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Books > Sport & Leisure > Travel & holiday > Travel writing > Classic travel writing
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My Unknown Chum
(Paperback)
Aguecheek; Foreword by Henry Garrity; Charles Bullard Fairbanks
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R643
Discovery Miles 6 430
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Lose yourself in the thrilling political intrigue and tangled love
affairs of wartime Egypt: Durrell's epic modern classic, introduced
by Alaa Al Aswany (bestselling author of The Yacoubian Building).
Every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position ...
As the threat of world war looms over the city of Alexandria, an
exiled Anglo-Irish schoolteacher unravels his erotic obsession with
two women: Melissa, a fragile dancer, and Justine, a glamorous
married Egyptian woman. Through conversations with Balthazar, a
doctor and mystic, these intricate love affairs are cast in an
ominous, sinister new light, as his private fixations become
entangled with a mysterious murder plot ... One of the twentieth
century's greatest masterpieces, rich in political and sexual
intrigue, Lawrence Durrell's 'investigation of modern love' in the
Alexandria Quartet set the world alight. Published in 1958, a year
after the sensational Justine, the kaleidoscopic Balthazar burns
just as brightly today. 'Legendary ... Casts a spell ... A fine
storyteller. Reader, watch out!' Jan Morris, Guardian 'A brave and
brazen work ... Lush and grandiose.' Independent 'One of the very
best novelists of our time ... [such] beauty.' New York Times Book
Review VOLUME TWO OF LAWRENCE DURRELL'S ALEXANDRIA QUARTET
'Oliver is an evocative storyteller, vividly bringing his tales to
life' BBC History From Genghis Khan's domination on earth to
Armstrong's first steps on the moon, discover the 100 moments that
defined humanity and shaped our world forever. Neil Oliver takes us
on a whistle-stop tour around the world and through a million years
to give us this unique and invaluable grasp of how human history
pieces together. From the east to the west, north to south, these
100 moments act like stepping stones allowing us to make sense of
how these pivotal events have shaped the world we know today.
Including many moments readers will expect - from the advent of the
printing press to the birth of the internet - there are also
surprises, and with them, some remarkable, unforgettable stories
that give a whole new insight on our past. From the bestselling
author of The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places, this is
outstanding new history of how our world was made from 5000 BC to
the present. ********************* Praise for Neil Oliver 'Neil
Oliver writes beautifully - bringing the past to life and letting
us see ourselves in a new light.' - Professor Alice Roberts
'Brilliantly demonstrates Neil's mastery of the broad sweep of
British history and landscape.' - Dan Snow 'Highly-crafted...a
vivid, pungent history.' - TLS 'Compelling' - Daily Mail
At the height of his career, around the time he was working on
Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens wrote a
series of sketches, mostly set in London, which he collected as The
Uncommercial Traveller. In the persona of 'the Uncommercial',
Dickens wanders the city streets and brings London, its
inhabitants, commerce and entertainment vividly to life. Sometimes
autobiographical, as childhood experiences are interwoven with
adult memories, the sketches include visits to the Paris Morgue,
the Liverpool docks, a workhouse, a school for poor children, and
the theatre. They also describe the perils of travel, including
seasickness, shipwreck, the coming of the railways, and the
wretchedness of dining in English hotels and restaurants. The work
is quintessential Dickens, with each piece showcasing his
imaginative writing style, his keen observational powers, and his
characteristic wit. In this edition Daniel Tyler explores Dickens's
fascination with the city and the book's connections with concerns
evident in his fiction: social injustice, human mortality, a
fascination with death and the passing of time. Often funny,
sometimes indignant, always exuberant, The Uncommercial Traveller
is a revelatory encounter with Dickens, and the Victorian city he
knew so well.
Gijsbert Heeck (1619-1669) was a medicinal specialist with the
Dutch East India Company (VOC). His journal is based on the daily
notes he made during his third trip to the East. This volume
carries the selections from his journal that deal with Siam,
accompanied by the original Dutch text. Heeck reveals how Siamese
authorities reacted to a violent confrontation between the Dutch
and the Portuguese. He gives a detailed description of the Dutch
lodge in Ayutthaya, and also bits of information on the
relationships of local Dutch men with indigenous women. His record
of villages along the Chao Phraya River specializing in the making
of coffins, preparing and selling firewood, painting, and producing
earthenware, signal the existence of a complex economy in this part
of Siam. Compared with the other seventeenth-century descriptions
primarily of the landscape, Heeck's journals provide more
information on population, scenery, traffic, trade, and religious
establishments than all the others combined. He also provides a
unique early perspective on local social arrangements and political
intrigue, and on interactions between the Dutch and the locals.
Barend Jan Terwiel recently published Thailand's Political History:
From the Fall of Ayutthaya until Recent Times.
Until the 1880s, British travellers to Arabia were for the most
part wealthy dilettantes who could fund their travels from private
means. With the advent of an Imperial presence in the region, as
the British seized power in Egypt, the very nature of travel to the
Middle East changed. Suddenly, ordinary men and women found
themselves visiting the region as British influence increased.
Missionaries, soldiers and spies as well as tourists and explorers
started to visit the area, creating an ever bigger supply of
writers, and market for their books. In a similar fashion, as the
Empire receded in the wake of World War II, so did the whole
tradition of Middle East travel writing. In this elegantly crafted
book, James Canton examines over one hundred primary sources, from
forgotten gems to the classics of T E Lawrence, Thesiger and
Philby. He analyses the relationship between Empire and author,
showing how the one influenced the other, leading to a vast array
of texts that might never have been produced had it not been for
the ambitions of Imperial Britain. This work makes for essential
reading for all of those interested in the literature of Empire,
travel writing and the Middle East.
Within 'Sirens and Seriemas', Paul Brooke explores the wild places
of Brazil through photography and poetry. A former biologist and
naturalist, Brooke travelled the Amazon and Pantanal regions of
Brazil studying culture, history and natural history. The poems
address pressing environmental issues such as deforestation,
extinction, overhunting, overpopulation, urbanization and wildness.
The photographs chronicle the amazing beauty and danger, the
culture of Amazonian peoples and multi-colored landscapes.
The small, handwritten volume which is Robert Marten's diary of his
travels in East Anglia is carefully conserved in the Norfolk Record
Office. Marten writes of Great Yarmouth, where he landed after the
journey by steamer from London, of Norwich as the county town of
Norfolk and of Cromer, where he and his family enjoyed several days
exploring. His picture of the county in September 1825, combined
with the detail in his pencil sketches, reveals an early 19th
century world to us. Editor Elizabeth Larby has carefully annotated
the text, providing a context to further our understanding of the
journey and the age.
Sybille Bedford once wrote that travel writing is inseparable from
the writer's tastes, idiosyncrasies, and general temperament - it
is what happens to him when he is confronted with a column, a bird,
a sage, a cheat, a riot; wine, fruit, dirt; the delay in the dirt,
the failing airplane. 'Pleasures and Landscapes' is what happened
to Mrs Bedford when, at the peak of her literary powers, she
traveled through France, Italy, and the rest of Europe for Vogue,
Esquire, and other magazines - eight classic essays that secure her
a place at the table with A.J. Liebling and M.F.K. Fisher.
In the summer of 1883 Belgian travel writer Jules Leclercq spent
ten days on horseback in Yellowstone, the world's first national
park, exploring myriad natural wonders: astonishing geysers,
majestic waterfalls, the vast lake, and the breathtaking canyon. He
also recorded the considerable human activity, including the
rampant vandalism. Leclercq's account of his travels is itself a
small marvel blending natural history, firsthand impressions,
scientific lore, and anecdote. Along with his observations on the
park's long-rumoured fountains of boiling water and mountains of
glass, Leclercq describes camping near geysers, washing clothes in
a bubbling hot spring, and meeting such diverse characters as local
guides and tourists from the United States and Europe. Notables
including former president Ulysses S. Grant and then-president
Chester A. Arthur were also in the park that summer to inaugurate
the newly completed leg of the Northern Pacific Railroad. A
sensation in Europe, the book was never published in English. This
deft translation at long last makes available to English-speaking
readers a masterpiece of western American travel writing that is a
fascinating historical document in its own right.
In 1907 J. M. Synge achieved both notoriety and lasting fame with The Playboy of the Western World. The Aran Islands, published in the same year, records his visits to the islands in 1898-1901, when he was gathering the folklore and anecdotes out of which he forged The Playboy and his other major dramas. Yet this book is much more than a stage in the evolution of Synge the dramatist. As Tim Robinson explains in his introduction, 'If Ireland is intriguing as being an island off the west of Europe, then Aran, as an island off the west of Ireland, is still more so; it is Ireland raised to the power of two.' Towards the end of the last century Irish nationalists came to identify the area as the country's uncorrupted heart, the repository of its ancient language, culture and spiritual values. It was for these reasons that Yeats suggested Synge visit the islands to record their way of life. The result is a passionate exploration of a triangle of contradictory relationships - between an island community still embedded in its ancestral ways but solicited by modernism, a physical environment of ascetic loveliness and savagely unpredictable moods, and Synge himself, formed by modern European thought but in love with the primitive.
In 1598 merchants of the City of London paid for a Present to be
given by Queen Elizabeth to Sultan Mehmet III of Turkey. In return
the merchants hoped to secure trading concessions, and the Virgin
Queen to turn the Sultan's military might on her Spanish enemies.
The Present was a carved, painted and gilded cabinet about sixteen
feet high, six feetwideand five feet deep. It contained a chiming
clock with jewel-encrusted moving figures combined with an
automatic organ, which could play tunes on its own for six hours -
or by hand to the point of exhaustion. The Present was dismantled
and dispatched on a merchant ship early in 1599. It took six months
to get from London to Constantinople. With it went four craftsmen.
They were Thomas Dallam the organ builder, John Harvey the
engineer, Michael Watson the carpenter and Rowland Buckett the
painter. Dallam was just twenty four years old. On their odyssey
they encountered storms, volcanoes, exotic animals, foreign food,
good wine, pirates, brigands, Moors, Turks, Greeks, Jews, beautiful
women, barbarous men, kings and pashas, armies on the march,
janissaries, eunuchs, slaves, dwarves and finally the most powerful
man in the known world, the Great Turk himself. Faithfully
translated into modern prose, unembellished and unedited, this
illuminating historical source reads as if its Elizabethan author
were alive today.
West Africa in the 1970s was a volatile melange of old and new; of
aspiration, corruption, power and influence. In its midst, Ian
Mathie laboured in his role as a water engineer to help improve the
lives of ordinary people. His work brought him in contact with
presidents, kings, emperors, chiefs and a succession of
extraordinary characters. Circumstances contrived to place him at
dinners with four heads of state whose rule had immense impact,
positive and negative, on their countries and on West and Central
Africa: Mobutu of Zaire, Traore of Mali, Senghor of Senegal and
Eyadema of Togo. In 'Supper with the President', he recalls the
events and the insights they gave him, interweaving those
experiences with true stories of other extraordinary brushes with
sorcery, slavery, wildlife conservation, desert travel and a
jail-break that could only happen in Africa.
A remarkable collection of charming and eloquent letters that
contain the seeds of Tocqueville's later masterful account of
American democracy Young Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in the
United States for the first time in May 1831, commissioned by the
French government to study the American prison system. For the next
nine months he and his companion, Gustave de Beaumont, traveled and
observed not only prisons but also the political, economic, and
social systems of the early republic. Along the way, they
frequently reported back to friends and family members in France.
This book presents the first translation of the complete letters
Tocqueville wrote during that seminal journey, accompanied by
excerpts from Beaumont's correspondence that provide details or
different perspectives on the places, people, and American life and
attitudes the travelers encountered. These delightful letters
provide an intimate portrait of the complicated, talented
Tocqueville, who opened himself without prejudice to the world of
Jacksonian America. Moreover, they contain many of the impressions
and ideas that served as preliminary sketches for Democracy in
America, his classic account of the American democratic system that
remains an important reference work to this day. Accessible, witty,
and charming, the letters Tocqueville penned while in America are
of major interest to general readers, scholars, and students alike.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, travelling within North
American borders or beyond to exotic locations was difficult at
best and disastrous at worst. Mary Schaffer, born into a
Pennsylvania-based Quaker family in 1861, not only conquered
international travel but also excelled as an explorer, surveyor and
photographer in the backcountry of Canada's Rocky Mountains and the
isolated communities of Japan and Formosa (now Taiwan). Michale
Lang's new book features more than 200 of Mary Schaffer's
colourful, hand-painted lantern slides from the archives of the
Whyte Musem of the Canadian Rockies. These unique works of art
detail some of the indigenous people and breathtaking landscapes of
the Rocky Mountains, along with tribal communities of Japan and
Formosa. Schaffer's writing, Michale Lang's accompanying narrative
and the book's overall design (inspired by the work of Barbara
Hodgson, author and designer of "The Tattooed Map," "No Place for a
Lady and Opium") opens a unique window on the Victorian obsession
with international travel and discovery.
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