Norman Lewis arrives in war-torn Naples as an intelligence officer in 1944. The starving population has devoured all the tropical fish in the aquarium, respectable women have been driven to prostitution and the black market is king. Lewis finds little to admire in his fellow soldiers, but gains sustenance from the extraordinary vivacity of the Italians. There is the lawyer who earns his living bringing a touch of Roman class to funerals, the gynaecologist who "specializes in the restoration of lost virginity" and the widowed housewife who times her British lover against the clock. "Were I given the chance to be born again," writes Lewis, "Italy would be the country of my choice."

Norman Lewis was eighty-three years old when in 1991 he embarked on a series of three arduous journeys into the most contentious corners of Indonesia: into the extreme western edge of Sumatra, into East Timor and Irian Jaya. He never drops his guard, reporting only on what he can observe, and using his well-honed tools of irony, humour and restraint to assess the power of the ruling Javanese generals who for better or worse took over the 300-year old dominion of the exploitative Dutch colonial regime. An Empire of the East is the magnificent swan-song of Britain's greatest travel writer: unearthing the decimation of the tropical rain forests in Sumatra, the all but forgotten Balinese massacre of the communists in 1965, the shell-shocked destruction of East Timor, the stone-age hunter-gathering culture of the Yali tribe (in western Papua New Guinea) and perhaps most chilling of all, his visit to the Freeport Copper mine in the sky - which is like a foretaste of the film Avatar - but this time the bad guys, complete with a well-oiled publicity department, triumph. He left us with a brilliant book, that reveals his passion for justice and his delight in every form of human society and still challenges our complacency and indifference.

A loving take on an extraordinary island, based on Norman Lewis's sixty-year fascination with all things Sicilian. Dedicated to a Sicilian journalist killed by a Mafia bomb, Lewis rarely lets us forget the presence of organized crime. We benefit from his friendships with policemen, journalists, and common people. Moreover, he writes beautifully of landscape and language, of his memories of his first father-in-law (professional gambler, descendant of princes and member of the Unione Siciliana), of Sicily's changing sexual mores, of the effects of African immigration, of Palermo and its ruined palaces - and of strange superstitions, witches, bandits, and murder.

"Voices of the Old Sea" is Lewis' masterly description of the Costa Brava on the cusp of tourist development in the 1950s, a place where men regulated their lives by the sardine shoals of spring and autumn and the tuna fishing of summer, and where women kept goats and gardens, arranged marriages and made ends meet.

Like most travelers in Burma, Norman Lewis fell in love with the land and its people. Although much of the countryside was under the control of insurgent armies--the book was originally published in 1952--he managed, by steamboat, decrepit lorry, and dacoit-besieged train, to travel almost everywhere he wanted. This perseverance enabled him to see brilliant spectacles that are still out of our reach, and to meet all types of Burmese, from District officers to the inmates of Rangoon's jail. All the color, gaiety, and charm of the East spring to life with this master storyteller.

the best book on the Mafia in Sicily - its origins, its code of honour, its secrecy and its brutality. A chilling insight. - reveals how Mafia violence and corruption crept even into every aspect of Sicilian society, including the police and the church - and how this was only possible with the help of the American army, who gave the Mafia, by then all but destroyed by the Fascist government, the kiss of life when they occupied the island in 1943 - the perfect companion for any traveller to Sicily, and a gripping armchair read

a poignant description of Cambodia, Laos & Vietnam in 1950, with all their beauty, gentleness, grandeur and intricate political balance intact - Restores this lost world, like a phoenix, from the ashes of the Vietnam war and its aftermath - shows the Vietnamese guerilla movement in its infancy, ranged against the French colonial powers, and the early affects of imported Western materialism - a best-seller when first published, and venerated by all the Saigon-based war correspondents in the '70s - inspired Graham Greene to go to Vietnam and write The Quiet American

In "The Missionaries", Norman Lewis brings together a lifetime's experience of travelling in tribal lands in a searing condemnation of the lethal impact of North American fundamentalist Christian missionaries on aboriginal life throughout the world.

In "Jackdaw Cake" Norman Lewis recounts the first half of his adventurous life with dry, infectious, laconic wit, observing the transformation of a stammering schoolboy into a worldly wise multilingual intelligence agent on the point of becoming a formidable travel writer.

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.

It is satisfying, and entirely in keeping with the mischievous character of Norman Lewis, that his very last book, The Tomb in Seville, is also his first. For the extraordinary set of misadventures recounted in The Tomb of Seville were first described in Norman Lewis's apprentice-work, Spanish Adventure, which he rightly refused to have re-issued in later life. In 1934 he travelled across the breadth of Spain into Morocco. The eve of the murderous civil war. He was acting as both friend and fellow-adventurer to his young brother-in-law, Eugene Corvaja, but also as minder, charged by his Sicilian father-in-law with keeping an eye on his son, who he knew to be a compassionate idealist easily attracted to left-wing causes. Norman, of course, had his own agenda, though the outward mission of this unlikely pair was to locate the tomb of the last Spanish Corvaja in the Cathedral of Seville. As an old man, he 'twice distilled' these powerful lifelong memories to create a slim, sharpened text, with all the bite of a vintage Norman Lewis. Other Norman Lewis titles published by Eland: Jackdaw Cake, The Missionaries, Voices of the Old Sea, A View of The World, Naples' 44, Dragon Apparent, Golden Earth, The Honoured Society and The Empire of the East.

The increased knowledge about the structure of genomes in a number of species, about the complexity of transcriptomes, and the rapid growth in knowledge about mutant phenotypes have set off the large scale use of transgenes to answer basic biological questions, and to generate new crops and novel products. This volume includes twelve chapters, which to variable degrees describe the use of transgenic plants to explore possibilities and approaches for the modification of plant metabolism, adaptation or development. The interests of the authors range from tool development, to basic biochemical know-how about the engineering of enzymes, to exploring avenues for the modification of complex multigenic pathways, and include several examples for the engineering of specific pathways in different organs and developmental stages.
* Prologue by Paul K. Stumpf and Eric E. Conn
* Incorporates new concepts and insights in plant biochemistry and biology
* Provides a conceptual framework regarding the challenges faced in engineering pathways
* Discusses potential in engineering of metabolic end-products that are of vast economical importance, including genetic engineering of cellulose, seed storage proteins, and edible and industrial oils