Eland now have eleven of Norman Lewis’s titles in print. Acknowledged as one of the most influential travel writers and a pioneering journalist, his biographer Julian Evans writes about Lewis's abiding fascination with Spain in his foreword to The Tomb in Seville . . .
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Growing
Seven Years in Ceylon by Leonard Woolf reviewed in The Oldie magazine by Jan Morris
This fascinating book is a kind of parable. It opens when one October morning in 1904 Leonard Woolf, aged 24, sets sail from Tilbury for Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, thena middle-sized component of the British Empire. He is to become a member of the Ceylon Civil Service, but he is an improbable imperialist. Rather weedy-looking, he has lately come down from Trinity College, Cambridge, where he has been an active member of the ultra-intellectual Apostles club. His luggage includes 90 volumes of Voltaire’s collected works, 1784 edition, andhe is never out of touch with the most prominent of the Apostles, Lytton Strachey.
Almost at once he is plunged into the ambience of imperialism, in the late heyday of the imperial idea: the true diligence of it, the latent prejudices, the red tape, the accountings, the rural courts, the horse-back journeys, the red tape, the petty disputes, the occasional floggings, the demands of religions and feudalisms – together with the hockey, squash, bridge, tennis, gossipings and ambitions that were the consolations of the imperialists themselves. In Ceylon their own community was layered too, civil servants, army officers and planters one and all looking down upon the business people who were, after all, almost never members of The Club. As Kipling made clear, it was a very provincial sort of society, and a far, far cry from Voltaire and the Lytton Stracheys . . .
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Spring News
Rupert Smith on Dilys Powell, author of THE VILLA ARIADNE
In January 1926 Elizabeth Dilys Powell married Humfry Payne, the brilliant young archaeologist whose pursuits and enthusiasm were to shape her early life. For the next ten years, until his death in 1936, she perched on the edge of his world, an interested observer, watching him and his colleagues with a mixture of admiration and bemusement, and coming to share his love of the landscape and the people of Greece . . .
Read MoreThe Travellers’ Film Club
We are delighted to announce that a new series of the Travellers’ Film Club hosted by Waterstones, Piccadilly (203-206, Piccadilly, London) starts this week on Wednesday 27th January, 7pm.
Antony Wynn, author of Persia in the Great Game: Sir Percy Sykes: Explorer, Consul, Soldier, Spy will introduce and discuss GRASS: A Nation’s Battle for Life.
This 1925 silent documentary follows Haidar Khan and his Bakhtiari tribe on their Spring migration across the flooded Karun River and the snowbound Zagros Mountains of southern Persia to their summer pastures. Filmed on location between Turkey and Iran, Grass is the first ethnographical account of the nomadic Bakhtiari people and was selected for preservation in the US National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being ‘culturally and historically significant’.
Directed and photographed by Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack (who would later go on to produce ‘King Kong’) and Marguerite Harrison, Grass is deliberately styled as a story of man’s triumph over nature, as much a mythic narrative of migration and settlement as a simple travelogue. Venturing through deserts, mountains, rivers and snowy wastelands in search of the life-sustaining grasslands, the Bakhtiari’s 50,000 strong caravan - complete with 500,000 cattle and goats - become the sole focus of the camera’s gaze.
Antony Wynn, who is Chairman of the Iran Society, lived in Iran for many years and has visited each end of this migration - he has yet to ride the middle part.
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