Tauris Parke – serie

The last of Lawrence's travel books, Etruscan Places is an ephemeral and vivid account, replete with hauntingly evocative descriptions of the way of life of this once great civilisation.The Etruscan civilisation, which flourished from the 8th until the 5th century BC in what is now Tuscany, is one of the most fascinating and mysterious in history. An uninhibited, elemental people, the Etruscans enthralled D.H. Lawrence, who craved their 'old wisdom', the secret of their vivacity and love of life. To him they represented the antithesis of everything he despised in the modern world, perhaps because their spontaneity and naturalness struck a chord with his own quest for personal and artistic freedom - so often censured or repressed.Lawrence approaches the enigmatic Etruscans as a poet, passionately and searchingly, and so the reader is swept up in his luminous descriptions of a utopian world where dancing and feasting, art and music were everything. The exhilaration of Lawrence in his Etruscan adventures stands in stark contrast to his intimations of the darkness of Mussolini's Italy - at a time when Europe was beginning its inexorable drift towards tragedy.

'Sometimes it feels as though the whole planet has been so polluted and ravaged that there are no Edens left, but they are there to be found by those who step off the beaten track... So it was with mine.'Fifty years ago the interior of Borneo was a pristine, virgin rainforest inhabited by uncontacted indigenous tribes and naive, virtually tame, wildlife. It was into this 'Garden of Eden' that Robin Hanbury-Tenison led one of the largest ever Royal Geographical Society expeditions, an extraordinary undertaking which triggered the global rainforest movement and illuminated, for the first time, how vital rainforests are to our planet. For 15 months, Hanbury-Tenison and a team of some of the greatest scientists in the world immersed themselves in a place and a way of life that is on the cusp of extinction. Much of what was once a wildlife paradise is now a monocultural desert, devastated by logging and the forced settlement of nomadic tribes, where traditional ways of life and unimaginably rich and diverse species are slowly being driven to extinction. This is a story for our time, one that reminds us of the fragility of our planet and of the urgent need to preserve the last untamed places of the world.