It is nearly thirty years since Aciman's superb memoir of his Alexandria childhood, Out of Egypt. Since Call Me By Your Name he has mutated from an academic scholar of Proust into a bestsell... read more
Europeans have north at the top of their maps; Islam looked south; the Hebrew culture looked east; the Aztecs had five points. What are compass points? How do they vary and function?
Balkan transhumance: in her fourth book on life in the Balkans, Kassabova lives and travels with the Karakachan, a small group of Greek-speaking nomadic pastoralists in the Pirin mountains.
The stone circles of Britain and Ireland: their location in a landscapes, construction, composition, chronology. An excellent illustrated guide, by region, with maps.
This C15th French manuscript revels in the peculiar, the fantastic and - just occasionally - the real. Our fear of 'the other' goes back a long way, it seems.
A riso- and letterpress pamphlet on the commons of South London: a belt of green space which used to stretch almost uninterrupted from Bostall Heath in the south-east to Putney and Barnes in... read more
LB could turn straw into gold. Here she describes chancing across the writings of a rather obscure Greek philosopher, and the wonders and illuminations that followed. Transformative.
Last encountered in his fine book Dostoevsky in Love, this gifted author has an eye for inner conflict. Now he returns to the Christian/Arab complexities of his native Cyprus.
Travel memories - some imagined, such as a performance of 'Hamlet' off the African coast, in 1607 - from the amiable author of A Pike in the Basement: Tales of a Hungry Traveller.