... with the very first line the reader is hooked into this epic roller-coaster of a historical narrative

... it was the five camels of the expedition who emerge as the dominant characters with a good walk-on part for Tuna, an oasis dog that adopts the party.

... he investigates the Tuareg defeat of the Flatters expedition and the bizarre truth of this French misadventure with its madness, mass poisoning and cannibalism.

Fortunately C.R.Pennell, having taught students in Turkey, Australia and Libya as well as lecturing to disparate groups of cultural tourists, has become educated in the attention span of "the interested general reader"

... although it is seemingly set in 17th-century Istanbul, it actually portrays a never-land of the collective imagination

… the uncovering of Motya has been fraught with controversy right from Schliemann's first raid-like dig.

..beneath the surface of this seemingly conventional travelogue, there is a questing spiritual inquiry.

Her personal insights into the political manoeuvres of the 50s and 60's alone make this book a valuable and fascinating testimony.

Michael Jacobs is an explorer of books and bars, ruins and restaurants - a scholar who can clearly lunch the best of us under the table.

… we are kept quite on tenterhooks as we follow our hero, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, on his erudite tour through the Arabic and Turkish speaking lands of Morocco, Egypt, Syria, Oman, Turkey and Crimea.

Munthe was also possessed by an abiding fascination for tramps and street musicians.

Her subject is not public architecture, the five M's of a Muslim city - mosques, mausolea, markets, medrasa and military-monuments - but the closely guarded domestic space.

The persistent edge of fear, the innate political caution of a people brought up under Saddam's dictatorship followed by the numbing experience of living through the allied aerial bombardments and the creeping tide of street violence, assassination, bombing and kidnappings after the invasion.

Time and time again I felt in the company of a young Dostoevsky, albeit in a jean jacket wandering through the dark streets of Edinburgh rather than in a greatcoat on the avenues of St Petersburg.

Bolter's Grand-daughter reveals a life packed full of movement, people, energy, flowers, scents and landscapes

Her coins are indeed beautiful objects, for she is cast as both human and an august empress ...

From these tenuous trails of historical memory, a whole rigid belief system would however be created by literate, male scholars to gradually strangle the freedom of a living, inspirational religion with the chains of clerical authority and a scarcely credible mythology

… he acquires a tangibly different mentality - that of a man supporting cultural diversity wherever he finds it, rather than seeking the imposition of a new order by an outside power.

This is a man with three best-selling books about Spain under his belt, who can speak and play guitar like a native, survive cocaine binges and police chases and has a flamenco-dancer from Valencia as his live-in lover.