{"title":"Eland","description":"\u003cp\u003eA wonderful publisher of classic travel books.  \u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"9781780600390-retail-the-turkish-embassy-letters-1716-1718","title":"The Turkish Embassy Letters: 1716-1718","description":"Mary Montagu was one of the most extraordinary characters in the world. She was a self-educated intellectual, a free spirit, a radical, a feminist but also an entitled aristocrat and a society wit with powerful friends at court. In 1716 she travelled across Europe to take up residence in Istanbul as the wife of the British ambassador. Her letters remain as fresh as the day they were penned: enchanted by her discoveries of the life of Turkish women behind the veil, by Arabic poetry and by contemporary medical practices - including inoculation. For two years she lovingly observed Ottoman society as a participant, with affection, intelligence and an astonishing lack of prejudice. She is one of the first modern travel writers and still one of the best, studying and recording a lived culture through its own values and its own language. In her own words, 'No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure more lasting.' '... one of the best narrative travel books ever written by an Englishwoman.'  Dervla Murphy 'Her letters have an immediacy and vivacity that remains as fresh as the mosaics on the ancient monuments she saw and the eastern gardens that gave her such delight.'  Anita Desai '... what fire, what ease, what knowledge of Europe and Asia.'  Gibbon","brand":"Book Grocer","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48869452382427,"sku":"9781780600390-RETAIL","price":25.49,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/e41d155f-1705-4924-b8ce-542ad72e88b2.jpg?v=1781283111"},{"product_id":"9781780600765-retail-honeymoons","title":"Honeymoons","description":"  Beautifully produced and a perfect gift for travellers  newly wedded or not - by turn funny, tender, acerbic and charming. Includes extracts from: Paul Bowles, Dorothy Sayers, D. H. Lawrence, Byron, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Dorothy Parker, A. N. Wilson, Thackeray, Trollope, Dickens, Ruskin, Maupassant, Martha Gellhorn, Graham Greene. 'A brilliant collection of writings on the subject of the honeymoon. Offering context and commentary where necessary, the editors have canvassed history, fact and fiction for the gamut of newlywed experience, from the Brownings' blissful elopement and Napoleon and Marie-Louise's swift exit from the marriage supper, to Charles Kingsley's bizarre proposal of chastity and Tess Durbeyfield's tragic disclosure of her rape...to the tenderly erotic writing from, of all people, Queen Victoria, who delights in sneaking in to watch her new husband shave. '   Time Out","brand":"Book Grocer","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48869452480731,"sku":"9781780600765-RETAIL","price":29.74,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/db87d0ca-eee1-4d92-bcc0-2502b9ae6e27.jpg?v=1781283114"},{"product_id":"9781780601380-retail-coasting","title":"Coasting","description":"'A valuable book and a necessary one. One of the funniest and cleverest voyages on record.' Christopher Hitchens,  New Statesman 'The finest writer afloat since Conrad.' Geoffrey Moorhouse,  The Guardian 'Unfailingly witty and entertaining.' Salman Rushdie Coasting round Britain single-handed in an antique two-masted sailing boat, Jonathan Raban conducts a masterly exploration of England and the English at the time of Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands War. He moves seamlessly between awkward memories of childhood as the son of a vicar, a vivid chronicle of the shape-shifting sea and incisive descriptions of the people and communities he encounters. As he faces his terror of racing water, eddies, offshore sandbars and ferries on a collision course, so he navigates the complex and turbulent waters of his own middle age. Coasting is a fearless attempt to discover the meaning of belonging and of his English homeland.","brand":"Book Grocer","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48869452611803,"sku":"9781780601380-RETAIL","price":25.49,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/706d902e-1cf2-428d-a739-c660e3ba8df0.jpg?v=1781283118"},{"product_id":"9781780601397-retail-arabia-through-the-looking-glass","title":"Arabia through the Looking Glass","description":"'Of all his generation's travellers, Jonathan Raban is the most sophisticated, writing with a subtle and imaginative brilliance.' Colin Thubron 'One of the most humane and visionary of all travel writers.' Jeremy Seal Into Jonathan Raban's familiar Earls Court neighbourhood after the 1970s oil boom came new visitors from the Arab world, dressed in floor-length robes and yashmaks. A people apart, little known, Raban wanted to get behind the myth and the rumour to discover the reality of their lives and world. His journey took him through Bahrain, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Yemen, Egypt and Jordan. What he discovered was a far cry from the camel, tent and sand dune archetypes of early European explorers. Oil wealth had seeped into almost every corner, and Bedouin encampments had been replaced by cosmopolitan boomtowns, camels by Range Rovers. The sons of Bedouin nomads were now studying medicine in Europe and engineering in New York. Yet in this fast-moving world, old certainties remained  and cultural innovation lagged miles behind economic change. Raban's gift for friendship introduces us to a series of memorable individuals  rich and poor  set against the feel, the smells, the sounds and the nuances of Arabia.","brand":"Book Grocer","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48869452644571,"sku":"9781780601397-RETAIL","price":25.49,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/05a7bd46-e379-43f5-a10a-c9c7a8209924.jpg?v=1781283119"},{"product_id":"9781780601427-retail-eothen-traces-of-travel-brought-home-from-the-east","title":"Eothen: Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East","description":"Eothen , which means 'news from the east' started out asa few notes scribbled on the back of a map, to amuse a friend who wanted some advicefor his own youthful 'year off' travels, but it became one of the most influential,witty and idiosyncratic of travel books. It took Kinglake seven years before hehad finished crafting this 'lively, brilliant and rather insolent' tale. The physicaldetails of the journey, undertaken in 1834 across the Balkan frontiers of the OttomanEmpire, through Constantinople, Smyrna, Cyprus into the Near eastern cities of Jerusalem,Cairo and Damascus, are never as significant as the conversations, chance encountersand attitudes of the author. Packed full of an infectious charm and a youthfuldelight at the world, it is above all things funny as it lampoons the pomposityof earnest, middle-agedtravellers seeking to establish themselves as professional authorities. 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At lasthe is following his own advice to students, to do their anthropological fieldwork'somewhere where the inhabitants are beautiful, friendly, where you would like thefood and there are nice flowers. With his customary wit and delight in the tellingdetail, he takes the reader deep into this complex but adaptable society. Themutual warmth of his friendships allows Barley to reverse the habitual patternsof anthropology. He becomes host to four Torajan carvers in London, invited to builda traditional rice barn at the Museum of Mankind. The observer becomes the observed,and it is Barley's turn to explain the absurd complexities of an English city tohis bemused but tolerant guests in a magnificent, self-criticalfinale.","brand":"Book Grocer","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48869452775643,"sku":"9781780601434-RETAIL","price":25.49,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/4d47904f-1ac8-4dec-8b76-f78e42db4662.jpg?v=1781283125"},{"product_id":"9781780601519-retail-a-plague-of-caterpillars-a-return-to-the-african-bush","title":"A Plague of Caterpillars: A Return to the African Bush","description":"When local contacts tipped off Nigel Barley that the Dowayocircumcision ceremony was about to take place, he immediately left London for thevillage in northern Cameroon where he had lived as a field anthropologist for 18months. 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A poetic genius, he destroyed all those who attempted to befriend him, most notoriously wrecking the marriage and sanity of the poet Verlaine. Having conquered the literary world of Paris, he abandoned France and in the dogdays of August 1880 he disembarked in Aden, on the coast of Yemen, a lean twenty-five-year-old Frenchman carrying only a brown suitcase fastened with four leather straps and a touch of fever. The subsequent period, the lost years , is the subject of this biographical quest.  Charles Nicholl pieces together the shadowy story of Rimbaud's life as a trader, explorer and gun-runner. We catch his trail in Somalia, in the alleys of Djibouti, up in the highlands of Ethiopia, in the souks of Cairo with twenty pounds of gold strapped around his waist and escorting a camel-train of Remington rifles across the Danakil desert.","brand":"Book Grocer","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48869452841179,"sku":"9781780601694-RETAIL","price":29.74,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/52106e11-5387-496f-b05e-1680adc5ddc3.jpg?v=1781283128"},{"product_id":"9781906011024-retail-walled-gardens-scenes-from-an-anglo-irish-childhood","title":"Walled Gardens: Scenes from an Anglo-Irish Childhood","description":"This is a journey both into a time and a place - the South of Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s. 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