Just 28 when he found Nineveh, Layard later witnessed the Charge of the Light Brigade and reported on the Indian Mutiny: his life was action-packed. This new biog argues that he was deeply r... read more
Patrick Leigh Fermor held that baroque architecture in Italy could never have existed without pasta in all its multitudinous and beguiling forms... Drawing on a decade and a half of living i... read more
C20th experimental and idealistic collectives, including Santiniketan in Delhi, England's Dartington, Germany's Bruderhof. Their leaders were charismatics too - Tagore, Gurdjieff, et al - ... read more
Raised in Nazi Germany, at 18, Wulff Scherchen was Britten's muse and lover. When the composer went to the USA during the war, Wulff was interned as an enemy alien and transported to Canada,... read more
A new translation of this fabulous C16th Chinese work - a wild epic, an outrageous satire, and surely one of the most exuberant works of literature the world has ever known. Based on the mon... read more
In this new book Sinclair has abandoned London for Peru, in an attempt to understand his great-grandfather's colonial career. The narrative Sinclair grew up with ends up as self-serving flot... read more