Eland Publishing Ltd – serie

This is what Eland is always looking out for - a scholar letting his hair down. Frustrated by the limitations of his professional career, Kaufmann chose to express his true understanding and deep affection for the Tuareg in fiction. A lifetime of detailed study, research and harrowing experience has gone into the creation of this seemingly effortless tale.

An extraordinary collection of interviews with lighthouse keepers and their families, in their own words – a record of a vanished profession and avanished Britain of the 1970s. Described by William Golding as "one of the mostfascinating social documents I have ever read". It captures the delights and downfalls of isolation, the mindgames it plays on ordinary people and theromance of the outer reaches of Britain.

In "The Hill of Kronos", Peter Levi paints a radiant portrait of the Greece he came to know through a lifetime of exploration. As a young scholar he sought out its ancient spirit, the keys to its mythology and civilisation, in its ruined cities and majestic mountains. Later, as a priest working as a diplomat and a friend of the oppressed, he lived in Athens through the dark days of the dictatorship. Then the sinews of political life led back to secret alliances made during the civil war and the earlier occupation of Greece, back to murder, starvation and corpse-filled quarries. Lastly, it is seen through the mature eyes of a family man, with the ripened sensibility of an acclaimed poet. This is a precious fusion of experience, a gift of insight from one philhellene to all those who have come to love Greece.

'Jonathan Raban is one of the world's greatest living travel writers.' William Dalrymple'The best book of travel ever written by an Englishman about the United States' Jan Morris, IndependentNavigating the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to New Orleans, Raban opens himself to experience the river in all her turbulent and unpredictable old glory. Going wherever the current takes him, he joins a coon-hunt in Savana, falls for a girl in St Louis, worships with black Baptists in Memphis, hangs out with the housewives of Pemiscot and the hog-king of Dubuque. Through tears of laughter, we are led into the heartland of America with its hunger and hospitality, its inventive energy and its charming lethargy and come to know something of its soul.The journey is as much the story of Raban as it is of the Mississippi. Navigating the dangerous, ever-changing waters in an unsuitably fragile aluminium skiff, he immerses himself with an irresistible emotional intensity as he tries to give shape to the river and the story finding himself by turns vulnerable, curious, angry and, like all of us, sometimes foolishly in love.

"Walled Gardens" is a brilliant portrait of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, struggling through the post-war depression aided by drink, horse-racing and religion, and their own idiosyncratic adaptations to modern life. Seen from the troubled perspective of the daughter of an aristocratic family in decline, we watch the disintegration of a marriage in elegant but emotionally chilled surroundings, and the struggle to keep up appearances, and a collapsing roof, in front of the neighbours. By turns sad, absured and funny, the story is ultimately liberating as failure leads to freedom.

Through a dialogue between two lovers, a young physicist in England and an anthropologist in Germany, Nicholas Mosely retells the history of Europe of the twenties and thirties. The destructive power and attraction of fascism and communism is unveiled and set against the changing relationship between man and science in the time of atomic power. Their story weaves together disparate strands of landscape to take the reader on a journey through Spain, London, Soviet Russia, North Africa and middle Europe. Simultaneously taking us through a new intellectual landscape from the new scenes of physics, biology, anthropology and psychology. 'A novel of enormous ambition, a book that takes on just about every social movement, every significant political event of our time - a virtual intellectual anthology of the 20th century, in fictional form' - Daniel Stern, "New York Times" Book Review.

From his birth in 1916 (in the carding room of a cotton mill) until he ran away to London, William Woodruff lived in the heart of Blackburn’s weaving community. But after Lancashire’s supremacy in cotton textiles had ended with the crash of 1920, his father was thrown out of work. From then on, including the great depression of the 1930s, Woodruff and his family faced a life blighted by extreme poverty. Reading this book today, it is hard to comprehend that within living memory - and in what was the richest country in the world - so many people couldn’t even afford to buy enough food. For the ordinary families of Lancashire, unemployment was an ever-present fear: "If you worked you ate. If there was no work you went hungry."

A Russian Upstairs, Downstairs, but one scented with the cordite and fear of revolution, and with a cast of devotedly loyal and capable British governesses. Miss Emmie is an intimate and revealing portrait of pre-Revolutionary Russian society which, contrary to received wisdoms, reveals a complex, liberal and humane society, full of enormous potential and past achievement. It is also the biography of five intrepid women who, by travelling abroad and working as governesses in Russia, achieved an intellectual dignity, a purpose and an authority which was denied them in their homeland. The extraordinary personal adventures of these women, as they negotiate the turmoil and terrifying anarchy of Revolution and Civil War, turns the book into a page-turning thriller.

Dervla Murphy's first epic journey from Ireland to India by bicycle, "Full Tilt", is a complete adventure in itself. It is also the first volume of a trilogy of experience that continues with Tibetan Foothold. For the young Irish woman, once she had got herself to India by July 1963, immersed herself in the life of the sub-continent, working for six months in an orphanage for Tibetan children in the refugee camps of Northern India. Here, she fell in love with the 'Tiblets' - the cheerful, tough, uncomplaining, independent and affectionate children of the new Tibet-in-exile. Dervla vividly describes day-to-day life in the camps where hundreds of children are living in squalor while a handful of dedicated volunteers do their best to feed and care for them, attempting to keep disease at bay with limited resources. She pitches in with a helping hand wherever it is needed and finds time to visit the Dalai Lama and his entourage.Dervla's heart-rending account is interwoven with her own observations on the particular cultural and social problems associated with trying to help a people who have lived in isolation from the rest of the world and she becomes a perceptive witness to the inner realities and sometime inadequacies of aid-work. First published in 1966, "Tibetan Foothold" not only confirmed Dervla's status as a traveller, but also revealed her to be a truly independent voice and an acute observer of politics and society.

One winter, Dervla Murphy, the four-footed Hallam (the mule) and her six-year-old daughter Rachel explored 'Little Tibet' high up in the Karakoram Mountains in the frozen heart of the Western Himalayas - on the Pakistan side of the disputed border with Kashmir. For three months they travelled along the perilous Indus Gorge and into nearby valleys. Even when beset by crumbling tracks over bottomless chasms, an assault by a lascivious dashniri, the unnerving melancholy of the Balts - the heroic highland farmers who inhabit the area - and Rachel's continual probing questions, this formidable traveller retained her enthusiasm for her surroundings and her sense of humour. First published in 1977, "Where the Indus is Young" is pure Murphy. 'The grandeur, weirdness, variety and ferocity of this region cannot be exaggerated,' she writes of the sub-zero temperatures, harsh winds and whipping sands that they faced. However much the region may have changed due to current day political situations her descriptions of the mountain splendour and cultures she explores are appropriately timeless.

In 1966 Dervla Murphy travelled the length and breadth of Ethopia, first on a mule, Jock, whom she named after her publisher, and later on a recalcitrant donkey. The remarkable achievement was not surviving three armed robberies or the thousand-mile trail, but the gradual growth of affection for and understanding of another race.