Pies and Prejudice


Book Description

A Northerner in exile, Stuart Maconie goes on a journey in search of the North, attempting to discover where the clichés end and the truth begins. He travels from Wigan Pier to Blackpool Tower and Newcastle's Bigg Market to the Lake District to find his own Northern Soul, encountering along the way an exotic cast of chippy Scousers, pie-eating woollybacks, topless Geordies, mad-for-it Mancs, Yorkshire nationalists and brothers in southern exile. The bestselling Pies and Prejudice is a hugely enjoyable journey around the north of England.




Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature


Book Description

The first reference book to deal so fully and incisively with the cultural representations of war in 20th-century English and US literature and film. The volume covers the two World Wars as well as specific conflicts that generated literary and imaginativ




Patrick Leigh Fermor


Book Description

Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) was a war hero whose exploits in Crete are legendary, and above all he is widely acclaimed as the greatest travel writer of our times, notably for his books about his walk across pre-war Europe, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water; he was a self-educated polymath, a lover of Greece and the best company in the world. Artemis Cooper has drawn on years of interviews and conversations with Paddy and his cloest friends as well as having complete access to his archives. Her beautifully crafted biography portrays a man of extraordinary gifts - no one wore their learning so playfully, nor inspired such passionate friendship.




Plum Brandy


Book Description

Essays by acclaimed Croatian writer Josip Novakovich.




The Traditions of Invention


Book Description

Based on hundreds of primary sources in a wide range of languages, this book offers a reevaluation of Romanian images of self and other, as well as of foreign images of the country and people. A nuanced and historically-grounded contribution to the lively debates over Balkanism, Orientalism and identities in Romania and in Europe as a whole.




Perception and Reality in the Modern Yugoslav Conflict


Book Description

In this book, the author has tried bridge the gap between the common perception of the Yugoslav conflict as portrayed in the media and the actual grim reality with which he was dealing as an EU monitor on the ground. Drawing on original material from both UN and ECMM sources, he has identified the true origin of Former Yugoslavia's wars of dissolution, and critically examines the programme of violence which erupted in 1991 and eventually culminated in 1995 in the vicious dismemberment of a sovereign federal republic with seat at the United Nations. In doing so, he highlights the duplicitous behaviour of all parties to the conflict; the double standards employed throughout by the United States in its foreign policy; the lengths to which the Sarajevo government manipulated the international media to promote a 'victim' status; the contempt in which UN peace-keepers were ultimately held by all sides; and the manner in which Radovan Karadzic was sacrificed at the altar of political expediency, when the real culprits were Slobodan Milosevic and his acolyte, General Ratko Mladic. This book, the first by an EU Monitor with actual experience of the conflict, tells the real story of the modern Yugoslav conflict, 1991-1995.




The Heart of Hell


Book Description

In the third installment in Alen Mattich’s highly addictive Marko della Torre series, Alen Mattich delivers a powerful political thriller that depicts the horrors and machinations of the Yugoslav civil war and the humanity of those who survive it. Autumn 1991. Civil war has broken out in Yugoslavia with Croatia’s declaration of independence, and former secret policeman Marko della Torre is set adrift. Department VI, the internal investigations unit, is now in a state of paralysis as Belgrade struggles to maintain its hold as the region’s centre of power. When the body of a young woman, identified as American agent Rebecca Vees, washes up on the shores of Italy, della Torre is summoned by U.S. authorities. He is the last person to have seen Rebecca alive. Her two colleagues have also been found shot dead on an island in Croatia, and della Torre is coerced into locating the man they think is responsible: the corrupt and unscrupulous Zagreb cop, Julius Strumbic. Forced to navigate Yugoslavia’s bloody civil war in order to track Strumbic’s whereabouts, della Torre has to decide whether he will warn his old friend or give him up to the Americans to save himself.




Bring Me My Machine Gun


Book Description

Award-winning journalist Alec Russell was in South Africa to witness the fall of apartheid and the remarkable reconciliation of Nelson Mandela's rule; and returned in 2007-2008 to see Mandela's successor, Thabo Mbeki, fritter away the country's reputation. South Africa is now perched on a precipice, as it prepares to elect Jacob Zuma as president - signaling a potential slide back to the bad old days of post-colonial African leadership, and disaster for a country that was once the beacon of the continent. Drawing on his long relationships with all the key senior figures including Mandela, Mbeki, Desmond Tutu, and Zuma, and a host of South Africans he has known over the years - including former activists turned billionaires and reactionary Boers - Alec Russell's Bring Me My Machine Gun is a beautifully told and expertly researched account of South Africa's great tragedy: the tragedy of hope unfulfilled.




Balkan Departures


Book Description

In writings about travel, the Balkans appear most often as a place travelled to. Western accounts of the Balkans revel in the different and the exotic, the violent and the primitive − traits that serve (according to many commentators) as a foil to self-congratulatory definitions of the West as modern, progressive and rational. However, the Balkans have also long been travelled from. The region’s writers have given accounts of their travels in the West and elsewhere, saying something in the process about themselves and their place in the world. The analyses presented here, ranging from those of 16th-century Greek humanists to 19th-century Romanian reformers to 20th-century writers, socialists and ‘men-of-the-world’, suggest that travellers from the region have also created their own identities through their encounters with Europe. Consequently, this book challenges assumptions of Western discursive hegemony, while at the same time exploring Balkan ‘Occidentalisms’.