The greatness of Italy`s culture & way of life have had a powerful attraction for many generations of visitors. This has created an overwhelming sense that Italy is a fundamentally benign & easy going country. ” The Force of Destiny”, Christopher Duggan`s immensely enjoyable new book, lays waste to this idea. While sharing everyone`s enthusiasm for Italy as a place, he strongly distinguishes this from its political role over the past two centuries, which has been both vicious & ruinous for Europe as a whole. ...

When launched in 1962, the Ford Cortina was an entirely new type of British car. Compared with its rivals
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Tientsin in north-eastern China was known as ` The Ford of Heaven` as it gave travellers access to the Celestial City of Peking & the Emperor of Heaven eighty miles to the west. It was also a `concession port` in the 1920s & 1930s, occupied by the foreign powers of Britain, France, Russia, America & Japan in the wake of the Opium War of 1860. This memoir evokes a childhood spent in this strange & exotic place. The world that Power evokes is a microcosm of the complexity & ferment that was China before the Second World War, yet seen through the fresh eyes of a sensitive child attuned to the people around him. This new edition of The Ford of Heaven (first published in 1984) contains a new foreword by Frances Wood, Curator of the British Library`s Chinese Collection, as well as a postscript & inclusion of extensive additional material. ...

Richard Sennett has spent an intellectual lifetime exploring how humans live in cities. In this pair of essays he visits two of the world`s greatest cities at crucial moments in their history to meditate on the condition of exile in both geographical & psychic space: the Jewish Ghetto of Renaissance Venice, where state-imposed outsiderdom was translated into a rich community identity; & nineteenth-century Paris, a magnet for political exiles, where the experience of displacement seeped into the city`s culture at large. ...

During the First World War, just behind the eastern front, there was a forest, where Austrians & Hungarians used to hang deserters. To this place came Apostol Bologa, a young Romanian officer eager to serve his country. Born in a Romanian region of Transylvania which was then under Hungarian rule, he had naturally enough joined the Austro-Hungarian army. But soon Romania itself entered the war, & Bologa found himself fighting his own people. The Forest of the Hanged asks a fundamental question about war: namely, why does a man fight? Apostol condemns an officer to death for desertion & attempting to give information to the enemy. He watches the execution of the officer with satisfaction until he witnesses a fellow soldier`s grief & pity for the dead man. At this point his world shifts. His growing self-doubt & uncertainty lead him to question beliefs he once held without question. Unprepared for his own reaction when he is once again called to sit on a court martial, he finds that he too must go to the forest. This very rare, richly descriptive novel lays bare the inner conflict engendered by a total war, yet seldom expressed. ...

The Forest People is an astonishingly intimate & life-enhancing account of a hunter
- gatherer tribe living in harmony with nature
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Clover has loved James for as long as she can remember, since before she knew what what love was. But fate seems determined to keep them apart. As children, Clover & James played beside a turquoise sea under cloudless skies, their Caribbean island home a place of pleasure & privilege, of lush lawns & tennis parties. In such a paradise nothing should obstruct the kind of happiness Clover dreams of, except that, as she discovers, true love is often harder than paradise allows for. & when Clover`s mother falls out of love with her husb&, a web of complications is woven that may take Clover a lifetime to unravel. If she ever can... Tender & true, The Forever Girl traces love`s unpredictable path to maturity with style, wit & feeling. ...

In wartime Berlin, Cioma Schonhaus discovered a way of turning his talent for graphic design to good use: he forged documents which helped save hundreds of Jewish lives. His first challenge involved painstakingly recreating each of the twelve long & 24 short feathers on German Imperial Eagle so that a pass stood up to scrutiny by Nazi officials. Many more forged documents were to follow, as the 20-year-old Schonhaus attempted to stay one step ahead of the authorities, who had him on their wanted list. Schonhaus is breathtakingly bold
- he gets himself arrested for wandering onto a military airfield & manages to talk his way out; he makes a complaint about the drunken behaviour of a policeman harassing Jewish diners in a restaurant; he goes cycling with a girlfriend in the countryside at a time when Jews were subject to curfew & banned from riding bicycles. On his final 1000-mile flight from Germany, he is forced to abandon his plan to jump on a goods train bound for Switzerland as too dangerous, & is left with the option of swimming across the Bodensee, or pedalling all the way... As those around him are one by one deported to the concentration camps, his is an astonishing story of wartime survival.
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` When I wasn`t reading Sharon Guskin`s The Forgetting Time, I was itching to return to it` Jodi Picoult Noah is four & wants to go home. The only trouble is he`s already there. Noah is a little boy who knows things he shouldn`t & remembers things he should have forgotten. Because as well as being a four-year-old called Noah, he remembers being a nine-year-old called Tommy. He remembers his house. His family. His mother. & now he wants to go home. Two boys. Two mothers. One unforgettable story.. . ...

The Forging of a Rebel is an unsurpassed account of Spanish history & society from early in the twentieth century through the cataclysmic events of the Spanish Civil War. Arturo Barea`s masterpiece charts the author`s coming-of-age in a bruised & starkly unequal Spain. These three volumes recount in lively detail Barea`s daily experience of his country as it pitched toward disaster: we are taken from his youthful play & rebellion on the streets of Madrid, to his apprenticeship in the business world & to the horrors he witnessed as part of the Spanish army in Morocco during the Rif War. The trilogy culminates in an indelible portrait of the Republican fight against Fascist forces in which the Madrid of Barea`s childhood becomes a shell & bullet-strewn warzone. Combining historical sweep & authority with poignant characterization & novelistic detail, The Forging of a Rebel is a towering literary & historical achievement. ...