How the global tea industry influenced the international economy & the rise of mass consumerism Tea has been one of the most popular commodities in the world. Over centuries, profits from its growth & sales funded wars & fueled colonization, & its cultivation brought about massive changes--in land use, labor systems, market practices, & social hierarchies--the effects of which are with us even today. A Thirst for Empire takes a vast & in-depth historical look at how men & women--through the tea industry in Europe, Asia, North America, & Africa--transformed global tastes & habits & in the process created our modern consumer society. As Erika Rappaport shows, between the seventeenth & twentieth centuries the boundaries of the tea industry & the British Empire overlapped but were never identical, & she highlights the economic, political, & cultural forces that enabled the British Empire to dominate--but never entirely control--the worldwide production, trade, & consumption of tea. Rappaport delves into how Europeans adopted, appropriated, & altered Chinese tea culture to build a widespread demand for tea in Britain & other global markets & a plantation-based economy in South Asia & Africa. Tea was among the earliest colonial industries in which merchants, planters, promoters, & retailers used imperial resources to pay for global advertising & political lobbying. The commercial model that tea inspired still exists & is vital for understanding how politics & publicity influence the international economy. An expansive & original global history of imperial tea, A Thirst for Empire demonstrates the ways that this fluid & powerful enterprise helped shape the contemporary world. ...

A Thousand days in Tuscany by Marlena de Blasi is the story of Marlena & her Venetian husb&, Fernando, as they make a life for themselves on a forgotten patch of Earth where Tuscany, Umbria & Lazio collide. Amongst the many people they befriend is Barluzzo, an old sage who takes the couple under his wing & initiates them in the age-old traditions of Tuscan life: since their house lacks electricity, he helps them build a traditional brick oven in the garden; in autumn he wakes them at dawn to gather chestnuts & porcini mushrooms, & at the onset of winter he takes them to pull grapes from the vines & beat olives from the trees. Beautifully written & richly seasoned with mouth-watering recipes of the region, this book is filled with the carpe diem attitude that so captivated readers of A Thousand Days in Venice. ...

When Fernando spots her in a Venice cafe & knows immediately that she is The One, Marlena de Blasi is caught off guard. A divorced American woman travelling through Italy, she thought she was satisfied with her life. Yet within a few months, she quits her job as a chef, sells her house, kisses her two grown-up kids goodbye, & moves to Venice. Once there, she finds herself sitting in sugar-scented pasticcerie, strolling through sixteenth-century palazzi, renovating an apartment overlooking the seductive Adriatic Sea, & preparing to wed a virtual stranger in an ancient stone church. As this transplanted American learns the hard way about the peculiarities of Venetian culture, we are treated to an honest, often comic view of how two middle-aged people, both set in their ways but also set on being together, build a life. A THOUSAND DAYS IN VENICE is filled with the foods & flavours of Italy & peppered with recipes & culinary observations. But the main course here is about a woman who falls in love with both a man & a city, & finally finds the home she didn`t know she was missing. ...

An intimate portrait of five inextricably linked lives, spanning one calendar year at Kew Gardens
- an exquisite, strange & beautiful
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Mariam is only fifteen when she is sent to Kabul to marry Rasheed. Nearly two decades later, a friendship grows between Mariam & a local teenager, Laila, as strong as the ties between mother & daughter. When the Taliban take over, life becomes a desperate struggle against starvation, brutality & fear. Yet love can move a person to act in unexpected ways, & lead them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with a startling heroism. ...

Children can make their own beautiful pop-up book using this imaginative kit, a little glue & by following simple step-by-step instructions. The result is a series of magical gardens
- French, Japanese, Arabian, tropical & dreamlike
- through which a mysterious tiger wonders. Brief texts introduce readers to the various types of gardens. Inspired by the late artist Derek Jarman`s unique garden on the coast of Kent, Engl&, this marvellous do-it-yourself book will provide readers with a product they can return to again & again
- & perhaps even the tools to create their very own pop-up book design.


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In seven works of non-fiction, especially in ” Birders” & the universally acclaimed ” Birds Britannica”, Mark Cocker has established himself as one of the foremost writers on nature & wilderness. In his most lyrical work to date, he has drawn together the best of his writing on wildlife, mainly taken from columns for the ” Guardian” & ” Guardian Weekly.” These carefully distilled articles, over a hundred in all, illustrate some of his most enduring themes over the last twenty years
- the magical dynamism of birds, as well as the subtle beauty, vast skies & wildlife riches of the Norfolk landscape. In its celebration of the natural world, the hugely varied selection also demonstrates a concern to champion the despised & neglected
- rats, gulls, crows (the ` Black Beasts` of his first section)
- as much as it explores some of the most charismatic creatures on Earth
- penguins, whales, lions & elephants. Cocker is equally good at evoking the commonplace mysteries of garden blackbirds & thrush`s song, as he is the exotic otherness of mountain gorillas or the one-horned rhinoceros. With its attention to detail, especially the sharpness of perception & the precise use of language, the writing in ”A Tiger in the Sand” shows qualities more usually associated with poetry than with prose.



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What if God exists? What if angels are real? What if we treated religious tracts, including the Bible, as empirical evidence of the supernatural world? Karl Ove Knausgaard`s major novel, A Time For Everything, is about God & his angels. It posits that angels are real, & that God exists. It posits, further, that heavenly beings evolve, & that even God may be subject to change. Written with Knausgaard`s characteristic style
- level, patient, & intensely readable
- it is a dazzling & innovative examination of the relationships between human, angels & God.

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Rowena Farre led a double life while studying art in London as a young woman. For months on end she would disappear to Scotland or the English-Welsh borderlands, where she lived as part of a Gypsy community. Here she met different kinds of travellers
- tramps & mumpers, tinkers & didikais, & the enigmatic Romanies
- all living on the fringes of society. She found it an uncertain existence of hard work & modest means, fruit-picking, labouring on farms, hawking goods from village to village. But she also found a life of rewarding friendships, unusual freedom, & even love. Written by a woman who refused to acknowledge the social divisions that keep us apart, A Time From the World is an intimate account of a nomadic culture that is repeatedly sensationalised, glamourised, demonised, & just plain misunderstood. Rowena Farre was a remarkable woman, a traveller in the truest sense, whose life was driven by an enduring curiosity in her fellow human beings.

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Doreen Ingrams & her husband were the first Europeans ever to live in the Hadhramaut, an extraordinary, isolated region of southern Arabia. Married to an Arabic-speaking British official, she arrived by boat, & during their ten-year residency travelled throughout the region by camel & donkey. Doreen kept a diary in which she detailed their adventures & described her unequalled access to the domestic quarters, to the women & children, the food, the scents, secrets, jewels & privileges of this extraordinarily rich traditional society. ”A Time in Arabia” is a precious document
- part history, part time-travel, seen through the eyes of a decent, modest & compassionate woman.
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