The Armchair Traveller at the BookHaus - Böcker

The siren-like qualities of the Sicilian capital are woven layer upon layer, each one revealing a stratum of the city's character. In Palermo, Robert Alajmo lays out a compelling series of reflections on the city's apparently endless fac...

Läs mer »

In this enchanting and moving memoir, Leon Sciaky describes his childhood before the FirstWorld War in a prosperous, loving Jewish family in the cosmopolitan city of Salonica (nowThessaloniki in Greece). Under the Ottoman Empire, the city's d...

Läs mer »

In recent years, tourists have discovered the rustic charms of Puglia, also known as Apulia, the heel stretching down from the spur of the Italian boot. The region boasts beautiful landscapes and miles of dramatic coastline, cities with Romanesque...

Läs mer »

In 2006, "Time magazine" listed the King of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuk, as one of the 100 'leaders and revolutionaries' who are changing our world today. Yet it was only in the 1960s that the first road linking "The Kin...

Läs mer »

It's time we got to know a little more about the Chinese. Did you know they don't eat soup, they drink it? That their surnames come before their first names? That their good sense is to be found not in their heads but in their hearts? Or...

Läs mer »

'Tell me where you eat, what you eat, and at what time you eat, and I will tell you who you are'. This is the motto of Anka Muhlstein's erudite and witty book about the ways food and the art of the table feature in Honore de Balzac&...

Läs mer »

It is easy to find England on a map - it is part of that conspicuous thing in the North Sea, just off the French coast. It gets trickier once you arrive: Not even the English are keen to explain what England actually is. Why do the English eat wha...

Läs mer »

For Somerville this was a kind of pilgrimage, a journey unlike any he had undertaken in 20 years of travel-writing. It was an expedition where he traded the usual comforts and certainties for a real physical and mental challenge, with no mobile ph...

Läs mer »

Each year of their 30-year marriage, Louis Begley, the award-winning author of Wartime Lies, and his wife Anka Muhlstein have spent long, enjoyable months in Venice. They write and live there and over the decades La Serenissima has become their se...

Läs mer »

Alex Capus follows every step of Robert Louis Stevenson's last years, studying every clue left behind by the Scottish writer and reaching his own conclusion about the most dramatic turn in Stevenson's life: his decision to settle in Samo...

Läs mer »

"An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia" is the story of the heel of Italy - Puglia - as told by past and present day travellers. It has beautiful landscapes, cave towns and frescoed grotto churches, wonderful old cities with Rom...

Läs mer »

An "Armchair Traveller's History of Cambridge" provides not only a narrative of the city and university, and a guide to visits within a short driving distance, it also features a variety of aspects ignored in other accounts - food a...

Läs mer »

Using a wealth of fascinating photographs and documents, this book tells the full story of the Berlin Wall; from the barbed wire barriers of August 1961 to the 12 foot 'Fourth Generation Wall'. It describes the feelings and reactions of ...

Läs mer »

No other conflict has such a powerful influence on the modern world as the Cold War between the two Superpowers of the USA and the Soviet Union. Berlin, divided by the Wall, was the front-line city of the conflict. In no other city but Berlin did ...

Läs mer »

Following in the footsteps of John Steinbeck, Cacucci travels through endless expanses of desert, salt mountains and rows of cacti with thorns so sharp that they can impale thirsty birds... Written with humour and heart, this is an insight into an...

Läs mer »

In the American mind, Finland is often swept up in the general group of Nordic countries, little known and seldom gaining prominence on its own. But as Jonathan Clements shows in An Armchair Traveller's History of Finland, it has a long and f...

Läs mer »

An author, foreign correspondent, academic, and television personality, Roger Willemsen is a familiar figure in Germany, and The Ends of the Earth offers English-language readers a chance to engage with his uniquely astute take on the world. Consi...

Läs mer »

Lars Gustafsson and Agneta Blomqvist have written a personal guide to their Swedish homeland. Setting off from the south their journey leads them all the way up to Norrland, from the farms of Scania to the Laponian area, a UNESCO World Heritage Si...

Läs mer »

Combining history and travel narrative, Nicholas Woodsworth journeys around the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, the sea which gave birth to Western civilisation. This sea, he says, should not be seen as an empty space surrounded by Europe, Asia...

Läs mer »

Ten years ago journalist Jens Muhling met Juri, a Russian television producer whose job it was to sell stories to TV stations in Germany but who always maintained that 'The true stories are more unbelievable than anything I could invent.&apos...

Läs mer »

Starting with a wild taxi ride into town from Ataturk airport, Tillinghast takes his readers on a voyage of discovery through the storied city of Istanbul, known in Byzantine times as the 'Queen of Cities' and to the Ottoman Turks as the...

Läs mer »

Whether it is in Madrid's cafe s or in Barcelona's fish markets, van den Brinks takes you on a trip through Spain where tasting and smelling are the key occupations. You will see the shop windows in Madrid displaying pig's trotters,...

Läs mer »

Each year, over 200,000 people pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Often called the Way of St. James, this journey has been an important Christian tradition for centuries. "The Road to Santiago" is one man&apo...

Läs mer »

While much of the Middle East is now engulfed in conflict and repression, Morocco remains a curious anomaly: peaceful and open to the West, it has provided refuge for artists and writers for generations, and it remains an exotic destination for ma...

Läs mer »

A region steeped in fable and myth, Provence is a cultural crossroads of European history. A source of inspiration to artists, poets, and troubadours, it is now an enviable refuge for the wealthy and fashionable. Nicholas Woodsworth, who was born ...

Läs mer »

Singer Nicholas Clapton first visited Budapest to record a recently discovered mass by an almost unknown eighteenth-century Hungarian composer. There, he discovered a striking sense of otherness in spite of Hungary s central geographical and cultu...

Läs mer »

Will Buckingham travelled to Tanimbar Islands (Indonesia) as a trainee anthropologist to meet three remarkable sculptors: the crippled Matias Fatruan, the buffalo hunter Abraham Amelwatin, and Damianus Masele, who was skilled in black magic, but w...

Läs mer »

When Patricia Clough bought a house in Umbria, she knew that buying her dream home did not mean that life would become a dream. By the end of this book, in which she describes the journey of making Umbria her home, she is sure that if one has basi...

Läs mer »

Ilija Trojanow's journey from Mumbai to Mecca is told in the tradition of the rihla, one of the oldest genres of classical Arabic literature and describes the Hajj, the pilgrimage to the holy sites of Islam. 'From the very first moment t...

Läs mer »

The German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is often seen as the quintessential eighteenth-century tourist, though with the exception of a trip to Italy he hardly left his homeland. Compared to several of his peripatetic contemporaries, he took...

Läs mer »