Penguin Handbooks
4 total works
The author lives part of each year in Turnac in the Dordogne, the region of France most visited by English tourists. This book combines scholarly, literary, gastronomic and historical perspectives, but is designed primarily to be useful and immediately accessible to a visitor who might know little or nothing about that part of France. Chapters on history, food and wine, architecture and so on will be followed by a detailed gazeteer based on major tourist centres.
In August 1990 East and West Germany signed a treaty of unification, to be ratified by the four World War II Allies. Already the border crossings had disappeared, and the infamous Berlin Wall had been virtually demolished. Opportunities for visiting East Germany are now unrivalled since the partition of the country. Still more visitors will pour into this part of Germany after custom and frontier controls are abolished. This book describes the landscape from the Baltic Coast, and the history of this part of Germany, looks at those who contributed to the country's tremendous cultural inheritance and the treasures of Saxony.
Alsace, the smallest of all French regions, is rich in towns and villages crammed with half-timbered houses, splendid churches, old inns and courtyards decked with begonia. Sheltered to the west by the wooded slopes of the Bosges, separated from Germany by the River Rhine, and watered by its tributaries, the land is famed not only for its seven noble wines and its beers but also for its unique food. James Bentley describes the great city of Strasbourg with its magnificent cathedral and it intimate, water-lapped quarter known as Petite France. It includes a description of Colmar, whose Unterlinden museum contains Grunewald's celebrated painting of a pock-marked, crucified Jesus and Haguenau, where the castle of Frederick Barbarossa became the prison of Richard Coeur de Lion.
