Egypt, 1912. Amelia Peabody & her dashing archaeologist husb&, Radcliffe Emerson, are once again in danger as they search for a priceless, stolen bust of legendary Queen Nefertiti... Arriving in Cairo for another thrilling excavation season, Amelia is relaxing in her elegant hotel suite when a man with knife protruding from his back staggers into her chamber & utters a single word -` Murder`
- before collapsing on the floor, dead. It soon becomes apparent that someone has saved Amelia from a would-be assassin-someone who is keeping a careful eye on the intrepid archaeologist. & there can be only one answer: the brilliant master of disguise, Sethos. For Amelia, this excavation season will prove to be unforgettable; one where a brilliant criminal will offer his final challenge... & perhaps be unmasked at last.` Think Miss Marple with early feminist gloss crossed with Indiana Jones` The Guardian
...

The paintings from Nebamuns tomb chapel are among the greatest & most famous of the British Museums treasures. Yet much about them remains mysterious, & this book is concerned with the detective work undertaken to help us to understand & see them properly before they are displayed in a new permanent gallery in 2008. For this the paintings are being conserved & remounted in the Museums specialist laboratories, a process that is revealing radical new information about painting techniques in ancient Egypt. This, together with archival work, is helping us to solve the problem of the tomb-chapels location at Thebes, last seen in the 1820s when the paintings were removed. Richard Parkinson discusses each painting fully, with reconstructions & translations of the hieroglyphic texts, a discussion of the other known fragments (now in Berlin & Avignon) & a reconstruction of the whole tomb chapel. Every fragment is fully illustrated in color, doing full justice to an artist who has been described as antiquitys equivalent of Michelangelo. ...

Kitty Fane is the beautiful but shallow wife of Walter, a bacteriologist stationed in Hong Kong. Unsatisfied by her marriage, she starts an affair with charming, attractive & exciting Charles Townsend. But when Walter discovers her deception, he exacts a strange & terrible vengeance: Kitty must accompany him to his new posting in remote mainland China, where a cholera epidemic rages... First published to a storm of protest, ” The Painted Veil” is a classic story of a woman`s spiritual awakening. ...

This work is a wide-ranging study of the visual records of voyages & the artists that made them before the age of the camera. From Patagonia to Peking, the South Seas to the Sahara, western artists have played a vital role in the exposure of unfamiliar lands. From Jacques Le Moyne's paintings of Florida in 1564 to the development of portable cameras in the late-19th century, artists were a habitual feature of explorational, scientific & diplomatic voyages. The works of these travelling artists were at first appreciated more for their scientific value than for artistic merit. By the 18th century, however, painters such as William Hodges began to regard exotic journeys as an alternative to the European Grand Tour. With the 19th-century fashion for Orientalism, adventurous travel & great art were no longer regarded as mutually exclusive. This book looks at the ways in which travelling artists influenced early western attitudes towards distant lands, & examines how far the artists' own vision of these places was distorted, affected by factors as diverse as changing artistic fashions, the demands of colonial propaganda & the frequent need to work from memory. Jacob's text contains many anecdotes relating to the lives of these people. The illustrations form a visual record of the lands visited & include a large number of formerly little-known works. ...

In 1913, an orphan girl boards a steamship bound for Wuhu in South East China. Left in the hands of her soft-hearted but opium-addicted uncle she is delivered to The Hall of Eternal Splendour which, with its painted faces & troubling cries in the night, seems destined to break her spirit. & yet the girl survives & one day hope appears in the unlikely form of a customs inspector, a modest man resistant to the charms of the corrupt world that surrounds him but not to the innocent girl who stands before him. From the crowded rooms of a small-town brothel, heavy with the smoke of opium pipes & the breath of drunken merchants, to the Bohemian hedonism of Paris & the 1930s studios of Shanghai, Jennifer Epstein`s first novel, based on a true story, is an exquisite evocation of a fascinating time & place, with a breathtaking heroine at its heart. ...

From Istanbul`s palatial old embassies to its glorious Bosphorus summerhouses, from Ottoman Paris to Ankara`s Art Deco, from rainforest mansions to a mad mosque in the mountains... a diplomat`s wife reveals their secret histories. This book brings together essays by Patricia Daunt written over the past 25 years for Cornucopia Magazine. It concludes with her latest article, on the magnificent ruins of Aphrodisias, newly listed as a World Heritage Site but long one of her greatest loves. The images are by internationally renowned photographers, including Fritz von der Schulenburg, Simon Upton, Cemal Emden & Jean-Marie del Moral. Foreword by John Julius Norwich. ...

A luminous & bewitching debut novel that is perfect for fans of Angela Carter. Set in Victorian London, it follows the fortunes of Eve, the Lion-Faced Girl & Abel, the Flayed Man. A magical realism delight. Before Eve is born, her mother goes to the circus. She buys a penny twist of coloured sugar & settles down to watch the heart-stopping main attraction: a lion, billed as a monster from the savage heart of Africa. Mama swears she hears the lion sigh, just before it leaps...and nine months later when Eve is born, the story goes, she doesn't cry
- she meows & licks her paws. When Abel is pulled from the stinking Thames, the mudlarks are sure he is long dead. As they search his pockets to divvy up the treasure, his eyes crack open & he coughs up a stream of black water. But how has he survived a week in that thick stew of human waste? Cast out by Victorian society, Eve & Abel find succour from an unlikely source. They soar to fame as The Lion Faced Girl & The Flayed Man, star performers in Professor Josiah Arroner's Palace of Curiosities. & there begins a journey that will entwine their fates forever.
...

At the heart of the Sultan`s vast but fragile empire stands the mysterious Palace of Dreams: the most secret & powerful Ministry ever invented. Its task is to scour every town, village & hamlet to collect the citizens` dreams, then to sift, sort & classify them, & ultimately to interpret them, in order to identify the ”master-dreams” that will provide the clues to the Empire`s destinies & those of its Monarch. An entire nation`s consciousness is thus tapped into & meticulously laid bare in the form of images & symbols of the dreaming mind. Kadare`s ” Palace of Dreams” stands as the symbol of the thought-police who have, through history, been the most effective instruments of oppression at the service of dictators. ...

Freedman has visited more than thirty of the most significant & beautiful Coffee Houses throughout India. Away from the stereotypes of poverty & exotica they have allowed him to enter an ordinary India. Buried deep within the country s collective memory they have for decades acted simultaneously as political & artistic salons as well as simple eating places.” ...

The second book in Bernard Cornwell`s epic & bestselling series on the making of England & the fate of his great hero, Uhtred of Bebbanburg. BBC2`s major Autumn 2015 TV show THE LAST KINGDOM is based on the first two books in the series. When peace is torn apart by bloody Danish steel, Uhtred must fight to save a king who distrusts him. Skeptical of a treaty between the Vikings & Wessex, Uhtred takes his talent for mayhem to Cornwall, gaining treasure & a mysterious woman on the way. But when he is accused of massacring Christians, he finds lies can be as deadly as steel. Still, when pious King Alfred flees to a watery refuge, it is the pagan warrior he relies on. Now Uhtred must fight a battle which will shape history
- & confront the Viking with the banner of the white horse.. . Uhtred of Bebbanburg`s mind is as sharp as his sword. A thorn in the side of the priests & nobles who shape his fate, this Saxon raised by Vikings is torn between the life he loves & those he has sworn to serve.
...