Maugham spent the winter months of 1919-20 travelling 1500 miles up the Yangtze river. Always more interested in people than places he gave full rein to a sensitive & philosophical nature: ON A CHINESE SCREEN is the refined accumulation of the countless scraps of paper on which he had taken notes. A series of acute & finely crafted sketches of Westerners who are culturally out of their depth in the immensity of the Chinese civilisation. Within the narrow confines of their colonial milieu, missionaries, consuls, army officers & company managers are all gently ridiculed as they persist obliviously with the life they know ...

This is the first travel book that tested the idea that a five-year-old daughter makes for a useful international travelling companion. Together Dervla Murphy & her daughter Rachel with little money, no taste for luxury & few concrete plans meander their way slowly south from Bombay to the southernmost point of India, Cape Comorin. Interested in everything they see, but only truly enchanted by people, they stay in fisherman`s huts & no-star hotels, travelling in packed-out buses, on foot & by local boats. Instead of pressing ever onwards, like so many travellers, they double back to the place they liked most, the hill province of Coorg & settle down to live there for two months. Anchored by her daughter`s delight in the company of her Indian neighbours, Dervla Murphy creates an extraordinarily affectionate portrait of these cardamon-scented, spiritually & agriculturally self- sufficient Highlands. If travel is underwritten by an unwitting search for a lost paradise, this is a quest that was achieved
- made possible with the right sort of travelling companion.
...

When writer & intrepid traveller Sarah Woods set about discovering the jungles of Central & South America, her quest
- to catch
...

In On Anarchism, Noam Chomsky
- author, activist & anarchist
- offers a vital overview of the meanings of anarchism & the

...

One cold Christmas night, a shepherd recounts the magical story of how he came to be the first visitor to the newborn Christ child
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...

On Beauty is Zadie Smith’s wonderful homage to Howard’s End & it provides plenty of parallels for devotees to spot while remaining greatly enjoyable on its own terms. The action has transferred to New Engl&, with some taking place in London, & concerns a pair of feuding families embroiled in a clutch of doomed affairs when the son of an unsatisfied English professor falls for the daughter of a right-wing icon. The professor’s own marriage is in difficulty too. He’s a Rembrandt scholar, who doesn’t like Rembrandt, married to a larger-than-life African-American who’s not quite the sexy activist she once was. When the two families are thrown together the real wars in the background are soon forgotten as their own cultural & personal wars begin in this beautiful corner of America. ...

” First you take a drink, ” F. Scott Fitzgerald once noted, ”then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.” Few writers have conveyed the effects of alcohol as vividly as Fitzgerald, & this collection gathers debutantes & dandies, rowdy jazz musicians, lost children & ragtime riff-raff into a collection taken from The Crack-Up & other works. On Booze portrays ” The Jazz Age” as Fitzgerald experienced it: roaring, rambunctious, & lush with quite a hangover. ...

On Brick Lane explores the contrast of extremes that make up the historical street in East London
- a street that is constantly
...

' As they used to say in Irel&, the devil only comes into good things.' Narrated by Lilly Bere, On Canaan's Side opens as she mourns the loss of her grandson, Bill. The story then goes back to the moment she was forced to flee Dublin, at the end of the First World War, & follows her life through into the new world of America, a world filled with both hope & danger. At once epic & intimate, Lilly's narrative unfurls as she tries to make sense of the sorrows & troubles of her life & of the people whose lives she has touched. Spanning nearly seven decades, it is a novel of memory, war, family-ties & love, which once again displays Sebastian Barry's exquisite prose & gift for storytelling. ...

` As they used to say in Irel&, the devil only comes into good things`. Narrated by Lilly Bere, ” On Canaan`s Side” opens as she mourns the loss of her grandson, Bill. The story then goes back to the moment she was forced to flee Dublin, at the end of the First World War, & follows her life through into the new world of America, a world filled with both hope & danger. At once epic & intimate, Lilly`s narrative unfurls as she tries to make sense of the sorrows & troubles of her life & of the people whose lives she has touched. Spanning nearly seven decades, it is a novel of memory, war, family-ties & love, which once again displays Sebastian Barry`s exquisite prose & gift for storytelling. ...