Our use of birds is well-known - feathers for hats as well as for nests, birds deified, personified, caged, used for food and for hunting. Less well know is how birds interact with us. (Not ... read more
An elegant exploration of how British Prime Ministers, from Eden to Blair and beyond, have engaged in the Middle East under the misconception that they could help solve disputes because they... read more
A strange and magical memoir of growing up in prosaic England with Anglo-Burmese parentage. Teak trees interweave oaks; myth and imagery chase each other through the author's odyssey through... read more
Three stories of family life - especially mothers and sons - from early in Tanizaki's career - 'Longing', 'Sorrows of a Heretic' and 'The Story of an Unhappy Mother'. (It would be interestin... read more
This extraordinary Californian garden was the creation of Ganna Walska, a Polish opera singer who bought the estate of Montecito in 1943 while briefly married to her sixth husband. Thereafte... read more
A substantial book on the 1920s' group who turned against modernist abstraction in favour of figurative painting, and were particularly influential oin theatre design, ballet and fashion.
From Byzantium to England, the Normans achieved an extraordinary ascendancy in the C11th. This study draws particular attention to dynastic relations and to the role of women in what has hit... read more
A troubled policeman is sent to investigate a double murder in rural Catalonia. Cercas, renowned as a novelist, turns his hand to crime - this won Spain's foremost literary prize
After looking at the bleak trajectory of Erdogan's regime, DB argues that Turkey's democratic instincts and economic ties to Europe will win in the end.
Incredible though it seems, in the closing years of the GDR the Stasi trained operatives to become poets in order to infiltrate literary circles. Years of sleuthing has yielded this remarkab... read more
Marzahn is a suburb of prefab GDR housing on the outskirts of Berlin. This odd but brilliant book, about a chiropodist who talks to her clients, is both memoir and portrait of modern Germany... read more