Henry James wrote of Venice: 'You desire to embrace it, to caress it, to possess it ...' whereas Mark Twain found St Mark's 'so ugly ...propped on its long row of thick-legged columns, its back knobbed with domes, it seems like a vast, warty bug taking a meditative walk'. Reactions to Venice have been, throughout the ages, astonishingly different. John Julius Norwich has put together a dazzling anthology, drawing on the writings of Byron, Goethe, Wagner, Casanova, Jan Morris, Robert Browning and...
"A walking tour of the Portland, Oregon neighborhood where Beverly Cleary spent her childhood and the landmarks, sights, and natural features that inspired her beloved children's books about Ramona, Beezus, and Henry Huggins"--
Artists and writers from the colder climes of northern Europe have long felt the lure of the South of the continent. Goethe was revitalised by his encounters with Mediterranean culture on his journey to Italy. Nietzsche took flight to the south to begin his life anew. D H Lawrence sought the health-giving southern sun in Sicily and Sardinia. Over many years, other versions of the South have also held their own fascination. The South Seas cast a spell over writers like Herman Melville and Robert...
Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850 1914
by Alexis Easley
This study examines literary celebrity in Britain from 1850 to 1914 with chapters focused on a variety of Victorian authors, including Charles Dickens, Harriet Martineau, and Octavia Hill. Through lively analysis of rare cultural materials, Easley demonstrates the crucial role of the celebrity author in the formation of British national identity. As Victorians toured the homes and haunts of famous writers, they developed a sense of shared national heritage. At the same time, by reading sensation...
The Literary Guide and Companion to Middle England
by Robert M. Cooper
Cooper's The Literary Guide and Companion to Southern England has been popular with travellers since 1986. This, the second guide in a series of three, brings all Cooper's delight and enthusiasm to the literary sites of Middle England. The author takes us through fourteen counties in the heart of England, engaging us with anecdotes of local literary figures, pointing out the homes, pubs, hotels, and places (fact and fictional) of all sorts that have connections to writers, their families, their...
Rambunctious ... Ten Tales of Twisted Travel and Tangled Thought
by Jefferson Rose
Henri Michaux (1899-1984), the great French poet and painter, set out as a young man to see the Far East. Traveling from India to the Himalayas, and on to China and Japan, Michaux voices his vivid impressions, cutting opinions, and curious insights: he has no trouble speaking his mind. Part fanciful travelogue and part exploration of culture, A Barbarian in Asia is presented here in its original translation by Sylvia Beach, the famous American-born bookseller in Paris.
Every great city is a restless work in progress, but nowhere is the urban impulse more in flux than in Berlin, that sprawling metropolis located on the fault line of history. A short-lived fever-dream of modernity in the Roaring Twenties, redubbed Germania and primped up into the megalomaniac fantasy of a Thousand-Year Reichstadt in the Thirties, reduced in 1945 to a divided rubble heap, subsequently revived in a schizoid state of post-World War II duality, and reunited in 1989 when the wall cam...
The Harbours of England (The Complete Works of John Ruskin -, #13)
by John Ruskin
North Carolina's Literary Luminaries and the Bookshops That Love Them, Calendar 2019
Michael Palin tackles the full length of the Himalaya in this terrific number one bestseller.Having risen to the challenge of seas, poles, dhows and deserts, the highest mountains in the world were a natural target for Michael Palin. In a journey rarely, if ever, attempted before, in 6 months of hard travelling Palin takes on the full length of the Himalaya including the Khyber Pass, the hidden valleys of the Hindu Kush, ancient cities like Peshawar and Lahore, the mighty peaks of K2, Annapurna...
Beyond Belief is a book about one of the more important and unsettling issues of our time. But it is not a book of opinion. It is, in the Naipaul way, a very rich and human book, full of people and their stories: stories of family, both broken and whole; of religion and nation; and of the constant struggle to create a world of virtue and prosperity in equal measure. Islam is an Arab religion, and it makes imperial Arabizing demands on its converts. In this way it is more than a private faith; an...