It began with an advertisement in The Times: 'Leaving England June, to explore rivers Central Brazil, if possible ascertain fate Colonel Fawcett; abundance game, big and small; exceptional fishing; room two more guns.' Colonel Fawcett and his son Jack had embarked on a journey in 1925 in search of a supposed lost city in the Amazon and were never seen again. This expedition was too much of a temptation for Peter Fleming, a young journalist with energy and an appetite for adventure. The jou...

Lewen Weldon was mapping the desert of Egypt when the First World War broke out. A fluent Arabic speaker, he was recruited to run a network of spies and confidential agents from a steam yacht onto the Syrian coast behind Turkish lines. He took his men ashore in small boats at night, which also allowed him to land and conduct personal interviews before returning back through the surf. This vivid tale of adventure becomes eyewitness history as we encounter Armenians escaping the massacres, p...

When Francis Yeats-Brown set off in 1905 to take up a commission in the British Indian Army, little did he know how deeply he would fall in love with the culture of India and her spiritual traditions. Between duties with his regiment, and enjoying the off-duty life of an officer – polo and hunting, ponies and dogs – he would disappear in search of a guru to lead him in the essentials of yoga, meditation and Hindu mysticism. Yeats-Brown proves himself brave, funny and self-deprecating, such...

On Travel presents a pyrotechnic display of cracking one-liners, cynical wordplay and comic observation, mining three thousand years of global wit and wisdom: from Pliny to Spinoza and from Albert Einstein to Aunt Augusta. Beyond the mad diversity of opinions and ideas, there is a gradually emerging consensus: that other people are crucial to our understanding of ourselves and that there is more than one right way to be. It also offers occasional practical tips to make the most of your tri...

Bruce Wannell was the greatest Orientalist traveller of his generation: a Paddy Leigh Fermor of the East, a Kim for our time. He lived through the Iranian Revolution, worked for a decade in the North West Frontier during the wars in Afghanistan, could transcribe the most complex Arabic calligraphy by sight and spoke Iranian and Afghan Persian with a dazzling, poetic fluency. His curious combination of talents – linguist, musician, translator and teacher – were duplicated by an internationa...

THE STORIES BEHIND OUR ICONIC NUMBERSRogerson's Book of Numbers is based on a numerical array of virtues, spiritual attributes, gods, devils, sacred cities, powers, calendars, heroes, saints, icons, and cultural symbols.It provides a dazzling mass of information for those intrigued by the many roles numbers play in folklore and popular culture, in music and poetry, and in the many religions, cultures, and belief systems of our world.The stories unfold from mil...

An incisive look at the past, present, and future of the religious divide that lies at the heart of the Middle East.At the heart of the Middle East, with its regional conflicts and proxy wars, is a 1400-year-old schism between Sunni and Shia. To understand this divide and its modern resonances, we need to revisit its origins—which go back to the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632; the accidental coup that set aside the claims of his son Ali; and the slaughter of ...

Marrakech is the heart and lifeblood of Morocco's ancient storytelling tradition. For nearly a thousand years, storytellers have gathered in the Jemaa el Fna, the legendary square of the city, to recount ancient folktales and fables to rapt audiences. But this unique chain of oral tradition that has passed seamlessly from generation to generation is teetering on the brink of extinction. The competing distractions of television, movies and the internet have drawn the crowds away from the st...

The Prophet Muhammad taught the word of God to the Arabs. Within a generation of his death, his followers - as vivid a cast of heroic individuals as history has known - had exploded out of Arabia to confront the two great superpowers of the seventh-century and establish Islam and a new civilization. That the protagonists originated from the small oasis communities of central Arabia gives their adventures, their rivalries, their loves and their achievements an additional vivacity and intima...

The acclaimed Medieval historian examines how the crusades of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries reshaped the Mediterranean and influenced the globe.In the late Middle Ages, the forces of Christianity engaged in a series of epic battles with the Ottoman Empire. Though these later crusades are often overshadowed by earlier conflicts, they hold profound historical significance. They were the bridge between the medieval and modern periods, between feudalism and colo...

The Last Crusaders is about the titanic contest between Hadsburg-led Christendom and the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the last great conflict between East and West - the battles that were fought and the men who led the armies that fought them. It was, in its way, the first world war.

Rogerson's Book of Numbers is a deceptively simple list of virtues, spiritual attributes, gods, devils, sacred cities, dominions, powers, heroes, saints and symbols. It provides a dazzling mass of information for those intrigued by the many roles numbers play - not only in mathematics and science, but also in poetry, in the hierarchies of heaven and hell and in the many religions, cultures and belief systems of our world. From the nine choirs of angels and the nine muses to the twelve live...