PERSIA: THROUGH WRITERS’ EYES
€ 14.76 excl VAT
Including texts by Herodotus, Aeschylus, Xenophon, Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Sir John Chardin, Sir James Fraser, George Curzon, Robert Graves, Harold Nicholson, Freya Stark, Robert Byron, Shusha Guppy, John Simpson and Christopher de Bellaigue
The land of the Iranians, known to European travellers for centuries as Persia, is riven by mountain-ranges, made inhospitable by deserts, yet rich in plains, forests and jewel-like gardens. Home to the most sublime architecture in the world, and a breeding ground for poets, empires, mystics and saints, it has an enduring and invincible fascination. David Blow enriches our understanding with his knowledgeable selection of the best of three thousand years of descriptive writing. He allows us to visit the courts of Cyrus and Xerxes, to ride out with the Parthians and Sassanians and to make a passing acquaintance with both the Shah and the late Ayatollah Khomeni, with Haf iz and with Omar Khayyam.
Persia: through writers’ eyes
Edited, collected and annotated by: David Blow
ISBN: 978-0955010-55-2
Format: 312pp demi pb
Place: Persia/ Iran
Thirty-three years ago, John Hatt set up as a publisher creating ELAND BOOKS, a company born at south London. John Hatt’s Eland was the first of a wave of travel lists that emerged in the early 1980s, quickly joined by Century Travellers, the Penguin Classic Travel Library, Picador and Virago. You wouldn’t have wanted to put any money on it, but only the Eland list has endured. Nowadays, E-editions enable our books to be read in parts of the world where bookshops do not exist, but otherwise Eland continues, very much as it first started, with between two and eight new titles a year, and run from an attic. It is a classic tale of the Hare and the Tortoise, or should one say the Leopard and the Eland. For one of the defining characteristics of the Eland is that it is no good at high speeds but ‘can trot along at fourteen miles an hour indefinitely.’
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