Nicholas Woodsworth – författare

Jerusalem is not an ordinary city and Crossing Jerusalem is not a standard telling of a city's story. While the author himself is deeply skeptical of religion, this book is both a portrait of a spiritual Jerusalem, and a recounting of the effect the city has on the spirit of one visitor who discovers its ongoing distress - through it he discovers some sort of spirituality in himself. At the same time a travelogue, a questioning of spiritual values, and an examination of the beliefs that have sustained Jerusalem's populations through centuries of conflict and division, Crossing Jerusalem offers an unusual and penetrating perspective of the city. While many of the themes the author touches upon are inevitably sensitive and controversial, Crossing Jerusalem is intended to provoke thought rather than antipathy. At a time when both Jewish attitudes and the West's foreign policy options on a Middle East solution are evolving, Crossing Jerusalem is now especially relevant.

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 and Africa, but as a continent in its own right, a place from whose coastlines people look, not outwards to distant countries or that capitals but inwards across the water to each other. The Mediterranean has its own culture, its own life, its own way of being. Setting out from Alexandria, in a journey marked by lively and unpredictable encounters, Woodsworth discovershidden corners of Venice, before arriving at Istanbul, where he installs himself in a former Benedictine monastery. In all these places he finds traces of a vibrant and cosmopolitan heritage, and asks what these cities and their inhabitants owe to the sea.