Farewell to Salonica

City at the Crossroads
by Leon Sciaky

In this warm and moving memoir, Leon Sciaky describes his childhood before the First World War in a prosperous, loving Jewish family in the cosmopolitan city of Salonica (now Thessaloniki in Greece). Under the Ottoman Empire, the city’s diverse communities – Jews, Muslim Turks, Orthodox Greeks and Bulgarians – met, traded and lived alongside each other in a day-to-day atmosphere of mutual respect and tolerance. Salonica was also a point of contact between East and West, and Sciaky describes the impact of Western ‘machine civilisation’ on the older, more human ways of the Orient.

read more »

Price: £14.40

Keynes

Life&Times
by Robert Cord

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) was educated at Eton and King’s College Cambridge, where he was elected to the Apostles. A part of the ‘Bloomsbury Group’, and close friends with Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell and Leonard and Virginia Woolf, he combined his revolutionary economic work with sponsorship of the arts, being a founder and first chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain, and a very successful career as a stock-market speculator. By the time of his death at the age of 63 in 1946, he was the most influential economist in the world.

read more »

Price: £7.99

Naguib Mahfouz

Egypt's Nobel Laureate
by Rasheed El-Enany

The Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) was the father of the Arabic novel. Born in the old quarter of Jamaliyya in Cairo, the traditional neighbourhood played an important role in his earlier realistic novels such as Midaq Alley and The Cairo Trilogy, and as a metaphor for Egyptian society in later works such as Children of the Alley and The Harafish. He established an international reputation and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, but accusations of a blasphemous portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad in Children of the Alley lead to a fatwa against him by Islamic extremists, and he was seriously injured in an assassination attempt in 1994.

read more »

Price: £7.99

Happy Landings!

Cartoons by Bosc, Chaval, Paul Flora and Loriot
by

This is a journey around the world in 65 cartoons. To all rolling stones and armchair travellers alike the world-renowned artists Bosc, Chaval, Paul Flora and Loriot say: Happy Landings!

read more »

Price: £5.55

In Search of Eden

The Course of an Obsession
by James Weir

Journeys to Turkey, Iraq, Ethiopia, Iran, Yemen and Bahrain, although not undertaken consciously by the author in search of Eden, James Weir confesses to have had a life-long fascination with the loss of Paradise and the dream to return.

read more »

Price: £9.40