Capus takes us on an exploratory journey via the loss of a Spanish vessel laden with gold and jewels in the South Seas, the burial of treasure, an ancient map, and a long and dangerous voyage across the Pacific, to prove that Robert Louis Stevenson's "treasure island" actually exists; and that it exists in a place quite different from where hordes of treasure-hunters have been seeking it for generations. In fact, he posits, it was for this reason alone that Stevenson spent the last five years of his life in Samoa. On a long trip round the Pacific islands with the idea of writing articles for American periodicals, Stevenson, travelling with his beloved wife, Fanny, and stepson Lloyd Osbourne, had no notion of stopping at Samoa when their ship made landfall in December 1889. Yet, only six weeks later, at the age of 39, he would invest all his available assets in a patch of impenetrable jungle and spend the rest of his life there. This book traces what led Stevenson to Samoa and the origins of his famous story. For facing him from this unlikely spot was another island – a conical isle, Tafahi, where legends abound, and it was, Capus suggests, this isle that would cause him to change the course of his life.

Biography of the first Prime Minister of the 20th Century during the height of the British Empire

A region steeped in fable and myth, Provence is a cultural crossroads of European history. A source of inspiration to artists, poets, and troubadours, it is now an enviable refuge for the wealthy and fashionable. Nicholas Woodsworth, who was born in Ottawa, Canada, married into a Provençal family and has lived in the region for decades. Lovingly recounting vivid details of life in Provence, he provides here a welcome antidote to the typical rosé-tinted, romantic view of it being a perennially sunny destination for tourists.

The true Provençaux have always lived a hard life close to the land and the rhythms of the seasons. And it is in the revelation and understanding of these lives, of the Provençal people, that the truths of the region are to be found. As much a study of Provençal culture and history as a memoir and travel book, this is a deep and soulful investigation into a way of life that remains very distinct from that of the rest of France.

In 2005, a group of actors in Kabul performed Shakespeare's Love’s Labour's Lost to the cheers of Afghan audiences and the raves of foreign journalists. For the first time in years, men and women had appeared onstage together. The future held no limits, the actors believed. In this fast-moving, fondly told and frequently very funny account, Qais Akbar Omar and Stephen Landrigan capture the triumphs and foibles of the actors as they extend their Afghan passion for poetry to Shakespeare's.Both authors were part of the production. Qais, a journalist, served as Assistant Director and interpreter for Paris actress, Corinne Jaber, who had come to Afghanistan on holiday and returned to direct the play. Stephen, himself a playwright, assembled a team of Afghan translators to fashion a script in Dari as poetic as Shakespeare's. This chronicle of optimism plays out against the heartbreak of knowing that things in Afghanistan have not turned out the way the actors expected.

Simone de Beauvoir was a member of the intellectual elite of philosopher-writers whose feminist ideas revolutionised conventional thinking. She is known primarily for her monumental work: The Second Sex, (1949) a scholarly and passionate seminal work, which became a classic of feminist literature but also for her partnership with the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, France's most celebrated and unconventional intellectual couplings.

Sir Robert Borden was Plenipotentiary of Canada at the Peace Conference. With the Versailles Treaty ratified by the Canadian Parliament, Borden largely believed his work was done. He retired as Prime Minister in 1920. Although Borden died in 1937, the great legacy for Canada that derived from Borden's attitudes towards the role of the Dominions in international affairs was the drive towards a constitutional recognition of Canada's international position. Canada's control of its own foreign policy was finally confirmed in a declaration by Arthur Balfour in 1926 and the Statute of Westminster in 1931 that created the British Commonwealth of Nations. Borden helped to produce a Canada with an autonomous and independent foreign policy, the seeds of this work led to the growth of a vigorous foreign policy for Canada within a United Nations and its specialised agencies.

Decades after westward expansion swept over it, settled it, and domesticated it, the Wild West remains a potent source of American myth and mystery. But the actual history, and the traces of it that remain, are at least as interesting as the fiction, and in Skidoo, writer and novelist Alex Capus takes us on a fascinating tour of the skeleton of the American West—the ghost towns and collapsing mines that lie far from interstates and airports, lost in history.

Walking in the footsteps of bank robbers and grave diggers, desperadoes and Native Americans, beer brewers and child brides, Capus uncovers story after story of adventure, violence, and exploration. Near Salt Wells, Nevada, he learns the story of a luckless inventor whose corpse was discovered frozen in the desert, an icicle hanging from its nose. In Skidoo, California, he tells us of a brawling bartender, Hootch Simpson, who was hanged twice—once by a mob, once by the law—before being beheaded during his autopsy. And in Flagstaff, Arizona, Capus traces the long-lost origins of Route 66, as a narrow, isolated trail for Edward Fitzgerald Beale’s Camel Corps.

Packed with period detail, and told with a verve and enthusiasm to rival Pecos Bill, the stories in Skidoo are sure to enchant any lover of Western tales or America’s wild history.

In Smile of the Midsummer Night, best-selling author Lars Gustafsson and Agneta Blomqvist present a very personal guide to their Swedish homeland. Setting off from the far South, their journey takes them up to Norrland, from the farms of Scania to Laponian, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. But it is the idyllic fjord in Bohulän, located in the Västmanland region, as well as Mälar Lake and Stockholm that they call home. Throughout, Gustafsson and Blomqvist are full of entertaining suggestions for excursions, including journeys through forests and moors where you can take in the odd elk or wolf along the way and visits to August Strindberg’s and Kurt Tucholsky’s graves.

The first work of contemporary travel writing about Sweden by Swedish writers to have been translated into English, Smile of the Midsummer Night is a loving and poetic ode to this beautiful nation and a must-have for anyone interested in Scandinavia.

The ancient world of fifth century Greece, an astonishing period of cultural development that helps situate the originality of Socrates, and to the city-state of Athens in particular. The social, political and cultural currents flowing through Athens are inseparable from an understanding of the events and attitudes that Socrates examined and intellectually dissected.

While Portuguese-speaking Brazil declared war on Germany in the First World War, the rest of South America held back. In the end no other South American nation joined the fighting. But four - Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and Uruguay - did break off diplomatic relations with Germany in 1917, in sympathy with US policy and with the Allies in Europe. Their reward was a place at the Paris Peace Conference table and for the first time a chance to play a role on the world stage rather than just in their own backyard.

The Tanimbar Islands of Indonesia are remote and largely neglected by outsiders. Will Buckingham went there, as an anthropologist in training, with a mission. He hoped to meet three remarkable sculptors: the crippled Matias Fatruan, the buffalo hunter Abraham Amelwatin, and Damianus Masele, who was skilled in black magic, but who abstained out of Christian principle. Part memoir, part travelogue, Stealing with the Eyes is the story of these men, and also of how stumbling into a world of witchcraft, sickness, and fever led Buckingham to question the validity of his anthropological studies, and eventually to abandon them for good. 

Through his encounters with these remarkable craftsmen—which in relating her also interweaves with Tanimbarese history, myth, and philosophy dating back to ancient times— we are shown the forces at play in all of our lives: the struggle between the powerful and the powerless, the tension between the past and the future, and how to make sense of a world that is in constant flux.

Considering subjects as diverse yet interrelated as the earth’s water resources, renewable energy sources, climate change, the demise of natural diversity, overpopulation, and malnutrition, this book collects and accessibly presents the most up-to-date research on subjects of major global concern from twelve leading scientists. 
 

Outside the theatrical profession Sybil Thorndike is no longer the household name she once was; she has become a historical figure. Yet her combative, inspiring life, her passionate concern for the state of the world as well as for her art, resonates with any age. As the actor Michael Macli­ammói­r put it: 'Essentially English, she is yet nationless; essentially of her period, she is yet timeless.'