Böcker i Eland classics-serien

The Sultanate of Muscat and Oman was a hermit state until 1970, preserving in every detail the poverty, personality and picturesque reality of a medieval kingdom. For forty years, Sultan Said bin Taimur personally controlled everything that happened, deliberately cutting the nation off from the headlong development of the rest of the world. Fortunately for Oman this would change, and fortunately for us, we have a first-hand witness to this complex society before that watershed. Ian Skeet traveled across the vast sand deserts and arid highlands of Muscat and Oman in 1966-68, preparing the wary inhabitants for the coming of oil, visiting its isolated walled cities, fortified oasis communities and independent-minded Bedouin tribes. The sultan's motives may have been pure - to preserve his people from the sin of usury and the slavery of foreign debt - but Ian Skeet's portrait is a devastating study of the dead hand of autocracy.

The Station follows three high-spirited young men as they visit twenty monasteries on Mount Athos in 1927. They examine treasures, photograph frescoes and sketch the courtyards and those who live in them. They swim ecstatically off the sparkling, deserted beaches, climb mountains, talk and share meals with monks and transcribe these conversations with relish. For life is very different for a celibate hermit on Mount Athos. Time has no meaning: the Son of God, His Virgin Mother, the Angels and the Saints are all living creatures of flesh and blood, and the Pope is a heretic. This slim book was little short of revolutionary in its fearless championing of Greek Orthodoxy and Byzantine civilization, reversing centuries of western prejudice. It was the first of Robert Byron's travel books, revealing the flashing wit, bravery, passion and astonishing powers of visual observation which made him such a brilliant writer. The playfully obscure title is only finally explained in his last sentence: 'This is the holy Mountain Athos, station of a faith where all the years have stopped.'

Caught between these covers is the authentic, forthright voice of Christian Watt, servant girl, lady's maid and fishwife. Born in 1833, her working life began in domestic service before the age of nine and ended with her selling her husband's catch from door to door. The tragic death of most of her close male family - her husband, four brothers and her favorite child - drowned by a sudden squall that sunk their boat, robbed her of her sanity. But cared for in the remarkable Cornhill Asylum in Aberdeen, a kindly doctor encouraged her to write her memoirs in pencil. In 1983 this bundle of papers, which included other family documents, was turned into a book by the historian David Fraser, and has been saluted as the Montaillou of Scotland.

The Narrow Smile is a portrait of the Pathan and their highland home on either side of the Pakistan-Afghan frontier. Peter Mayne grew up in India, and later spent four years on the Northwest Frontier during the Second World War. Mayne delighted in the company of these fierce but hospitable highlanders, who were as hard as the mountains that assured their independence but democratic to the point that no man admitted the right of another to lead him. In 1953, Mayne took a long journey to see what had become of his old friends in the high, flower-filled valleys on the roof of the world. But peace had always been a relative concept on this frontier, where Afghanistan was now eyeing Pashtun lands in a new iteration of the Great Game. Mayne's misadventures are sometimes serious, often very funny, and at all times compassionate.

First published in 1933, Brazilian Adventure is Peter Fleming's account of his expeditionary search for the lost Colonel. Peter Fleming was the brother of Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond series and was literary editor of The Times.

Weldon was mapping the deserts of Egypt when war broke out. Working from out of a steam yacht based on Port Said or Famagusta, he ran a network of spies and confidential agents onto the Levant coast behind Turkish lines. He was a fluent Arabic speaker and could conduct personal interviews on the shore, as well as landing and taking off agents - all

Veronica was not a casual traveller but a young musician married to a scholar. She was determined to make use of her time in Afghanistan and break out of the charmed circle of the expatriate academic and make real friendships with local women.

Guy Kennaway s novel about Jamaican life and culture is set in the fictional village of Angel Beach. It is an affectionate and hilarious description of a small community where everyone knows everyone s business, poverty is a way of life and dreams of escape trickle through fingers.

By happy agreement with the literary estate of Norman Lewis, the previous five collections of Norman s work have been withdrawn, so that all the best pieces are now in one book.

The memoir of a young cavalry officer in India in the British Empire and his search for spiritual fulfilment.

Unique eyewitness account from 1917 of Morocco as a French protectorate.

Letters written from 1716-1718 from the Ottoman Empire by Mary Wortley Montagu, one of the first modern travel writers. A revelation in their day.