Böcker av Harry Mount

"If you know someone who missed out on Latin at school and wants to live a happier life, you could do no better than give them Harry Mount's entertainingly educative Latin primer." Know Latin and - mirabile dictu - you will know Wilfred Owen's misery, Catullus's aching heart and the comedy of a thousand bachelor schoolmasters.

Architecture, art, sculpture, economics, mathematics, science, metaphysics, comedy, tragedy, drama and epic poetry were all devised and perfected by the Greeks. Of the four classical orders of architecture, three were invented by the Greeks and the fourth, the only one the Romans could come up with, was a combination of two of the former.The powerful ghost of ancient Greece still lingers on in the popular mind as the first great civilization and one of the most influential in the creation of modern thought. It is the starting block of Western European civilization.In his new Odyssey, eminent writer Harry Mount tells the story of ancient Greece while on the trail of its greatest son, Odysseus. In the charming, anecdotal style of his bestselling Amo, Amas, Amat and All That, Harry visits Troy, still looming over the plain where Achilles dragged Hector''s body through the dust, and attempts to swim the Hellespont, in emulation of Lord Byron and the doomed Greek lover, Leander. Whether in Odysseus''s kingdom on Ithaca, Homer''s birthplace of Chios or the Minotaur''s lair on Crete, Mount brings the Odyssey - and ancient Greece - back to life.

Harry Mount's How England Made the English: From Why We Drive on the Left to Why We Don't Talk to Our Neighbours is packed with astonishing facts and wonderful stories.Q. Why are English train seats so narrow?A. It's all the Romans' fault. The first Victorian trains were built to the same width as horse-drawn wagons; and they were designed to fit the ruts left in the roads by Roman chariots. For readers of Paxman's The English, Bryson's Notes on a Small Island and Fox's Watching the English, this intriguing and witty book explains how our national characteristics - our sense of humour, our hobbies, our favourite foods and our behaviour with the opposite sex - are all defined by our nation's extraordinary geography, geology, climate and weather.You will learn how we would be as freezing cold as Siberia without the Gulf Stream; why we drive on the left-hand side of the road; why the Midlands became the home of the British curry. It identifies the materials that make England, too: the faint pink Aberdeen granite of kerbstones; that precise English mix of air temperature, smell and light that hits you the moment you touch down at Heathrow.Praise for Harry Mount:'Highly readable, encyclopeadic, marvellous, illuminating. Mount portrays England via dextrous excavations of its geography, geology, history and weather' Independent'Fascinating. Mount's an intelligent, funny and always interesting companion' Daily Mail'Charming and nerdily fact-stuffed' GuardianHarry Mount is the author of Amo, Amas, Amat and All That, his best-selling book on Latin, and A Lust for Window Sills - A Guide to British Buildings. A journalist for many newspapers and magazines, he has been a New York correspondent and a leader writer for the Daily Telegraph. He studied classics and history at Oxford, and architectural history at the Courtauld Institute. He lives in north London.