From time immemorial Afghanistan has both been a fortress of faith and a mountainous crossroads. Through its high valleys merchants traded Chinese porcelains, bundles of indigo cloth, sacks of lapis lazuli, golden jewellery, emeralds and fine carvings from both east and west. Ancient scrolls and beliefs entered the land in satchels of Buddhist pilgrims and in the baggage of military invaders- from Alexander the Great to Mughal, Persian and Arab conquerors and even the ill-fated armies of t...

Peter Levi paints a radiant portrait of the Greece he came to know through a lifetime of exploration. As a young scholar he sought out its ancient spirit, the keys to its mythology and civilisation, in its ruined cities and majestic mountains. Later, as a priest working as a diplomat and a friend of the oppressed, he lived in Athens through the dark days of the dictatorship. The sinews of political life led back to secret alliances made during the civil war and the earlier occupation of Gr...

'Horace tells us in his poetry almost everything we need to know about his life; it is curiously entangled with the Italian earth, with the history of his times, and an exact moment in that brief early summer of Latin poetry which had no autumn.'The work of the great Roman poet, Horatius Flaccus (65 BC to 8 BC), spanned all aspects of Roman life: politics, the arts, religion, and the authority of the emperor, while his legendary poems (Satires, Odes, E...

Book by Samuel Johnson, published in 1775. The Journey was the result of a three-month trip to Scotland that Johnson took with James Boswell in 1773. It contains Johnson's descriptions of the customs, religion, education, trade, and agriculture of a society that was new to him. The account in Boswell's diary, published after Johnson's death as The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1785), offers an intimate personal record of Johnson's behavior and conversation ...

Written by a Greek traveller in the second century ad for a principally Roman audience, Pausanias' Guide to Greece is a comprehensive, extraordinarily literate and well-informed guidebook for tourists of the age. Concentrating on buildings, tombs and statues, it also describes in detail the myths, religious beliefs and historical background behind the monuments considered. In doing so, it preserves Greek legends, quotes classical literature and poetry that would otherwise have been lost, a...

This volume contains a selection of early works by Yevgeny Alexandrovich Yevtushenko who blazed a trail for a generation of Soviet poets with a confident poetic voice that moves effortlessly between social and personal themes. ‘Zima Junction’ vividly describes his idyllic childhood in Siberia and his impressions of home after a long absence in Moscow. Private moments are captured in ‘Waking’, on the joys of discovering the unexpected in a lover, and ‘Birthday’, on a mother’s concern for he...

This authoritative and extremely readable biography is the first since the Victorian Age to pay full attention to Shakespeare’s life and times and their numerous subtle connections to his works. Peter Levi emphasizes the background of Shakespeare’s life: the local and national events that shaped his experiences, his family and friends, and the Elizabethan people with whom he shared his life and populated his plays. Bringing together new research and new discoveries and reexamining the famo...

In 336 b.c. Philip of Macedonia was assassinated and his twenty-year-old son, Alexander, inherited his kingdom. Immediately quelling rebellion, Alexander extended his father’s empire through-out the Middle East and into parts of Asia, fulfilling the soothsayer Aristander’s prediction that the new king “should perform acts so important and glorious as would make the poets and musicians of future ages labour and sweat to describe and celebrate him.”The Life of Alexander the Gr...

Utopia is a work of fiction and political philosophy by Thomas More (1478–1535) published in 1516 in Latin. The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs.

In Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, one of the towering figures of English literature is revealed with unparalleled immediacy and originality. While Johnson’s Dictionary remains a monument of scholarship, and his essays and criticism command continuing respect, we owe our knowledge of the man himself to this biography. Through a series of wonderfully detailed anecdotes, Johnson emerges as a sociable figure with a huge appetite for life, crossing swords with other great e...

'The first example of non-fiction, the text that underlies the entire discipline of history ... it is above all a treasure trove' Tom HollandOne of the masterpieces of classical literature, The Histories describes how a small and quarrelsome band of Greek city states united to repel the might of the Persian empire. But while this epic struggle forms the core of his work, Herodotus' natural curiosity frequently gives rise to colourful digressions - a descri...

Shortlisted for the 1998 Los Angeles Times Book Award in Fiction: "Stunning and strange . . . Sebald has done what every writer dreams of doing. . . . The book is like a dream you want to last forever. . . . It glows with the radiance and resilience of the human spirit."—Roberta Silman, The New York Times Book Review"Ostensibly a record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia," as Robert McCrum in the London Observer noted, The Rings of Satur...