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£14.99
2,500 years ago, the city of Syracuse on the eastern coast of Sicily was, for the Ancient Greeks, one of the centres of the classical world. It was in Syracuse that Aeschylus premiered his plays, and to Syracuse that Plato would visit from Athens, where the tyrant Dionysius bought Euripides’s lyre at auction, and the languishing nymph Arethusa hid in the papyrus grove. Living in the city, the Joachim Sartorius learned that this history and myth is still present today. At Sartorius’s side we walk with nymphs and cyclops through the old town of Ortigia, and meet the people of the city; its notables, police officers, artists, and barbers. Unravelling the depths of Sicilian history and bringing the juxtaposition, superimposition, and commingling of cultures and attitudes to life, Sartorius shows a city of ancient luminosity, bringing us, through the baroque, to the contemporary world.
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£10.99
Richard Owen’s book begins in London, where the poet dealt with Italian merchants in his role as court diplomat and customs official. Next Owen takes us, via Chaucer’s capture at the siege of Rheims, to his involvement in arranging the marriage of King Edward III’s son Lionel in Milan and his missions to Genoa and Florence. By scrutinising his encounters with Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the mercenary knight Sir John Hawkwood – and with vividly evocative descriptions of the Arezzo, Padua, Florence, Certaldo, and Milan Chaucer would have encountered – Owen reveals the deep influence of Italy’s people and towns on Chaucer’s poems and stories. Much writing on Chaucer depicts a misleadingly parochial figure, but as Owen’s enlightening, short study of Chaucer’s Italian years makes clear, the poet’s life was internationally eventful. The consequences have made the English canon what it is today.
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£12.99
This work takes the reader the length and breadth of Britain and Ireland to lesser-known places associated with Churchill’s life. Some are familiar – Blenheim Palace, Chartwell, the Cabinet War Rooms – but we also see his schools, far-flung parliamentary constituencies in Dundee and Epping, the sites of famous speeches, the place he started to paint, the shop he bought his cigars, and the final resting places of his family and close friends. We read about these places in his own words alongside Clark’s insightful analysis and, by visiting sites that made important but less-celebrated contributions to the story of Churchill’s life, we come closer to a full picture. Clark takes us from the site of his father’s marriage proposal to his American future wife on the Isle of Wight to his grave in a country churchyard in Oxfordshire. Each of the eight regions of the United Kingdom is introduced with a map.
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£12.99
In recent years Naples has become, for better or worse, the new ‘destination’ in Italy. While many of its more esoteric features are on display for all to see the stories behind them remain largely hidden. In Marius Kociejowski’s portrait of this city, the serpent can be many things? Vesuvius, the mafia-like camorra, the outlying Phlegrean Fields (which, geologically speaking, constitute the second most dangerous area on the planet). It is all these things that have, at one time or another, put paid to the higher aspirations of Neapolitans themselves. Naples is simultaneously the city of light, sometimes blindingly so, and the city of darkness, although often the stuff of cliché. The boundary that separates death from life is porous in the extreme: the dead inhabit the world of the living and vice versa. This book is a travelogue, a meditation on mortality, and much else besides.
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£12.99
In Christopher Somerville’s workroom is a case of shelves that holds 450 notebooks. Their pages are creased and stained with mud, blood, flattened insect corpses, beer glass rings, smears of plant juice and gallons of sweat. Everything Somerville has written about walking the British countryside has had its origin among these little black-and-red books. ‘The View from the Hill’ pulls together the cream of this unique crop, following the cycle of the seasons from a freezing January on the Severn Estuary to the sight of sunrise on Christmas morning from inside a prehistoric burial mound. In between are hundreds of walks to discover randy natterjack toads in a Cumbrian spring, trout in a Hampshire chalk stream in lazy midsummer, a lordly red stag at the autumn rut on the Isle of Mull, and three thousand geese at full gabble in the wintry Norfolk sky.
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£9.99
Black Earth is a vivid first-hand account of an extensive journey through a contested nation.
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£9.99
The reader will come to know life in London from the pavement up and see its streets from the perspective of this renowned diarist. The city was almost as much a character in Pepys’s life as his family or friends, and the book draws many parallels between his experience of 17th-century London and the lives of Londoners today. Colliss Harvey’s book reconstructs the sensory and emotional experience of the past, bringing geography, biography and history into one. Full of fascinating details and written with extraordinary sensitivity, ‘Walking Pepys’s London’ is an unmissable exploration into the places that made the greatest English diarist of all time.
