south through the Golan Heights, the Galilee and Nazareth then finally on to Jerusalem, Jericho, the Dead Sea, Bethlehem and Jaffa. Strathcarron follows their exact route though the countries are now Lebanon, Syria, Israel and the West Bank-with diplomatic diversions by sea on the writer's yacht Vasco da Gama, where needed. Together they meet the tribes and tribulations of the Holy Land, where the religious is political and the political is religious, where natural beauty meets man-made squalor, where hope and despair hang from the same tree and where trouble is always close at hand. Travel was troublesome then and it is troublesome now. Troublemakers and troubleshooters vie for supremacy. Both protagonists suffer for their troubles-and only sometimes laugh it off.

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Nigel Molesworth, ‘the curse of St. Custard's’, was a much-loved post-war fictional schoolboy character who featured in a series of books by Geoffrey Willans and illustrated by Ronald Searle. The books also featured the headmaster Grimes, Nigel’s annoying younger brother Molesworth 2, his best friend Peason, the head boy Grabber and the school wet Fotherington-Thomas. Nigel’s main characteristic was his cynicism and in Nigel Molesworth’s Cynical Tendency he has, through the success of his YouTube channel The Cynical Tendency, started a Cynical Tendency political party and his school friends have all become heads of the main political parties. The play starts with a Prologue for those unfamiliar with the characters, and the action is then set just after a general election in the near future, the result of which was chaotic and all the players could possibly become Prime Minister but only with Nigel’s support. Nigel on the other hand…

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Pepper the dachshund therapy dog sets off across the African Plains to cheer up the unhappy elephant Poncho. Along the way she meets a giraffe living with camels, survives a wildebeest stampede, makes friends with an aardvark, walks with a leopard through a valley of warthogs, befriends a vegan crocodile, swims with an inflatable hippopotamus, steals a picnic, avoids hungry lions, sprints with an ostrich and is charged by a bull elephant. And she hasn't even met Poncho yet.

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In 1895/6 the sixty-year-old Mark Twain set off on a worldwide lecture tour to pay off his debts from a publishing company bankruptcy, notes from which a year later became his final travel book Following the Equator. Two years later he wrote, 'How I did loathe that journey around the world! except the sea-part and India.' Although he was only in India for just over two of the twelve months, his exploits and observations there take up forty per cent of the book-and by common consent are by far the best and liveliest part of it. In The Indian Equator the Mark Twain travel trilogist Ian Strathcarron, his wife and photographer Gillian and his factota Sita follow in his mentor's footsteps, train tracks and boat wakes tracing the route that Twain, his wife Livy, his daughter Clara, his manager Smythe and his bearer Satan took as they crisscrossed the sub-continent. Leaving from the Bombay that was and the Mumbai that is, both writers follow the lecture circuit of old India--including what is now Pakistan--across the plains and cities of the north up to the peaks of the Himalayas by way of Baroda, Jaipur, Delhi, Agra, Lucknow, Benares/Varanasi, Calcutta/Kolkata, Darjeeling, Lahore and Rawalpindi. Staying in the same Raj clubs, travelling down the same train lines, meeting the high and mighty and the downtrodden and destitute, Twain and Strathcarron are absorbed by an India that then was and now is 'not for the faint of heart nor mild of spirit nor weak of mind nor dull of sense nor correct of politic'; a rapidly changing yet still deeply traditional society where 'a few hundred million have grabbed the twenty-first century by the whiskers and many more hundred million still tuck the nineteenth century into bed at night'. Mark Twain loved the India of 1896; like his trilogist, he would love it still.

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