The Laugavegur is one of the big walks. It is the most famous trek in Iceland and crosses other worldly landscapes formed by recent volcanos. I did it from north to south and it runs over 80km from Landmannalauger via Thorsmork to Skogar on the coast. I started on the 15 June, the first day the bus ran to Landmannalaugar. I hadn’t booked the huts as I didn’t know whether I’d make it. So I took camping gear. The scenery is sensational and unlike anywhere I’d been before. At this time of the...

As China reclaims its position as a world power, Imperial Twilight looks back to tell the story of the country’s last age of ascendance and how it came to an end in the nineteenth-century Opium War.As one of the most potent turning points in the country’s modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today’s China seeks to put behind it. In this dramatic, epic story, award-winning historian Stephen Platt sheds new light on the early attempts by ...

Nelbow Rockfist is a dwarf on a mission. Her brother has a bad case of demonic possession and there is a shortage of exorcists. Her only hope is to convince the sorcerer Grumblechin to come out of retirement, but the once-infamous spellcaster is adamant she won't leave the comfort of her tower for anything, least of all to meddle with demons. Meanwhile, Orsnart Rogtog knows that firsts are difficult. Being the first orc 'pryvate eye' in a city of dwarves is tough. Avoiding the axe blows of...

From the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century to the Chinese Communist movement in the twentieth, no province in China gave rise to as many reformers, military officers, and revolutionaries as did Hunan. Stephen Platt offers the first comprehensive study of why Hunan wielded such disproportionate influence.Covering a span of eight decades, this book portrays three generations of Hunanese scholar-activists who held their provincial loyalties above their allegiances to a q...

The Massif Central is a highland in south-central France and historically the region, the Auverne, was a barrier. It was formed by ancient volcanic activity over many ages and was raised by the Alpine and Pyrenean uplifts. The rock is granite and metamorphic and the region contain hundreds of extinct volcanos or Puys. I was unfamiliar with the region and had never considered visiting it until recently, perhaps because it wasn't high or spiky enough in my youth or too agricultural. But the ...

A gripping account of China’s nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion, one of the largest civil wars in history. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom brims with unforgettable characters and vivid re-creations of massive and often gruesome battles—a sweeping yet intimate portrait of the conflict that shaped the fate of modern China.The story begins in the early 1850s, the waning years of the Qing dynasty, when word spread of a major revolution brewing in the provinces, led by a fail...

The Mare a Mare Nord traverses Corsica from sea to sea. It’s nearly 100 miles long (152 km), involves nearly 7000 metres of ascent and descent and took me 11 days. I sailed to Ajaccio, the capital of Corsica, on the west coast, and the walk climbed thickly wooded valleys before crossing the GR20 and the mountainous backbone of Corsica at the Col de Vergio. From Corte, the town in the middle of the island, the path follows mule tracks that link isolated hilltop villages all the way to the e...

A book that actually takes you inside - and around - the human body to see how it works, with the help of some truly unique illustrations and some very small people!Explore your brain, your bones, and everything in between in incredible cross-section drawings of all the body systems. Inside each one are teams of tiny characters busy at work, and explaining what's going on.Every page includes jaw-dropping facts. Did you know that the skin is your largest org...

Providing a critical review of the current state of health promotion research. This book re-conceptualises the field of health promotion as collaborative and integrating enterprise, rather than as a battlefield for disciplinary and intellectual clashes.It makes a significant contribution to ongoing epistemological, theoretical and methodological debates in health promotion research. With contributors from Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, Ireland, the UK and the US, Researching Heal...

We had a trip to Morocco in mind for some years, since Frances, our daughter, went there on buying trips twenty years ago. But this time we visited parts that were new to her. From Fez we crossed the Atlas Mountains and went south into the desert, then west along the mountains to Finnt, across to Marrakesh and back along the northern flank to Fez. I’m glad we went now because Morocco is changing. Everywhere we went there were signs of development – half finished apartments blocks, new subu...

Because of its remoteness, New Zealand was one of the last places to be settled by humans who arrived only 7-800 years ago from Polynesia and founded what today is a strong and highly influential Maori culture. We went to study recovery after the 2012 earthquake and stayed with Scharlie’s cousin John and his wife Mollie in Christchurch. We interviewed key people involved in planning the reconstruction and also surveyed the damage in the centre and the badly affected suburbs, After we went ...

The modern history of Africa was, until very recently, written on behalf of the indigenous races by the white man, who had forcefully entered the continent during a particularly hubristic and dynamic phase of European history. In 1884, Prince Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor, brought the plenipotentiaries of all major powers of Europe together, to deal with Africa's colonization in such a manner as to avoid provocation of war. This event, known as the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885...