Newsletters & Travel Tips
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 . . .
Eland publisher, Rose Baring, celebrates the life of Antony Gray, our much loved typesetter, who has been invisible yet central to the visual beauty of the Eland list.
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 . . .
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.
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.
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.
Our late Spring travel tips are provided by Matthew Teller
Before my first trip to Antarctica, I got onto Twitter and was yapping about what gear to buy and how cold it might be, when the calmest piece of travel wisdom social media has ever seen came out of the blue at me. ‘Forget the cold, it’ll melt your heart' . . .
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’ . . .
Our Spring travel tips are provided by Nicholas Laing of Steppes Travel
Carry a small Polaroid camera (they are back in fashion). Handing over a photograph to the individual or family you want to photograph breaks the ice and usually results in smiles all round . .
For anyone embarking on a camel journey.
Get in touch with cameleers young and old, normal and eccentric (they’re mostly eccentric) and download their top tips. There are plenty out there in this country alone . .
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.
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 . . .
This autumn we are adding two new Martha Gellhorn titles to the Eland list, The View from the Ground: Peacetime Dispatches, 1936–87 and The Face of War, 1937–85: War Reporting as a Commitment to Humanity, Life and Peace . . .
From Hugh Thomson, traveller, writer and film-maker.
Always ask for a better room in a hotel at the same price. Because there always is one; Take teabags . . .
From Rose Baring and Barnaby Rogerson - our own husband and wife publishing team - a little less cerebral than the Woolfs, but possibly better travelled!
Last week we were asked to talk to some travel-hungry teenagers trying to escape thinking about revision who had started to dream of life after their exams were over in July. We tried to remember what it was like . . .
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 . . .
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Read @halfmanhalfb00k's interview with The Innocent #Anthropologist - Nigel Barley (pictured here with… https://t.co/WDom2ZNK2U
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A very full house for tonight’s excellent LETTERS FROM BAGHDAD- Gertrude Bell in the Middle East. Join us for the n… https://t.co/Hv7XXltsyZ
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Norman Lewis: The Time Traveller (1993). Lewis goes to the Baliem Valley of Irian Jaya, New Guinea, to observe the… https://t.co/NNYwRo7Sju
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RT @MatthewAsprey: My review of #NormanLewis's A View of the World' @ElandPublishing @thejulianevans @normanlewiswrit https://t.co/M7PQcsXfAA
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RT @ElandPublishing: “He had watched spellbound while specialist grave-robbers cleaned figurines from Morgantina, famous for moving thei… https://t.co/thdSKEFOF1
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.