When Thomas Becket was murdered by King Henry II in 1170, the journey to his shrine quickly became a popular pilgrimage route, and the 14th century poet Geoffrey Chaucer built his Canterbury Tales round the personalities of a group making the journey. Pilgrimages continue to fascinate us in the 21st century and the author, who had already made pilgrimages in celebration of his Cherokee heritage, entertains his readers with the people he meets and the wisdom he encounters on his own pilgrimage trail, interspersed with fascinating insights into the challenges of the route in the 14th century, when the country was still struggling with the aftermath of the Black Death. Harry Bailey and his 29 pilgrims would stop at inns along the way, sometimes four to a bed. A pilgrimage brings freedoms, and one of the modern characters Jerry encounters is Jack, who does straight-line walking, wherever the line takes him. Entering woodland Jerry feels something drawing him on, as if he is entering a sacred space. He casually asks a boy on a bike if he believes in miracles and gets the answer "You and me are miracles, aren't we?". In the 14th century 90% of the population was rural, and they could be ordered by the lord of the manor to help with the harvest. Medieval women had few options, with marriage being the main one, and the Wife of Bath had five husbands in the betrothal ceremony at the church door. Jerry has high jinks with the teenagers Red Head and Big Top, but never loses sight of the spiritual quest he is on, exchanging tobacco with a stranger to link the Christian pilgrimage with his Cherokee roots. 310pp, paperback, illustrations.

An Imperial War Museum and Collins publication sub-titled 'The History of the War Through Maps from 1939 to 1945', as recently seen by our editor Annie at Stanford's iconic book shop at full price - not here! The 150 Strategic maps show theatres of war, frontiers and occupied territories, key battles and offensives on major fronts, planning and operations maps showing references in detail and propaganda and educational maps for the armed forces and general public. In addition, maps showing dispositions of Allied and enemy forces bomber and V-weapon target maps, and descriptions of key historical events accompany the maps, giving an exceptional illustrated account of the war from an expert historian. Chapter one begins with 1918-39, The Treaty of Versailles to the Invasion of Poland, Chapters two and three 1940 with the German invasion of Norway, the Low Countries and France, and the Battle of Britain and Operation Sealion. Other theatres of war include the Balkans and North Africa, Barbarossa, Pearl Harbor to Midway, Stalingrad and the relief of Leningrad, Sicily and Italy, D-Day to VE Day, the Eastern Front, Burma and the Pacific 1942-45. The map provided commanders and their staff at home and at the front with an easy-to-review information system which modelled, in two dimensions (and in the case of terrain models in three), the complexities of natural ground forms and human-created environments of the theatres and battlefields in which their forces were operating. On these maps they determined their strategy, planned and executed their operations, and instructed their subordinates from the leaders of the smallest tactical units, down to platoons, sections or squads who pored over grid references, interpreted the conventions, signs or symbols and gave their orders. On the large-scale artillery maps, the firing data were read-off. On 'going' maps, tank commanders plotted their routes. On nautical and aeronautical charts, navigators did the same, while bomber pilots and their navigators studied flak and target maps. The map production statistics reveal a stupendous output - well over 300 million map sheets produced by the Germans, Russians, British and Americans. Germany printed around 1,300 million sheets in printing plants and 16 million alone were produced in 1943. Britain produced over 400 million sheets at home, including 60 million by the War Office's Geographical Section of the General Staff or MI4, and 343 million by Ordnance Survey at Southampton. The Imperial War Museums' Map Archives holds many, and the finest examples are reproduced in this magnificent publication. 304 magnificent large pages, 22.7 x 27cm.
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The Adriatic has long been a centre of international relations and a vital crossroads between East and West Europe at the heart of the Roman Empire. Later it became the all-important trading route of the Venetians. Besides being a strategic waterway, in the south it provided a way through the Narrow Strait of Otranto into the wider Mediterranean. This book explores how over many centuries the Adriatic became central to the lives and ambitions of a variety of peoples, among them the Goths, Normans, Spanish, Albanians, French, British, Austro-Hungarians, Italians, Germans and also those collectively called Yugoslavs. The long history of the Adriatic region is marked by commercial and political rivalries, conflicts, changing governments and fluid borders, and the author has tried to condense this to bring the whole area together and she has included some figures from outside the region like the Holy Roman Emperors, and various foreign dignitaries or invaders. The book spans over 2000 years of history and the whole of the eastern Mediterranean region around the Adriatic sea and part of the neighbouring Ionian sea. These lands have included great empires, occupation by the British in recent centuries, the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the First World War which had its origins in this combustible region and the book untangles a rich and complex history into the 20th century before the former Yugoslavia once again fractured. It is detailed on the alliances that countries formed, often through trade or royal marriage, and on the negative side the rivalries that divided states and ended in war, invasion or the overthrow of government. The narrative is filled with personal stories of individuals from the many different periods that illuminate the political, cultural and economic developments, together with the major conflicts from earliest Roman times, through the Crusades, right up to the battles of the Second World War. Everything is here, beauty, beautiful islands and beaches and coastal towns, Roman emperors, traders and crusaders, the Polish queen from Bari, the Serenissima's last days of carnival, Napoleon's expanding empire, Ali Pasha and Lord Byron, the unification of Italy, Archduke Maximillian's dreams, assassinations and opposition and Italy's dictators like Mussolini. A magnificent work of history, 448pp, maps and 16 pages of colour photos.

Sub-titled 'An Edwardian Journey on the Nile' this is a quality The American University in Cairo Press publication, very well illustrated throughout. A collection of letters in a small painted box passed down through three generations of a London family is the starting point for a vivid account of a three-month journey up and down the Nile, and like a time capsule, they bring to life a lost world of Edwardian travel and social mores, of Egypt on the brink of the modern age, of the great figures of Egyptology, and of aristocrats and archaeologists. In 1907-8 Ferdinand Platt, known as Ferdy, travelled to Egypt as the personal physician to the ailing 8th Duke of Devonshire, one of the giant statesmen of the late Victorian age, and his family party, recounting his adventure in letters to his young wife in England. Ferdy reported on the sights of the country around him with his amateur Egyptologist's eye and the people he met along the way including Howard Carter and Winston Churchill. He also recorded his private thoughts and intimate observations of a formal and stratified society, soon to be witness to its own extinction. The affectionate husband in his detailed letters, particularly from on board the Serapis in 1907, writes about visiting the temples of Rameses II and Seti I. 'I was delighted to see the beautiful sculptured and painted walls in the former once more.' And 'You won't find the Bridge or railway marked on any of the maps: they are all too old but Nag Hamadi is between Beliana and Kena. The hills are just beginning to get pink. Natives sitting outside a sort of caffee playing some game like draughts. The Nile is quite smooth, not a ripple and the smoke from sugar factory chimneys goes straight up...' Beautifully captures the golden age of Egyptology and travel during the Belle Epoch. Dozens of colour photographs, illustrations such as the Egyptian swallow and Sacred Lake at Karnak, a complete itinerary and map of the journey. A must for armchair travellers and historians. 144pp, colour.

The Financial Times said, 'An illuminating glimpse of the chain reactions of human and physical geography.' This is a fascinating exploration of the lesser-known and more subtle borders across the earth, and the surprising ways in which they shape our lives. Our world has innumerable boundaries, ranging from the obvious like an ocean to the subtle differences in language or climate. Most of us cross invisible lines all the time, but do not stop to consider them. Here geographer Maxim Samson presents 30 such unseen boundaries, intriguing and unexpected examples of the myriad ways in which we collectively engage with and experience the world. From football fans in Buenos Aires to air quality in China, Paris' banlieues to sub-Saharan Africa's Malaria Belt, the existence or perceived existence of dividing lines has manifold implications for people, wildlife, and places. Football's no-go neighbourhoods, evolutionary splits, segregation along Detroit's infamous 8 Mile, to herds of deer that refuse to cross the former Iron Curtain, the book is a veritable treat for the armchair explorer. Fully illustrated with maps of each location in a new way of viewing our world in all its consistency and messiness too. 404pp.

Paris is famous for its art and art bookshops, and Bibliophile struggled to resist this beautiful temptation of a book! The most iconic bookshops such as Delamain or Galignani have passionate booksellers with a vocation to open new horizons to readers and these bookshops feel a little bit like a social club. Sound familiar? The role of bookshops was so essential during the pandemic lockdowns that books were considered an essential need and bookshops were allowed to stay open alongside food shops and pharmacies. Food for thought. Like all of us, Parisians cannot resist stopping at a box of books put out in front of a bookshop. The name of the City of Paris evokes many stories from Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo and also as a refuge for authors who fled prejudice, like Oscar Wilde, Richard Wright and James Baldwin. From the oldest café in Paris, Le Procope, where philosopher Voltaire had his desk, to the Shakespeare & Co. bookshop where so many Americans come on pilgrimage in the footsteps of the Beat Generation, to green book stalls punctuating the banks of the River Seine, you'll be drawn to Paris after reading this book, if only from your armchair, with these delightfully engaging colour photographs on every page. Currently hosting the 2024 Olympics, the City of Light is here explored in a cultural odyssey of its historic bookshops, restaurants and the haunts of writers who have made Paris their home. For example the Drouant restaurant which is inextricably linked with the Goncourt Literary Prize, Le Döme at 108 Boulevard du Montparnasse where occultist Aleister Crowley, artist Paul Gauguin and Vladimir Lenin frequented, and follow in the footsteps of Paul Verlaine whose new poetry was published in a weekly review from the nightclub Le Chat Noir and despite an ongoing addiction to absinth was voted 'Prince of Poets' in 1894. The prolific author and self publicist Georges Simenon wrote his Inspector Maigret novels here and added to the glitterati literati list are Marcel Proust, Molière, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Alxandre Dumas, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre and many more and the places they knew and loved like theatres, Parisian alleyways, the opera house and the riverside booksellers who have been in business in one form or another since the 16th century. We love this book. 160 landscape format pages, packed with colour photos, 23 x 19.6 cm.

'Some may look at the decay in these buildings as simply reflecting the destruction of the Soviet Bloc and the moral bankruptcy of a flawed ideological system. I perceive them as museums, the buildings and extant objects as beautiful exhibits. They are memorials to the ordinary people who once lived and worked there, but whose existence, whose stories are ephemeral; and at risk of being extinguished forever, if they are not somehow recorded.' Like a ghost hunt, this photographer has indeed recorded faded memories of the former Soviet Union his first trip to the abandoned town of Pripyat, Ukraine, in October 2012, the town that served the powerplant at Chernobyl. His second trip was to Bulgaria to see the abandoned Communist Monument up the beautiful Mount Buzludzha. It is as if life just stood still - with not a human in sight we see inside the dilapidated swimming pool at Pripyat Sports Centre, the strewn books at the Young Pioneer Camp Russia, with access to the dilapidated Teufelsberg Spy Station, East Germany, the Cosmonaut Memorial, Russia, with an old space suit, a satellite communication centre in Russia, the inside of an Antonov aircraft in Bulgaria, a dusty pool table and peeling walls of a sanatorium in Russia with discarded pill bottles, stirrup chairs and other contraptions for the poor inmates, filthy curtains half torn down and blood stained beds. Here is life and work behind the Iron Curtain and inside the Wünsdorf Soviet headquarters East Germany in imagery which becomes surreal and almost suffocating in its post-society, post-human post-life. There are military spaces which once directed such supreme power in the Cold War "now left in an alternative post-apocalyptic vacuum, weeping with the irony that mocks them." Yet there are glimmers of architectural genius with spiral staircases, beautiful wrought ironwork, mosaics, stained glass windows, gigantic proportions and above-cloud vistas, plus of course the prisons and functional aspects of the Soviet-built Communist structures. Breathtaking in its artistry is the monument of the Bulgarian Soviet Friendship hewn in stone with four identical military figures in a cubist style towering over a city. Sights we would never otherwise see, mostly in full page colour photos which Rebecca Litchfield has personally visited as she describes the forgotten historic locations and the ideologies that built them. Approx. 10" square and 200 pages.
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A prize winning masterpiece, this little book is ruminative, humane and genre-defying. Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell. Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, the book weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own works that pondered the nature of narrative itself. Erich Auerbach was the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler's Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature Mimesis in Istanbul. François Fenelon was the 17th century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey, named The Adventures of Telemachus, was a veiled critique of the Sun King. It was the bestselling book in Europe for 100 years and resulted in his banishment. And the German novelist W. G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia and separation from home. Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn's struggles to write his own family saga of the Holocaust and memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father. Haunting tales of oppression and wandering, his book moves to a startling conclusion about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages and centuries. 128pp, paperback.

John Smith was born in 1580 in Lincolnshire, where he attended Louth grammar school, and as a boy he would hear about the defeat of the Spanish Armada and expeditions to the New World by Sir Francis Drake. At the age of 16 Smith enlisted as a soldier, learnt the arts of horsemanship at Tattershall Castle, and after a variety of adventures including more than one shipwreck, he eventually took up with some Jesuits and ended up in Italy, where he enlisted with the imperial army in a holy war against the Turks. As a result he found himself in a Protestant Hungarian regiment, was captured by the Turks and was sold into slavery. Bound for the Crimea with a nefarious group of other captives, he managed to make a run for it and sailed for Spain. Eventually finding his way home, Smith had not lost his appetite for adventure and joined an expedition to the New World, where he became one of the founders of Jamestown, Virginia. The intrepid colonisers found a suitable site for a settlement by following instructions supplied by the London Council. Having sworn in their governing body they prepared to build by cutting wood and setting up a palisade. The local Native American chief, Wowinchopunck, sent 100 men with two fat deer, inviting the colonists to lay down their weapons, which they declined to do. The paramount chief, Powhatan, was less friendly, and when Smith was captured he only escaped with his life by showing them the workings of a compass. At this point he first made the acquaintance of Powhatan's daughter Pocahontas, who later married one of the settlers and was taken to England, where she caused a sensation but could not survive the climate. The story of the Jamestown settlement is largely based on Smith's own account, and makes fascinating reading. 202pp, black and white reproductions.

Edward Lane was one of the leading historians of the Arab world in the Victorian era, publishing lexicons of Arabic, a translation of the Thousand and One Nights, and studies of Egyptian social customs. Description of Egypt would have been his first book had it been published. Lane's interest moved from ancient to modern Egypt and following the offer of funding from a mysterious benefactor he embarked for Alexandria in 1825, moving straight on to Cairo where he immediately adopted Egyptian dress and within a year spoke fluent Arabic. Immersing himself in the life of Cairo he worshipped at the mosque and lived as an Egyptian, at the same time amassing a huge library of books and manuscripts. Lane made two extended voyages up the Nile as far as Nubia and the Second Cataract. In spite of his prodigious learning he made a number of archaeological misjudgements, particularly in interpreting Akhenaten and Hatshepsut, but his descriptions of the condition of the monuments provide valuable evidence for historians and conservationists. His accounts of towns, markets and the urban and rural landscape are accompanied by detailed drawings which prioritise accuracy. On his return to the UK, Lane's massive book went through three major drafts. With the final draft including a comprehensive history of Muhammad Ali, which he took largely from secondary sources including the Cairo-based Islamic scholar al-Jabarti, Lane submitted his manuscript to John Murray in 1831. Murray was preoccupied with the Reform Bill, and successive revisions and Egyptian visits failed to produce a viable manuscript. The editor of this version has made it available following 170 years of oblivion. 15.2 x 22.6cm, 588pp, paperback, photos.