Category Archives: Travel Guides
The Adventures of Miss Petitfour
Meet the utterly irresistible Miss Petitfour (a name of unknown origin but possibly descended from bakers of tiny delicious cakes). She loves baking and making and dancing with her cats, but most of all she loves to fly. All she has to do is pick up a favourite tablecloth (preferably the one with the paisley
The Saffron Tales: Recipes from the Persian Kitchen
Shortlisted for a 2016 Edward Standford Travel Writing Award.`Barberries, fresh herbs, date molasses, dried limes, saffron; Yasmin`s Persian pantry staples are a roll call of my favourite ingredients. Her recipes are a mouthwatering showcase of a beautiful country` Yotam Ottolenghi `Not just a great cookbook but a book full of stories – a love letter
Landskipping: Painters, Ploughmen and Places
A ravishing celebration of landscape, its iridescent beauty and its potential to comfort, awe and mesmerise. Landskipping explores the different ways in which we have, throughout the ages, responded to the land, beginning in the eighteenth century when artists first started to paint English scenery, and the Lakes, as well as Snowdon, began to attract
The Royal Baby`s Big Red Bus Tour of London
It`s a beautiful day, and the Royal Family are sunning themselves in the Palace Gardens. The royal babies` grandad is even having a bit of a snooze – what bliss! When all of a sudden — BEEP BEEP! BEEP BEEP! It`s the Big Red Bus, and it`s come to take the Royal Family on a
River Cottage Much More Veg
`What`s the central aim? To make vegetables delicious, to make them irresistible, to come up with a whole bunch of recipes that are easy, family-friendly, and just make it that much easier to put a load of veg into your diet every single day.` Hugh Fearnley-WhittingstallHugh`s River Cottage Veg Every Day! became the UK`s best-selling
Around the World in 80 Trains
Shortlisted for the 2020 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award`s Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the YearWhen Monisha Rajesh announced plans to circumnavigate the globe in eighty train journeys, she was met with wide-eyed disbelief. But it wasn`t long before she was carefully plotting a route that would cover 45,000 miles – almost twice the circumference
The Gun Room
The memory of war will stay with a man longer than anything else. Dawn, mist clearing over the rice fields, a burning Vietnamese village, and a young war photographer gets the shot that might make his career. The image, of a staring soldier in the midst of mayhem, will become one of the great photographs
Thirteen Ways of Looking
A story in this collection has been longlisted for the Sunday Times EFG short story award As it was, it was like being set down in the best of poems, carried into a cold landscape, blindfolded, turned around, unblindfolded, forced, then, to invent new ways of seeing. It is a cold day in January when
I Love You, Stick Insect
Stick Insect is IN LOVE! Just think of all the fun and laughter he will have with his perfect partner – surfing the ocean waves, racing on speeding motorcycles with the wind in his feelers, dancing the hula – whoop-di-whoop! But … There`s something not quite right about Stick Insect`s new sweetheart, and Butterfly seems
Cobra in the Bath: Adventures in Less Travelled Lands
Miles Morland is an adventurer. He was born in India to a naval father and a dangerously glamorous mother. When his parents divorced, Miles followed his mother to Tehran, which they had to leave in a hurry, and on to Baghdad, which they also had to leave in a hurry after the 1958 revolution. His
The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China
Far from the glittering cities of Beijing and Shanghai, China`s borderlands are populated by around one hundred million people who are not Han Chinese. For many of these restive minorities, the old Chinese adage “the mountains are high and the Emperor far away”, meaning Beijing`s grip on power is tenuous and its influence unwelcome, continues
The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company
THE TOP 5 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERONE OF BARACK OBAMA`S BEST BOOKS OF 2019THE TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEARFINALIST FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 2020LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2019A FINANCIAL TIMES, OBSERVER, DAILY TELEGRAPH, WALL STREET JOURNAL AND TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR`Dalrymple is a superb historian with a visceral understanding
The Flaneur
A flaneur is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the streets he walks – and is in covert search of adventure, aesthetic or erotic. Acclaimed writer Edmund White, who lived in Paris for sixteen years, wanders through the avenues and along the quays,
The Man with the Golden Typewriter: Ian Fleming`s James Bond Letters
On 16 August 1952, Ian Fleming wrote to his wife, Ann, `My love, This is only a tiny letter to try out my new typewriter and to see if it will write golden words since it is made of gold`. He had bought the gold-plated typewriter as a present to himself for finishing his first
They are Trying to Break Your Heart
In 1994, Marko Novak`s world is torn apart by the death of his best friend. Kemal Lekic, a young soldier in the darkest days of the Bosnian war, is killed in the shelling of their home town. But his body is never recovered.Marko flees to England, hoping to put his broken homeland and a dark
In Other Words
In Other Words is a revelation. It is at heart a love story of a long and sometimes difficult courtship, and a passion that verges on obsession: that of a writer for another language. For Jhumpa Lahiri, that love was for Italian, which first captivated and capsized her during a trip to Florence after college.
The Dust of Promises
`In a voice as dim as a lighthouse on a rainy night, he said, “Beware of loving a woman who loves bridges.”` Once upon a September in Paris…Still heartsick over the break-up of his relationship with the alluring, elusive novelist Hayat, the narrator of The Dust of Promises finds himself adrift in Paris, where he
Safari Pug
Meet the brilliant, the wonderful, the courageous … Safari Pug! The third book in a joyful illustrated series for fans of Claude and Squishy McFluff.When Pug and Lady Miranda have a scary run-in with a lion one night (it might be hiding under the bed), Lady M decides Pug needs to face his fears and
The Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline
The world`s most intractable problems solved: ambitious lessons in leadership and hope from free-thinkers and innovators who have tackled our biggest challengesFrom immigration reform to energy resources, from political paralysis to inequality and extremism, we are beset by a raft of huge and seemingly insurmountable issues. The daily newspapers, the rolling 24-hour television news, portray
Pigeon English
Eleven-year-old Harrison Opoku, the second best runner in Year 7, races through his new life in England with his personalised trainers – the Adidas stripes drawn on with marker pen – blissfully unaware of the very real threat around him. Newly-arrived from Ghana with his mother and older sister Lydia, Harri absorbs the many strange
