Like us, Michael Haag first got into the travel book game by putting together guidebooks. His Cadogan guide to Egypt was first rate. Michael was both amused and world-weary at the same time and his eyes would flash open with passionate interest before glazing over like a lizard. He spoke with an odd, almost Damon-Runyan lisp, as if always delivering a stubby punch line.
When we were thinking of setting up in business, he invited us to supper in his basement flat in North London so that he could share his experience of running a small literary list. It was a memorable evening, for his Egyptian wife Loutfia played a hand drum between courses, his friend Justin told us horrifying stories about Vietnam and we drank a lot of red wine while trying to remain balanced on red leather pouffes. The core of his advice was to not get divorced, for in his case it had taken away the London family home the value of which upheld the large overdraft needed to support the outgoings of a small publisher. But Michael had paid off every last penny he owed to his printers by selling his publishing company to a businessman from Saudi Arabia who loved books but did not understand the need to sell them or open letters, let alone reply to them. With Michael’s advice we eventually got hold of one of the jewels in his list which was Ralph Bagnold’s Libyan Sands, after it had languished in legal limbo during the slow ossification of his old business. He also published T E Lawrence’s Crusader Castles and E M Forster’s guidebook to Alexandria, Pharos and Pharillon. I was mightily intrigued by both books, but in the end you realise that they hide more than they reveal. The only other books in his list that were really outstanding were Dilys Powell’s two Greek books: A Villa Ariadne and An Affair of the Heart. We admired them from afar for decades but have finally managed to add them to the Eland list.
Travelling with Don McCullin
by Barnaby Rogerson
I have been lucky enough to travel with Don McCullin in both the Libyan and Algerian deserts looking for Roman ruins. Last year we decided to expand our horizons and drive through the Troad in north-west Turkey, and then hop over to have another look at the temple of Baalbeq in eastern Lebanon. We have had some wonderful successes in the past – like finding the Saharan frontier fort of Bou Njem at dawn – but there have also been some failures. On this latest trip, walking around the excavations of the Late Bronze Age city of Troy, talking excitedly to the director of the excavations about Hector and Achilles in the gathering dusk was a totally thrilling experience for me, but I noticed it did not have quite the same fascination for my travelling companion. His camera bag remained buckled up (always a bad sign) apart from one photograph of Hector, the excavation guard dog.
The next morning, I knocked lightly on the door of Don’s room to check he was up. It was dark, and we were hoping to catch the Roman statues in the site museum in the first light of dawn. The door immediately swung open, and Don appeared, bags packed, camera case to the fore. The shadow of a grin crept across his face as he met my glance. ‘Up at last I see,’ he said. ‘Only you could have slept through your mate making such a din.’ The mate he was referring to was the muezzin, calling the dawn prayer.
Jonathan Raban on Eothen
Eothen is such an easygoing book, so funny, so crisp and vivid in its handling of people and places, that the reader may well not notice that it is also a very slippery book indeed. It seems so lightly and spontaneously done, this quizzical self-portrait of an Old Etonian swanning idly around the Middle East in the 1830s. Its determinedly inconsequential surface masks a degree of artistic guile for which Kinglake has never received full credit.
‘My excuse for the book is its truth,’ he announces in his Preface. One may let one’s eyebrow lift a fraction at that statement, since the preface itself is an elaborate, and highly purposeful, lie. Kinglake passes off Eothen as a hastily written letter (a ‘scrawl’) to a travelling friend. It was no such thing. The book took Kinglake a decade to write. It was revised and re-revised; its style of bright talk was the product of a long process of literary refinement. In the Preface, Kinglake rejoices in the book’s ‘studiously unpromising’ title and makes the assurance that it is ‘quite superficial in its character’. For an ironist, the worst of all fates is to be taken literally – and Kinglake, adored though he was by generations of Victorian and Edwardian readers, has usually been taken, or mistaken, at his word.
Gavin Maxwell by Douglas Botting
Douglas 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.
The People of Providence
I 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's Forgotten Kingdom
Peter 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 MoreRaban Revisited
When 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 MoreThrough Writers’ Eyes: Hampshire
When 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 MoreFalling in Love with Books
Rose 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.
Travels in a Dervish Cloak
Spellbound 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.
Read MoreA Square of Sky
During the Second World War Janina David was smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto, hidden in a convent and raised by Catholic nuns. Recently, Janina was delighted to have succeeded in getting the nuns recognised by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations. To commemorate this achievement, and to remind ourselves of the trauma of war and exile, we revisited this moving description of Janina’s return, alone, to her native town in Poland back in the early 1960s. Both of Janina’s parents were killed by the Nazis in the extermination camps.
Read MoreRebel in Pearls
It seemed apt that I should discover Juliet living in Russia when I was there. And apt that rather than living in Moscow like the vast majority of foreigners, she was living in Peredelkino, a retreat from the city where wooden dachas sheltered improbably but cosily, like mushrooms, in the all-encompassing forest. Like Churchill’s description of the country itself, she had always been to me something of ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’ . . .
An Irishman in Somalia
Can a book save one’s life? I used to think so when stationed in Mogadishu, avoiding thoughts of murder or suicide in that sunburnt madness only by immersing myself in Gerald Hanley’s Warriors (1971). Day after day I would throw myself on to my bed after another utterly fruitless, pointless day in the president’s office, and lie down, sweating beneath squadrons of flies and mosquitoes, and try to forget about it all.
Read MoreNorman Lewis
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 . . .
Read MoreSummer News
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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