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.

The pioneering autobiographical story of a British Zionist in her fifties who moves to Israel and chooses to live among 25,000 Muslims in the all-Arab Israeli town of Tamra, a few miles from Nazareth. Susan Nathan's revelatory book about her new life across the ethnic divide in Israel is already creating international interest. At a time when Middle Eastern politics (in many ways central to the current world disorder) have become mired in endless tit-for-tat killings, Susan Nathan is showing - by her own daily example - that it is perfectly possible for Jews and Arabs to live peacefully together in a single community, recognising their common humanity. The author's familiarity with the former injustices of apartheid South Africa enables her to draw telling comparisons with the state of Israel. The increasing segregation of, and discrimintation against, the million-strong Arabic population of Israel is something she witnesses at first hand, but in describing her experiences in Tamra she is as observant of Arab frailties as of Jewish oppression. Written with warmth, compassion and humour, 'The Other Side of Israel' is one courageous woman's positive life-enhancing response to a situation in which entrenched attitudes lead only to more violence and bloodshed.

This book covers the two most famous expeditions of the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration: Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova expedition of 1910-12 and Ernest Shackleton's Endurance expedition of 1914-16. It focuses not only on the two expeditions, but also on the ways in which the reputations of the men who led them have evolved over the course of the last century. For decades after Scott's tragic death on the return journey from the South Pole - to which he had been beaten by only five weeks - he was regarded as a saint-like figure with an unassailable reputation born from his heroic martyrdom in the frozen wastes of the Antarctic.In recent years, however, Scott has attracted some of the most intense criticism any explorer has ever received. Shackleton's reputation, meanwhile, has followed a reverse trajectory. Although his achievements were always appreciated, they were never celebrated with nearly the same degree of adulation that traditionally surrounded Scott. But in the final decades of the twentieth century Shackleton has come to be regarded as the beau ideal of the heroic explorer, a man capable of providing leadership lessons not only for other explorers but also for corporate executives and politicians.Today, Scott and Shackleton therefore occupy very different places in the polar pantheon than they once did. This change has come about with little new information about either man or the expeditions they led coming to light. Their actions and personalities, their virtues and flaws, have not changed. How, when and why attitudes towards Scott and Shackleton have altered over the course of the twentieth century forms the subject of this book. It explores how the evolution of their reputations has far more to do with broader cultural changes in Britain and the United States.

No railway journey on Earth can equal the Trans-Siberian between Moscow and Vladivostok. It is not just its vast length and the great variety of the lands and climes through which it passes. It is not just its history as the line that linked the huge territories which are Russia together. It is a dream which calls countless travellers to the adventure of the longest railway in the world. This new edition of a classic anthology takes us through the tremendous achievement of the railways construction across harsh, unsettled lands through the earliest journeys of Western travellers and the trains on which they travelled, and their descriptions of fellow travellers, food, scenery, domestic arrangements, adventures on and off the train, convicts, revolution and war as the train carried them through a lonely, lovely landscape.

This volume focuses on how travel writing contributed to cultural and intellectual exchange in and between the Dutch- and German-speaking regions from the 1790s to the twentieth-century interwar period. Drawing on a hitherto largely overlooked body of travelers whose work ranges across what is now Germany and Austria, the Netherlands and Dutch-speaking Belgium, the Dutch East Indies and Suriname, the contributors highlight the interrelations between the regional and the global and the role alterity plays in both spheres. They therefore offer a transnational and transcultural perspective on the ways in which the foreign was mediated to audiences back home. By combining a narrative perspective on travel writing with a socio-historically contextualized approach, essays emphasize the importance of textuality in travel literature as well as the self-positioning of such accounts in their individual historical and political environments. The first sustained analysis to focus specifically on these neighboring cultural and linguistic areas, this collection demonstrates how topographies of knowledge were forged across these regions by an astonishingly diverse range of travelling individuals from professional scholars and writers to art dealers, soldiers, (female) explorers, and scientific collectors. The contributors address cultural, aesthetic, political, and gendered aspects of travel writing, drawing productively on other disciplines and areas of scholarly research that encompass German Studies, Low Countries Studies, comparative literature, aesthetics, the history of science, literary geography, and the history of publishing.

This volume examines the hotel experience of Anglo-American travelers in the nineteenth century from the viewpoint of literary and cultural studies as well as spatiality theory. Focusing on the social and imaginary space of the hotel in fiction, periodicals, diaries, and travel accounts, the essays shed new light on nineteenth-century notions of travel writing. Analyzing the liminal space of the hotel affords a new way of understanding the freedoms and restrictions felt by travelers from different social classes and nations. As an environment that forced travelers to reimagine themselves or their cultural backgrounds, the hotel could provide exhilarating moments of self-discovery or dangerous feelings of alienation. It could prove liberating to the tourist seeking an escape from prescribed gender roles or social class constructs. The book addresses changing notions of nationality, social class, and gender in a variety of expansive or oppressive hotel milieu: in the private space of the hotel room and in the public spaces (foyers, parlors, dining areas). Sections address topics including nationalism and imperialism; the mundane vs. the supernatural; comfort and capitalist excess; assignations, trysts, and memorable encounters in hotels; and women's travels. The book also offers a brief history of inns and hotels of the time period, emphasizing how hotels play a large role in literary texts, where they frequently reflect order and disorder in a personal and/or national context. This collection will appeal to scholars in literature, travel writing, history, cultural studies, and transnational studies, and to those with interest in travel and tourism, hospitality, and domesticity.

To travel the Silk Road, the greatest land route on earth, is to trace the passage not only of trade and armies but also of ideas, religions, and inventions. Making his way by local bus, truck, car, donkey cart, and camel, Colin Thubron covered some seven thousand miles in eight months--out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran into Kurdish Turkey--and explored an ancient world in modern ferment.

The narrator arrives in his 117th rented room at the end of an epic journey, abandoned by his lover, almost broke and certainly feverish. His obsession with the insects he shares the room with and his beautifully articulated observations of himself on the edge of a physical and mental collapse extend out to include the insect-like habitues of the local cafe - the charlatans, the indolent landowners and even a levitating priest who has been dead for six years. This razor-sharp chronicle of experience, which grew out of Bouvier's seven-month stay on the island of Ceylon, shows that if you travel, you must be prepared to discover not only delights but also the worst as well.

'We have no idea how much resilience there is inside us until we have to draw on it. We learn that we grow through adversity only as we go through it. That we crave happiness like plants leaning toward the light'

When Susan quit her job in London and set sail off the south coast of England on her beloved sailboat, Isean, she was unaware this spontaneous departure would lead to a three-year journey spanning several countries across the continent.

With only the very basics on board, resourcefulness becomes an unexpected source of joy and contentment. The highs and lows of living in such an extreme way awakens a newfound appreciation for the beauty of her surroundings, for being safe - for just being alive.

For all the physical and navigational challenges of her journey, the other side of her story reveals a more important change - an inner journey - that took place along the way.

This wasn't merely a challenge, a mid-life adventure or gap-year career break; it was much gentler than that, but much greater too.

She was seeking nothing less than an entirely different life, having left the land far behind to call the wild, unbiddable sea home.

The 1930s were one of the most important decades in defining the history of the twentieth century. It saw the rise of right-wing nationalism, the challenge to established democracies and the full force of imperialist aggression. Cultural Encounters makes an important contribution to our understanding of the ideological and cultural forces which were active in defining notions of national identity in the 1930s. By examining the work of writers and journalists from a range of European countries who used the medium of travel writing to articulate perceptions of their own and other cultures, the book gives a comprehensive account of the complex intellectual climate of the 1930s.

'Killing It combines three popular, profound topics: where our food comes from, how to achieve purpose in life and how to find lasting love' - Sunday Times

After a career spent writing about food, Camas Davis came to a realization: she had never forced herself to grapple with how it actually got to her plate. Out of love with her life and with the world she found herself in, she knew she had to make a change.

And so she set off for France. There, in the rolling countryside of Gascony, she would learn the art of butchery, and with it the art of eating and drinking well. Surrounded by farmers, producers, cooks and food-lovers, eating some of the world's least processed and most lovingly made food, Camas discovered the very authenticity she'd longed for in her old life. She just needed to return to America, and bring what she'd learnt back with her . . .

Killing It is the story of one woman's quest to understand what it means to be human and what it means to be animal too.

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'We have lost touch with nature, rather foolishly as we are a part of it, not outside it. This will in time be over and then what? What have we learned?... The only real things in life are food and love, in that order, just like [for] our little dog Ruby... and the source of art is love. I love life.' DAVID HOCKNEY Praise for Spring Cannot be Cancelled: 'This book is not so much a celebration of spring as a springboard for ideas about art, space, time and light. It is scholarly, thoughtful and provoking' The Times 'Lavishly illustrated... Gayford is a thoughtfully attentive critic with a capacious frame of reference' Guardian 'Hockney and Gayford's exchanges are infused with their deep knowledge of the history of art ... This is a charming book, and ideal for lockdown because it teaches you to look harder at the things around you' Lynn Barber,The Spectator 'Designed to underscore [Hockney's] original message of hope, and to further explore how art can gladden and invigorate ... meanders amiably from Rembrandt, to the pleasure principle, andouillette sausages and, naturally, to spring' Daily Telegraph On turning eighty, David Hockney sought out rustic tranquillity for the first time: a place to watch the sunset and the change of the seasons; a place to keep the madness of the world at bay. So when Covid-19 and lockdown struck, it made little difference to life at La Grande Cour, the centuries-old Normandy farmhouse where Hockney set up a studio a year before, in time to paint the arrival of spring. In fact, he relished the enforced isolation as an opportunity for even greater devotion to his art. Spring Cannot be Cancelled is an uplifting manifesto that affirms art's capacity to divert and inspire. It is based on a wealth of new conversations and correspondence between Hockney and the art critic Martin Gayford, his long-time friend and collaborator. Their exchanges are illustrated by a selection of Hockney's new, unpublished Normandy iPad drawings and paintings alongside works by van Gogh, Monet, Bruegel, and others. We see how Hockney is propelled ever forward by his infectious enthusiasms and sense of wonder. A lifelong contrarian, he has been in the public eye for sixty years, yet remains entirely unconcerned by the view of critics or even history. He is utterly absorbed by his four acres of northern France and by the themes that have fascinated him for decades: light, colour, space, perception, water, trees. He has much to teach us, not only about how to see... but about how to live. With 142 illustrations in colour

This book is about the authora s amazing trip across six continents and the world economy and society. It discusses whoa s sinking and whoa s swimming, which countries are on the rise and which are collapsing, where you can make a million and where you could lose one. Every place he stopped on the trip, Rogers talked to businessmen, bankers, investors and regular people. He learned reams of information that youa d never learn from reading the financial pages of any periodical. Delivers a thrilling account of the journey of a lifetime and provides tips that would enable you to pay for a trip just like it.

In 1995, before leaving his much-loved home in North Yorkshire to move back to the States for a few years with his family, Bill Bryson insisted on taking one last trip around Britain, a sort of valedictory tour of the green and kindly island that had so long been his home. His aim was to take stock of the nation's public face and private parts (as it were), and to analyse what precisely it was he loved so much about a country that had produced Marmite; a military hero whose dying wish was to be kissed by a fellow named Hardy; place names like Farleigh Wallop, Titsey and Shellow Bowells; people who said 'Mustn't grumble', and 'Ooh lovely' at the sight of a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits; and Gardeners' Question Time. Notes from a Small Island was a huge number-one bestseller when it was first published, and has become the nation's most loved book about Britain, going on to sell over two million copies.

In June 2016, Rodrigo Duterte won the Philippine presidential election by a landslide. Infamous for his bombastic temper and un-PC wisecracks, he is waging a brutal drug war that has killed more than 12,000 people so far. Over the last nine years, British writer Tom Sykes has travelled extensively in the Philippines in order to understand the Duterte phenomenon, interviewing friends and enemies of 'The Punisher' -- as he is known -- in politics, the media, the arts and civil society. Sykes witnesses anti-government demonstrations in the capital Manila and visits the provincial city of Davao, where Duterte began his crusade against crime using police and vigilante death squads. By delving into Duterte's troubled childhood of violent rebellion, Sykes discovers what motivates the man today in his pursuit of a merciless 'war on the poor' -- as Amnesty has described it -- that has no end in sight. The Realm of the Punisher also examines oppressed and marginalized groups in the modern Philippines through encounters with a transgender rights campaigner, an 86-year-old former sex slave to the Japanese in the Second World War, a public artist who must work while under attack from Maoist rebels, and slum-dwellers resisting violent eviction by a real estate company. The past is never far away from these present-day problems and Sykes' travels to festivals, cemeteries, war memorials and a tomb housing an embalmed corpse reveal the ways in which key figures in Philippine history -- from Jose Rizal to Ferdinand Marcos -- have influenced current affairs. Funny, tragic, enlightening and uncompromising -- and infused with the author's strong sense of social justice -- The Realm of the Punisher is the first major travel book by a Westerner to explore Duterte's Philippines.