Ella Carr – författare

The Craft Gin Guide is the only guide to Britain and Ireland's craft gin distilleries and gin bars.This second edition of The Craft Gin Guide is an updated, revamped guide to all the best craft gins, gin bars and distilleries to visit across Britain and Ireland. It features returning distilleries and many new additions. This is a practical guide to sourcing and buying some superb gins with supplier’s addresses and websites. With more than 300 small batch distillers and dedicated gin bars in the UK and Ireland, here’s the perfect guide to help you discover them all. Many small gin distillers are not just producers but interesting places to visit for buying, for tasting and for learning about gin. This guide is filled with carefully researched information on those most worth seeking out. They are often run by enterprising, independent-minded people who are fun to meet. Discover the best bars– all the UK’s cities have gin bars, with London and Edinburgh having the mostSeek out the best distillers – distillers, although concentrated in the cities, can also be found deep in the heart of the countryside. This guide has one or two page entries on who we feel are the most interesting and worth discoveringKnow your craft gin – discover the range of brands and tastes availableAll the essential information – opening times of bars and distilleries, web addresses, plenty of photographs plus interesting things to do and see nearby, making gin a fun day outWritten by the internationally renowned gin expert, David T. Smith, here is an invaluable guide to the finest gins being produced in Britain and Ireland. This is an ideal gift for the gin lover in your life as well as being a handy personal reference.

Florence's world-famous Renaissance is brought to life in this anthology through the eyes of its most illustrious chroniclers. Beginning with Dante's vision of Inferno, teeming with his Florentine enemies, to the artist Cellini's swashbuckling adventures in High Renaissance Italy, and including the pioneering writings of Boccaccio, Ficino, Guicciardini and Vasari, this selection shows that in literature, as in art, Florence was a trailblazer. The city's long tradition of mesmerizing foreigners is celebrated in selections from Tobias Smollet, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence and Stendhal (whose rapturous impressions gave name to 'Stendhal syndrome'), while indigenous writers such as Curzio Malaparte and Vasco Pratolini paint a far grittier portrait of Florence under the looming cloud of Fascism and World War II. Salman Rushdie's dazzling novel The Enchantress of Florence takes inspiration from the city's gilded Renaissance past, while Mary McCarthy's masterful travelogue captures a bustling 20th century market city. George Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke, Iris Origo and Penelope Fitzgerald are among the other brilliant writers whose stories illuminate the many faces of this fascinating city.

Woven through all these tales are the unique histories and mythologies of the regions of Southern Italy, encompassing Sicily, Calabria, Cantania, Basilicata, Apulia and Campania. Theocritus, Virgil and Ovid evoke a Sicily populated by Cyclopes and sea monsters, while in an excerpt from The Smile of the Unknown Mariner Vincenzo Consolo depicts the island in 1860, on the frontline in Italy's war of independence. The South's legendary legacy of brigandage and organized crime enlivens the stories of Leonardo Sciascia, Carlo Levi and Joseph Conrad. Curzio Malaparte and Norman Lewis immortalize the wreckage of Naples and the indomitable spirit of its people during World War II, and Elena Ferrante paints a spectacular portrait of a poor but vibrant Neapolitan neighbourhood in an excerpt from the bestselling My Brilliant Friend. Collectively, these entertaining tales plunge readers into the sometimes harsh and troubled, but always seductive and vital world of Italy's Mezzogiorno

Momentous parties have long provided dramatic scenes in fiction, from Natasha’s first ball in War and Peace to Lizzie meeting Darcy in Pride and Prejudice to J. Edgar Hoover consorting with Truman Capote in Don DeLillo’s ‘The Black and White Ball’.Revelry can be revealing of character, as in Jay Gatsby’s extravagant bash in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and the decadent partying of the jaded expats in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. More decorous affairs can conceal profound depths, as in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’ and the parties at the centre of two modernist masterpieces, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. Glamour with a gothic twist makes an appearance here in the fancy dress ball at Manderley from Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca and in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, at which Death himself is a guest.But there is room on this dance floor for humour as well, in Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Bella Fleace Gave a Party’, Dorothy Parker’s ‘Arrangement in Black & White’, Saki's ‘A Boar Pig’ and Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Pnin Gives a Party’. All kinds of literary greats consort in this festive gathering, a perfect gift for readers and partygoers alike.