Isabella Bird, an Englishwoman whose extensive travels & writings earned her the first female membership of the Royal Geographical Society, visited Malaya, Singapore, Indo-China & Hong Kong in 1879. She wrote 23 letters describing her adventures to her sister Hennie in Scotl&, & named the collection The Golden Chersonese after the ancient name given to the Malay Peninsula by the Greek scholar, Ptolemy. Her detailed descriptions of the Malay Peninsula in the 1870s are in startling contrast to present-day Malaysia & Singapore, & provide a fascinating account of many aspects of the region, including the people, culture, landscapes, & wildlife, all described with the Victorian stiff upper lip typical of her time. Stanfords Travel Classics feature some of the finest historical travel writing in the English language, with authors hailing from both sides of the Atlantic. Every title has been reset in a contemporary typeface to create a series that every lover of fine travel literature will want to collect & keep. ...

The Golden Door takes its title from Emma Lazarus’ poignant poem, inscribed at the feet of the Statue of Liberty, read by every American schoolchild. The sonnet famously articulates the American dream of creating a haven for the world’s beleaguered, exhausted & oppressed, rejecting the ‘storied pomp’ & values of more ‘ancient lands’. In this passionate defence of America, both what she is & what she represents, Britain’s most famous restaurant critic & columnist A.A. Gill takes on European snobbery & disparagement of the American Dream & exposes the clichés & default prejudices which perpetuate it. Grappling with the ways in which the world’s perception of America changed between those two generation-defining moments, the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, & the devastation of the twin towers in New York City on 11 September 2001, the book is as much about the things which Gill himself has always found likeable about the United States & its citizens. Clearly coming from a deeply personal place, these essays are very much about the disjunction between Gill’s expectations of a land of simpletons formed before he lived in the States, & the contradictory, elusive country & personal happiness he found whilst living both in New York & in the Kentucky mountains. Gill points out the hypocrisy of non-Americans attacking various facets of American politics or lifestyle whilst voraciously consuming her produce, whether in the form of dream, cinema or other commercial goods, & asks how exactly it came to happen that the optimistic promise of the 1970s America he knew & loved came to represent everything which the rest of the world’s liberal intellectuals set their opinions. The book is structured as a collection of linked essays based around specific places, each of which is “the home of” something, according to the famous boast of so many small town Welcome signs in America, be it a mountain, a mine, spotted pigs, a president, the world`s biggest ball of string or deepest hole. This is a journey on which Gill explores & deconstructs the mythologies America has spun about herself & those spun about her, & shows how these, taken together, make America, the home of everything. ...

Twenty-one years ago, when a conductor was poisoned & the Questura sent a man to investigate, readers first met Commissario Guido Brunetti. Since 1992's Death at La Fenice, Donna Leon & her shrewd, sophisticated, & compassionate investigator have been delighting readers around the world. For her millions of fans, Leon's novels have opened a window into the private Venice of her citizens, a world of incomparable beauty, family intimacy, shocking crime, & insidious corruption. This internationally acclaimed, bestselling series is widely considered one of the best ever written, & William Heinemann is thrilled to be publishing the twenty-second installment, The Golden Egg, in April 2013. When making routine enquiries into a possible bribery case that could embarrass the mayor
- a humiliation Vice-Questore Patta is very keen to avoid
- Commissario Brunetti receives a call from his wife, Paola, who is evidently very upset. The middle-aged deaf mute with the mental age of a child who helped out at the Brunetti's dry cleaners has been found dead
- an 'accidental' overdose of his mother's sleeping pills
- & for some reason Paola is distraught by the news. To the neighbourhood he was just the 'boy' who helped out, but nobody knew much about him
- not even his name. That a soul could have lived such a joyless life is too much for Paola to bear, & she asks Guido if he can find out what happened. It is a surprise to Brunetti just how little was known about this man-child
- there are no official records to show he even existed. The man's mother is angry & contradictory when questioned about his death, & Brunetti senses that there much more to the story than she is willing to tell. With the help of Inspector Vianello & the ever-resourceful Signorina Elettra, perhaps Brunetti can get to the truth & find some measure of solace.





...

Twenty-one years ago, when a conductor was poisoned & the Questura sent a man to investigate, readers first met Commissario Guido Brunetti. Since 1992`s Death at La Fenice, Donna Leon & her shrewd, sophisticated, & compassionate investigator have been delighting readers around the world. For her millions of fans, Leon`s novels have opened a window into the private Venice of her citizens, a world of incomparable beauty, family intimacy, shocking crime, & insidious corruption. This internationally acclaimed, bestselling series is widely considered one of the best ever written, & William Heinemann is thrilled to be publishing the twenty-second instalment, The Golden Egg, in April 2013. When making routine enquiries into a possible bribery case that could embarrass the mayor
- a humiliation Vice-Questore Patta is very keen to avoid
- Commissario Brunetti receives a call from his wife, Paola, who is evidently very upset. The middle-aged deaf mute with the mental age of a child who helped out at the Brunetti`s dry cleaners has been found dead
- an `accidental` overdose of his mother`s sleeping pills
- & Paola is distraught by the news. To the neighbourhood he was just the `boy` who helped out, but nobody knew much about him
- not even his name. That a soul could have lived such a joyless life is too much for Paola to bear, & she asks Guido if he can find out what happened. It is a surprise to Brunetti just how little was known about this man-child
- there are no official records to show he even existed. The man`s mother is angry & contradictory when questioned about his death, & Brunetti senses that there much more to the story than she is willing to tell. With the help of Inspector Vianello & the ever-resourceful Signorina Elettra, perhaps Brunetti can get to the truth & find some measure of solace.





...

New York, a small town on the tip of Manhattan isl&, 1746. One rainy evening in November, a handsome young stranger fresh off the boat pitches up at a counting-house door in Golden Hill Street: this is Mr Smith, amiable, charming, yet strangely determined to keep suspicion simmering. For in his pocket, he has what seems to be an order for a thousand pounds, a huge amount, & he won`t explain why, or where he comes from, or what he can be planning to do in the colonies that requires so much money. Should the New York merchants trust him? Should they risk their credit & refuse to pay? Should they befriend him, seduce him, arrest him; maybe even kill him? An astonishing first novel, as stuffed with incident as a whole shelf of conventional fiction, Golden Hill is both a book about the eighteenth century, & itself a novel cranked back to the form`s eighteenth century beginnings, when anything could happen on the page, & usually did, & a hero was not a hero unless he ran the frequent risk of being hanged. Rich in language & historical perception, yet compulsively readable, Golden Hill has a plot that twists in every chapter, & a puzzle at its heart that won`t let go till the last paragraph of the last page. Set a generation before the American Revolution, it paints an irresistible picture of a New York provokingly different from its later self: but subtly shadowed by the great city to come, & already entirely a place where a young man with a fast tongue can invent himself afresh, fall in love
- & find a world of trouble.
...

When powerful real-estate tycoon Nero Golden immigrates to the States under mysterious circumstances, he & his three adult children assume new identities, taking ` Roman` names, & move into a grand mansion in downtown Manhattan. Arriving shortly after the inauguration of Barack Obama, he & his sons, each extraordinary in his own right, quickly establish themselves at the apex of New York society. The story of the Golden family is told from the point of view of their Manhattanite neighbour & confidant, René, an aspiring filmmaker who finds in the Goldens the perfect subject. René chronicles the undoing of the house of Golden: the high life of money, of art & fashion, a sibling quarrel, an unexpected metamorphosis, the arrival of a beautiful woman, betrayal & murder, & far away, in their abandoned homel&, some decent intelligence work. Invoking literature, pop culture, & the cinema, Rushdie spins the story of the American zeitgeist over the last eight years, hitting every beat: the rise of the birther movement, the Tea Party, Gamergate & identity politics; the backlash against political correctness; the ascendency of the superhero movie, &, of course, the insurgence of a ruthlessly ambitious, narcissistic, media-savvy villain wearing make-up & with coloured hair. In a new world order of alternative truths, Salman Rushdie has written the ultimate novel about identity, truth, terror & lies. A brilliant, heartbreaking realist novel that is not only uncannily prescient but shows one of the world’s greatest storytellers working at the height of his powers. ...

When powerful real-estate tycoon Nero Golden immigrates to the States under mysterious circumstances, he & his three adult children assume new identities, taking ` Roman` names, & move into a grand mansion in downtown Manhattan. Arriving shortly after the inauguration of Barack Obama, he & his sons, each extraordinary in his own right, quickly establish themselves at the apex of New York society. The story of the powerful Golden family is told from the point of view of their Manhattanite neighbour & confidant, René, an aspiring filmmaker who finds in the Goldens the perfect subject. René chronicles the undoing of the house of Golden: the high life of money, of art & fashion, a sibling quarrel, an unexpected metamorphosis, the arrival of a beautiful woman, betrayal & murder, & far away, in their abandoned homel&, some decent intelligence work. Invoking literature, pop culture, & the cinema, Rushdie spins the story of the American zeitgeist over the last eight years, hitting every beat: the rise of the birther movement, the Tea Party, Gamergate & identity politics; the backlash against political correctness; the ascendency of the superhero movie, &, of course, the insurgence of a ruthlessly ambitious, narcissistic, media-savvy villain wearing make-up & with coloured hair. In a new world order of alternative truths, Salman Rushdie has written the ultimate novel about identity, truth, terror & lies. A brilliant, heartbreaking realist novel that is not only uncannily prescient but shows one of the world’s greatest storytellers working at the height of his powers. ...

For weeks, someone has been broadcasting people`s secrets from the minarets of the city`s mosques, striking fear into the hearts of Christians & Muslims alike. Then when shots ring out on the Grand Trunk Road, & Nargis`s husb&, Massud, a fellow architect, is caught in the crossfire, she is unable to confess to him her greatest secret before he dies. But as the anonymous broadcasts continue, is it merely a matter of time before her past is exposed? The Golden Legend is a timely & luminous story of corruption, resilience & the hope that only love & the human spirit can offer. ...

Following the popular Chronicles of Old Paris, in The Golden Moments of Paris, John Baxter has uncovered more fascinating true stories about the characters that gave Paris its character in the years between World War I & World War II. Explore more about one of the world`s most beautiful & loved cities in twenty-six fact-filled, humorous, & dramatic stories about the famed Annees Folles--the Crazy Years at the turn of the 20th century in Paris. Learn about Gertrude Stein & her famous writers` salon, Salvador Dali & the Surrealists, the birth of Chanel No. 5, & the antics of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, & the lost generation. Then see what these areas look like today by following along on the guided walking tours of Paris`s historic neighborhoods & the cafes, clubs, & brothels that were home to the intellectuals, artists, & Bohemians, illustrated with color photographs & period maps. If you enjoyed Woody Allen`s film Midnight in Paris, you`ll love this book. ...

On a bleak winter night in 1997, a British Columbia timber scout named Grant Hadwin committed an act of shocking violence: he destroyed the legendary Golden Spruce of the Queen Charlotte Islands. With its rich colours, towering height & luminous needles, the tree was a scientific marvel, beloved by the local Haida people who believed it sacred. The Golden Spruce tells the story of the sadness which pushed Hadwin to such a desperate act of destruction
- a bizarre environmental protest which acts as a metaphor for the challenge the world faces today. But it also raises the question of what then happened to Hadwin, who disappeared under suspicious circumstances & remains missing to this day. Part thrilling mystery, part haunting depiction of the ancient beauty of the coastal wilderness, & part dramatic chronicle of the historical collision of Europeans & the native Haida, The Golden Spruce is a timely portrait of man’s troubled relationship with a vanishing world.
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