The Caucasus has long suffered the impact of Russian colonialism - enforced with particular brutality in the nineteenth century. This military and cultural domination provided the background to growing British interest in what had hitherto been large...

The subject of love, in all its forms, has interested poets in every age and culture: its common consequences, namely marriage and parenthood, less so. John Elinger, author of this collection of poems on the challenging theme of how to be a 'good eno...

It's a cool July day. A young girl is tired of window-shopping in Oxford Street, when a white rabbit runs past her looking at his watch. "Oh dear! Oh dear! It's 3 o'clock already. I shall be too late!". Without thinking, she chases after the rabbit a...

Communist Albania was unlike any other European nation. It was a "hermit state" ruled by a dictator, Enver Hoxha, who presided over a repressive Stalinist regime. When John Watkins visited Albania in the late 1980s, he saw peasants toiling in the fie...

The English seaside has long been seductive. For 200 years, punters have sought out its quirky thrills from bingo to Wurlitzer organ dances, glamorous granny parades to child-jockeyed donkey races, lewdly shaped rock candy to harrowingly bad karaoke....

On 4 August 2020 a massive explosion in the port area obliterated parts of Beirut and damaged many others, bringing fresh international attention to a city already recovering from civil war and weakened by economic instability. This book contributes...

This second edition of Nicholas T. Parsons' The Joy of Bad Verse is accompanied by a new and expanded Introduction that considers the remarkable literary phenomenon of bad poetry down the ages and the remarkable chutzpah of its practitioners. It brin...

The Oxford academic and foreign correspondent James Pettifer has been an international authority on and historian of modern Greece and its Balkan neighbours for over thirty years. At the same time, he has been an eye-witness to many of the events tha...

Recollections of Tartar Steppes, first published in 1863, is a lost classic of women travel writing that remains one of the earliest and best examples of the genre. In February 1848 the erstwhile English governess Lucy Atkinson set off from Moscow wi...

Before the end of the present century the population of China - currently around 1.4 billion - is forecast to drop to around half that level as a major and unprecedented demographic crisis begins to bite. Its working-age population has already stoppe...