Kosovo: the name conjures up blood: ethnic cleansing and war. This book reveals another side to the newest country in the world a land of generous families, strong tastes and lush landscapes: a land of honey. Elizabeth Gowing is rushed to Kosovo, on a blind date with the place , when her partner is suddenly offered the position of adviser to Prime Minister Agim Ceku. Knowing nothing of the language or politics, she is thrown into a world of unpronounceable nouns, unfamiliar foods and bewilderingly hospitable people. On her first birthday in Kosovo she is given a beehive as a gift, and starts on a beekeeping apprenticeship with an unknown family; through their friendship and history she begins to understand her new home. Her apprenticeship leads her to other beekeepers too: retired guerrilla fighters, victims of human trafficking, political activists, a women's beekeeping group who teach her how to dance, and the Prime Minister himself. She dons a beekeeper's veil, sees the bees safely through winter, manages to use a smoker, learns about wicker skeps, gets stung, harvests her honey and drizzles it over everything. In between, she starts working at Pristina s forgotten Ethnological Museum, runs a project in a restored stone house below the Accursed Mountains and falls in love with a country she had known only as a war. Travels in Blood and Honey charts the author s journeys through Kosovo's countryside and its urban sprawl, its Serbs and Albanians, its history and heartache, its etymology and entomology, its sweet and its unsavoury. Describing new ways of living, and many new ways of cooking, the book contains traditional recipes, and the flavours of Turkish coffee, chestnut honey, and the iconic food called fli. It is a celebration of travel, adventure and the new tastes you can acquire far from home.

Philanthropy was an essential feature of the relationship between Dissent and the society from which it sometimes felt itself to be separate. This collection examines the contribution made by Dissenters from the Church of England to the history and development of charity and philanthropy in Britain from 1660 to the beginning of the twentieth century. It looks at the importance of charity and philanthropy in supporting Protestant Dissent and the causes with which it was associated; the part charity and philanthropy played in helping to fashion a self-identity for Dissent and for individual denominations; and the distinctive contributions made both by Dissenters generally and by particular denominations. Dissent and philanthropy intersect at many different points and levels: between the public and the private, the state and the individual, the voluntary and the organized. Philanthropy was an essential feature of the relationship between Dissent and the society from which it sometimes felt itself to be separate. Each chapter not only covers the contribution of a particular denomination but forms a case study of a wider aspect of charitable or philanthropic activity within Dissent as a whole. This volume is the first study which examines the contribution of Dissenters to charity and philanthropy, one of the most important developments in British society between the Restoration of Charles II and the outbreak of the First World War. CLYDE BINFIELD is Emeritus Professor in History at the University of Sheffield. His publications have concentrated on nonconformist history, in particular its social, cultural, and political contexts, from the late eighteenth century to the mid twentieth century. G. M. DITCHFIELD is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Kent. His publications include The Evangelical Revival, George III. An Essay in Monarchy, and The Letters of Theophilus Lindsey (1723-1808). DAVID L. WYKES is Director of Dr Williams's Trust and Library. He edited Parliament and Dissent with Stephen Taylor and, with Isabel Rivers, Joseph Priestley, Scientist, Philosopher, and Theologian and Dissenting Praise. CONTRIBUTORS: Clyde Binfield, John Briggs, Hugh Cunningham, G. M. Ditchfield, Jennifer Farooq, Mark Freeman, Elizabeth Gow, David Jeremy, Stephen Orchard, Alan Ruston, David L. Wykes

Elizabeth Gowing is not a likely yogini. She is too fond of cake and To-do lists, and sometimes falls over on her mat. But yoga has taken her on journeys both inside and out and now she follows yoga around Britain - from the village hall where a quivering triangle pose was interrupted by the council recycling collection to a sound gong bath in the country's noisiest city, from Cornwall to Scotland. She discovers prisoners finding solace in child's pose; children finding expression in dancer pose, and dancers sitting bendily in cobbler's pose. Her feet start to hurt and she realizes that yoga is a current of shared experience that runs quietly through British society, through Middle England to the nation's extremes from Newcastle to Nottingham, East Anglia to West Kilbride, she untangles the Ashtanga from the Kundalini, the Sanskrit from the whimsical new-age, and finds the ways that yoga is rebuilding communities and lives - and her own wobbling body. Sometimes funny, sometimes touching, Gowing evokes the characters and communities she meets along a fascinating journey in a celebration of ancient wisdom solving modern-day problems and the exultation of finally mastering the Crow.

M. Edith Durham is best known for her classic travel books about the Balkans. However, she was also a passionate, articulate and well-informed commentator on the twists and turns of Balkan politics and the machinations of the Great Powers. The pieces in this collection of her writings from the early half of the twentieth century remind us of the many connections between Britain and the Balkans over recent centuries -- of Tennyson, Disraeli, Lord Fitzmaurice, Aubrey Herbert and Margaret Hasluck. With its wide geographical sweep, the book offers a fair picture of the Balkans in the early twentieth century: Montenegro, Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania, Serbia are all represented -- their dangers and wonders, ugly brutality and startling beauty, history, custom, geography and politics. The anthology offers vivid pictures of Balkan locations which will be fascinating reading for anyone interested in modern Balkan history.