In 1880 Christian Watt, a woman of forty-seven who was to be a patient for many years in Cornhill, the Aberdeen Infirmary for those suffering from mental disorders, started to write down recollections of her life. She wrote on foolscap sheets of paper in pencil – pen and ink were forbidden within the institution – with a firm, clear hand. Her memory was encyclopaedic, her gift of narration superb. Before she died in 1923, she had recorded the principal events and impressions of a life of ninety years, describing folk and incident of the mid-nineteenth century in a way which, six decades later, brings both before our eyes.
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Read MoreIn Africa Dances Gorer takes the reader on an odyssey across West Africa, in the company of one of the great black ballet stars of 1930’s Paris, Féral Benga. This new edition features an afterword from Lamont Lindstrom.
Dancing Together – Black and White
Interwar Paris of the 1920s and 1930s was a honeypot buzzing with artists, writers, composers and musicians, many of whom arrived from around the world. Among these were dancer Féral (François) Benga, a Wolof migrant from colonial French Senegal, and Geoffrey Gorer (born 1905), a young graduate of Cambridge University and aspiring writer. Benga, a member of a wealthy, acculturated family in Dakar, had come to France in the mid-1920s when he was seventeen. He survived in Paris selling perfumes until he ran into a relative who admired his physique. Recommended as a cabaret performer, Benga found employment with the Folies Bergère where he became a featured dancer. He performed often with Josephine Baker, including in her signature banana dance. Modernism, and its primitivist shadow, powerfully then stimulated the city’s artistic community. Just as Picasso, Matisse and others incorporated African and Oceanic elements in their work, so did Parisian choreographers blend black themes and bodies within their productions. Dance, whether popular, jazz, or contemporary ballet, in those years combined and expressed both modern sophistication and savage vitality.
Africa Dances was published in 1935 and proved both a critical and financial success. It was also one of the most searing criticisms of the bleak reality of French colonialism to have ever been published.
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Read MoreCould the world possibly need another book festival? It turns out that the answer is yes, but not for the reasons you might imagine. It’s always fun for authors to meet some of their readers after the solitary process of writing, but the inaugural festival in Marrakesh turned out to be much richer than that.
Dar Cherifa is a far cry from even the most elegant of book festival tents – one of the oldest courtyard houses in the Marrakesh medina, it dates to the 16th-century and radiates age and distinction from its ornate tiles, plaster and beautiful carved wood. No doubt rising to the challenge of the historic setting, Eland publisher Barnaby Rogerson sits on a table in the courtyard to give a breathtaking exploration of the ancient history of north Africa, ranging from Queen Dido to St Augustine and a number of Berber kings in between. The audience are amazed and delighted that anyone from Europe should know so much about their homegrown heroes, and the vibe is one of mounting mutual respect. When the afternoon call to prayer interrupts Barnaby’s flow, he sits in contemplative silence, simply acknowledging the supremacy of his host culture in a way that endears him even more. The scene is set for an extraordinary weekend of subtle exchange.
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Read MorePopular perceptions of Afghanistan have changed radically since the mid-1970s, when I lived there. Before the communist coup d’état of 1978, it was a relatively peaceful and obscure location, and during the following years of civil war Afghanistan remained inaccessible and remote. By the mid-1980s, when I had a draft manuscript of Three Women of Herat, I had a hard time convincing a publisher that sufficient people would be interested in reading about Afghan women. Now, by contrast, everyone has heard of Afghanistan as a site of ongoing conflict – a sinkhole into which vast sums of money have been poured and thousands of lives lost. Situated on the strategic crossroads of Central Asia, over and over again the real needs of this beleaguered country have been disregarded by self-interested neighbours, super-powers and Islamist groups such as al-Qaida and ISIS. Now and then ‘the plight of Afghan women’ resurfaces, but media images tend to stereotype Afghan women as downtrodden victims of abuse and violation – a simplistic message that does not reflect my own experience.
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Read MoreUsually when I tell someone in Britain that I live in Jamaica they say the same thing: ‘Isn’t that terribly dangerous?’ If they look dull or annoying, I say ‘Yes, very. Chances of survival are frankly low. Don’t go. Try the Dordogne.’ But if they look interesting, I say to them, ‘Not at all, unless you go looking for trouble,’ and we agree that this is true of any country worth visiting.
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When I return to the UK, recently for shorter and shorter periods, I feel a lassitude settle on me. I don’t have to interact with the people and the environment at all times. The immigration officers aren’t flirting and laughing, no one dares dance in the street, and I am safely cocooned from anything that might harm me. I age too fast in Britain. Take me back to Jamaica.
Read MoreExperience Flows Away
A couple of days later, hot, dirty and exhausted, I arrived in the outskirts of Chiang Mai in the back of a song taow. The truck stopped at a traffic light. There was a band of small boys by the side of the road, holding a bucket of water. I saw them running towards the truck, but it was still something of a surprise when they emptied the entire contents of the bucket over me.
‘It’s the beginning of songkran,’ the driver called back. ‘You’d better get used to it.’
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Read MoreIntroduced by Barnaby Rogerson
One of the finest British travel books of the twentieth century is Gavin Maxwell’s Lords of the Atlas. It is a book that inspired me as a teenager to travel, and later on to write about North Africa. I must have now read it half a dozen times, with its magic enhanced by each reading. In other books, Gavin Maxwell writes freely about his own life, his family and experiences, but in Lords of the Atlas he hardly appears in the text, the better to focus the narrative on the experience of the Moroccans. Aside from his own researches, Gavin Maxwell was clearly inspired by two travel writers, Walter Harris (especially Morocco that Was) and the three Moroccan books written by the Tharaud brothers.
Jérôme and Jean Tharaud were faithful and truthful observers, dependent on their own experiences which they relate with empathy, but also the sharp eye of actual observation. They were also French, so could not pretend to be innocent observers of the modernization of Morocco through colonial conquest, even when camouflaged as a ‘Protectorate’. However I think you will agree that the extraordinary veracity of their eyewitness accounts, preserves for us the true history of Morocco. We are grateful to Anthony Gladstone-Thompson for making the first ever translation of these books from their original French into a fresh, clear English which Eland is proud to publish.
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Read MoreExtracted from Barnaby Rogerson’s afterword to Eland’s new edition
Bengal Lancer was published in the summer of 1930 and proved a phenomenal success in both the British Isles and North America. Over 150,000 copies were sold and the London publisher, Victor Gollancz, sold foreign rights to Italy, Spain, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Rumania. The film rights were snapped up by Hollywood for fifteen thousand dollars and in January 1935 Paramount released The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, [starring Gary Cooper] which was saluted as one of the great adventure stories of cinema. Francis Yeats-Brown was able to admire the film on its own merits and was amused rather than outraged that it had so little to do with his book. But having read Bengal Lancer, you will understand how difficult it would be to create a film that would in any way be true to the text.
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Read MoreTaken from the biographical afterword
It is impossible to read Lucie Duff Gordon’s letters home to her family without falling a little in love with her poignant joy at life in the face of her imminent death and with her open-minded care for and curiosity about her Egyptian neighbours. It is clear that they, in their turn, both respected and admired her, taking her to themselves in the absence of her own family. What was it that bred such a natural nobility and sense of equality and service in her, when British colonial administrators of a very different stripe were already lining up to exploit the desperate poverty of the Egyptians while trumpeting their own superiority?
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Read MoreThis is the piece that Dervla Murphy wrote for OX-TRAVELS: Meetings with remarkable travel writers, published in 2011 by Profile Books, which contains three dozen stories of travel, the royalties of which were pledged to the coffers of Oxfam.
On a cold grey day at the end of March 1964, shortly after my return from India, I first met a Tibetan in Western surroundings – the foyer of a central London hotel. I had been working for some months in Dharamsala, then an overcrowded and under-funded refugee camp for Tibetan children, and that moving encounter with the Tibetan way of being made me feel slightly apprehensive about Lobsang. How would this young man, only five years out of Tibet and three months out of India, be reacting to our Western ways? But I needn’t have worried; by the time our refugee-related business had been concluded I knew that Lobsang was in no danger of being ‘tainted’ – he was simply adjusting to his new circumstances to the extent required by good manners.
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Read MoreThe great twelfth-century traveler Ibn al-Arabi defined the very origin of our human existence as movement. “Immobility can have no part in it,” wrote Ibn al-Arabi, “for if existence were immobile it would return to its source, which is the Void. That is why the voyaging never stops, in this world or in the hereafter.” With a malicious linguistic twist, Ibn al-Arabi confuses our endless movement through time, from cradle to grave, with a pragmatic movement through space. Certainly, even cloistered in one’s room for the whole of one’s life, one is condemned to travel through the years, hour after hour, each one wounding us, as a sundial motto has it, until the last one kills us. And yet, an opponent of Ibn al-Arabi might have argued movement from one point of this earth to another is merely a succession of moments of being still: our geography exists only in the instant in which we are there, standing on our own two feet.
This notion of travel as moving through space, but also being in one place at a time, is vividly exemplified in the travel books of Ronald Wright, Cut Stones and Crossroads and Time Among the Maya, and in the history told in Stolen Continents. For several decades now, he has diligently chronicled the ancient civilizations of Latin America, traveling through Peru and Mexico, and rooting himself in a succession of historical moments, visiting not only the present landscapes but also those long vanished, like the courageous Time Traveller imagined by H.G. Wells. Wright witnesses the past from the vantage point of the present and reports back to us.
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Read MoreAn Affair of the Heart is one of several books Dilys Powell wrote about Greece. Part memoir, part history and part travelogue, it is written with great emotion but little sentimentality.
While she was at Somerville College, Oxford, where she read modern languages, Dilys Powell met Humfry Payne, and they married in 1926, the same year that he became the Director of the British School at Athens, the archaeological organisation responsible for digs undertaken by the British in Greece. After Powell joined the literary pages of the Sunday Times in 1928, she divided her time between Greece, where she joined her husband on excavations, and London, where she pursued a journalistic career that was to last five decades. For nearly ten years she spent a good deal of time with Humfry at his site at Perachora on the Gulf of Corinth, but after his tragic death in 1936 from a staphylococcus infection
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Read MoreJan Morris remembered by Barnaby Rogerson and others
Jan Morris is in the pantheon of British travel writers, even though she has repeatedly tried to escape from this restrictive label. She started out as a jobbing journalist (trained on a provincial newspaper) but through her own talents broke free of all constraints to become a travelling writer, the very role model of a free spirit, living a life of her choice. She was beholden to no editor but instead built up a devoted readership, staying true to her own distinctive literary style and remaining with one of the finest, and most enduring, of the independent publishing houses, Faber & Faber. Her range is vast, over fifty books now carry her name. Ironically for a famous stylist this literary freedom was won with a brief, coded telegram – the worldwide scoop of Hillary’s conquest of Mount Everest (the crowning glory) on the eve of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
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Read MoreDouglas Botting was a trusted friend of Gavin Maxwell in the last 12 years of his life and a fellow explorer-traveller-writer, so was uniquely equipped to understand both the creative and destructive demons that drove him. He has written an empathetic study of a man, which reads like the most bizarre and eccentric adventure story. Here he relates encountering Maxwell for the first time.
The first time I met Gavin Maxwell – poet, painter, shark-hunter, naturalist, traveller, secret agent and aristocratic opter-out – was a shock. ‘Come round for a drink,’ he had said over the phone. ‘Say, about tea time? Take the bus up the King’s Road. Get off just before the World’s End and double back. The square is on your left, between the road and the river. Paultons Square. Number 9.’
I found the house without difficulty, a tall, narrow-fronted terrace house in a large, tree-filled square on the furthest frontier of fashionable Chelsea. There were two bell pushes by the front door: the lower one was labelled ‘G. Maxwell’, the upper one ‘K. Raine’. I pushed the lower one and waited. Nobody came, and after a minute or two I went back to the pavement and leaned over the railings to try and peer through the front window. Behind the net curtain I could make out nothing but a brightly lit glass fishtank standing waterless and fishless on the windowsill. Inside the tank I could see the outline of what I took to be a large stuffed lizard, a sort of dragon in miniature, about a foot and a half long, with a tawny coloured, scaly skin. As I stared transfixed at this Jurassic apparition I saw that it was not stuffed after all but very much alive, for suddenly a long tongue like a snake’s flickered out of its mouth, snatched at an insect that looked like a grasshopper, then just as suddenly retracted. My attention was instantly distracted from this startling reptile by a flash of iridescent wings and a frantic fluttering of brilliant electric-blue and green feathers in the upper window pane. Some kind of tropical bird, wings beating furiously like a humming bird, hovered momentarily behind the glass, then swooped away and was lost from view in the darkness of the room’s interior.
Read MoreI was first introduced to The People of Providence as I sat bewildered and exhausted, nursing my six-day-old first-born. A friend appeared with a birthing present, a 370-page book which I was told would enrich and change my life. Actually, quite a lot seemed to be altering in my life at that time, and I added it to the list. I had just made the decision to change my career from hospital doctor to GP and was open to new ideas about people and their lives. Once my baby allowed me to do anything for more than 15 minutes at a time, I began to dip into the book and was immediately hooked. Here was such a diversity of people talking openly about so many parts of their lives lived on an ordinary inner city housing estate. It was a complete revelation to me, coming from a hospital background with a rich and honourable tradition of trying to ‘Get it right for bed 17, a case of …’. Now I was being invited to think about how the person in bed 17 might have a whole other life.
Read MorePeter Goullart spent nine years in the all but forgotten, ancient Nakhi Kingdom of South West China. He had a job entirely suited to his inquiring, gossipy temperament, for it was his mission to get to know all the local traders, merchants, inn-keepers and artisans so that he could report on which characters should be backed by a loan from the Co-Operative movement. In his company we get to hear about the the love affairs and the social rivalries of his neighbours, attend magnificent banquets, meet ancient dowagers and handsome warriors as well as catching the sound of the swiftly running mountain streams, the coarse ribaldry of the market ladies and the happy laughter emerging from out of the wineshops. For he remained fascinated by this complex society which believed simultaneously and sincerely in Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, in addition to their ancient religion of Animism and Shamanism.
Read MoreWhen you think of Hampshire, you think of chalk streams and downland, military and naval enterprise, sailing and King Alfred, and Winchester Cathedral. But its literary heritage does not leap to mind. And yet Hampshire has played a surprisingly important role in nurturing the book. For the English novel reached its earliest flowering through the genius of Jane Austen, who was born and lived most of her life here. The world that she depicts in her exquisite novels, and her scintillating and detailed understanding of the human psyche, were born of the county and of her observation of her Hampshire neighbours and friends. But her Hampshire is only part of the story . . .
Read MoreWhen you think of Hampshire, you think of chalk streams and downland, military and naval enterprise, sailing and King Alfred, and Winchester Cathedral. But its literary heritage does not leap to mind. And yet Hampshire has played a surprisingly important role in nurturing the book. For the English novel reached its earliest flowering through the genius of Jane Austen, who was born and lived most of her life here. The world that she depicts in her exquisite novels, and her scintillating and detailed understanding of the human psyche, were born of the county and of her observation of her Hampshire neighbours and friends. But her Hampshire is only part of the story . . .
Read MoreRose Baring and Barnaby Rogerson, the husband and wife team who run Eland were set identical questions by Georgia de Chamberet at The BookBlast® Diary - enjoy the answers!
Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
ROSE: No, but there were books around. I was quite a lonely child and books were a marvellous escape and provided adventure, friends and role models – Noel Streatfield, E. Nesbit, Johanna Spyri, L. L. Montgomery, Louisa M. Alcott and Lucy M. Boston. Just remembering makes me want to get back under the sheets and counterpane with a pile of them.
BARNABY: No, I can remember them both being rather concerned that I was reading “yet another book” instead of riding a pony, or playing with the dogs. There were many books in the tiny, dark Tudor cottage in which I was brought up, but they were mostly all inherited. They included a vast shelf of bound Punch magazines and a full set of Jorrocks. At a young age I used my pocket money to acquire the Ladybird history books but before the age of seven I had graduated to Jackdaws – fascinating folders of facsimile historic documents and maps.
Read MoreSpellbound by his grandmother’s Anglo-Indian heritage and the exuberant annual visits of her friend the Begum, Isambard Wilkinson became enthralled by Pakistan as an intrepid teenager, eventually working there as a foreign correspondent during the War on Terror. Seeking the land behind the headlines, Bard sets out to discover the essence of a country convulsed by Islamist violence. What of the old, mystical Pakistan has survived and what has been destroyed? We meet charismatic tribal chieftains making their last stand, hereditary saints blessing prostitutes, gangster bosses in violent slums and ecstatic Muslim pilgrims.
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