The author of such classic novels as The Portrait of A Lady, The Turn of the Screw and Daisy Miller, Henry James (1843-1916) here takes readers from the American towns of upstate New York to villages in rural Tuscany. Our guide is a curious, engaged observer not only of streets and landscapes and cathedrals but also of paintings and plays and the characteristics, national, social and individual of the people we encounter at his side. He is a formidable travel companion whether on a trip to Lake George or an afternoon visit to an art exhibition in Paris from Burlington, Newport and Niagara, a European summer in Lichfield and Warwick, North Devon, Wells and Salisbury, from Chambery to Milan, from Venice to "Strassburg", the after-season at Rome, autumn in Florence, Tuscan cities, Ravenna, London sights and theatres and Scotland. The period of travel around Europe in 1869 lasted 15 months and when he came home again to Cambridge Massachusetts, Henry James was 27. He writes particularly lovingly of Italy and we travel with James in these pages in an unhurried holiday with a thoroughly seasoned, supremely cultivated, acutely intelligent companion. Word by word, phrase by phrase, James's long, purposefully meandering, beautifully detailed sentences will guide you around the curves of country roads, up the steps of a mouldering castle, into the quiet of a rural inn or the bustle of a grand hotel. Don't forget your deerstalker hat, bonnet and steamship tickets! US first edition 2016 with 280 desirable roughcut pages and chapter heading illus.

Sub-titled 'Scott, Zelda, and The Jazz Age Invasion of Britain: 1904-1929' this extraordinary history shows how the story of F. Scott Fitzgerald's creation of Jay Gatsby, war hero and Oxford man at the beginning of the Jazz Age attracted an astounding array of authors and intellectuals. The poet T. S. Eliot, the polo star Tommy Hitchcock, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were a diverse group of Americans who came to the City of Dreaming Spires when the Rhodes Scholar programme had just begun and World War One had enveloped much of Europe. Fitzgerald created the character Jay Gatsby shortly after his and Zelda's visit to Oxford, and the creation is a cultural reflection of the aspirations of many Americans who came to the University of Oxford seeking beauty, wisdom and social connections. Beginning in 1904, the story chronicles the experiences of American expatriates through Prohibition and the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929, interpreted through the pages of the classic novel The Great Gatsby. It shows how much Fitzgerald owes a debt to the medieval, romantic and European historical tradition and what he would have experienced at the post-war university encountering an impressive array of artists including W. B Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. An interesting mix of intellectual, cultural, biographical and emotional history populated with transformative Great Thinkers. With maps on endpapers of the City of Oxford, 346pp, a glossary of Oxford terms like Battels (expenses incurred), Punt and Torpids (boat race for novice crews). US first edition.

In 1726 in the town of Godalming, a young woman confounds the medical community by giving birth to 17 rabbits. This astonishing true story is the basis for this powerfully evocative novel. Surgeon's apprentice Zachary Walsh knows that his master John Howard prides himself on his rationality, but John cannot explain why or how Mary Toft, the wife of a local journeyman, has managed to give birth to a dead rabbit. When this singular event becomes a regular occurrence, John and Zachary realise that nothing in their experience as rural physicians has prepared him to deal with a situation like this - strange, troubling, and possibly miraculous. John contacts several of London's finest surgeons, three of whom soon arrive in Godalming to observe, argue and perhaps use the case to cultivate their own fame. When King George I learns of Mary's plight, Mary and her doctors are summoned to London where Zachary experiences a world far removed from his small-town existence, and is exposed to some of the darkest corners of the human soul, the human appetite for witnessing the grotesque - diseases, injuries, deformities and idle perversions of the bored and wealthy contrasted with religious, scientific, spiritual and philosophical beliefs of the educated and mostly moral main characters. While Mary lies in bed, doubts begin to blossom among her caretakers and a growing group of onlookers waits with impatience for another birth, another miracle. Canadian first edition, 2019 with roughcut pages which are highly desirable in North America. 320pp.

By the author of H is for Hawk here is a transcendent collection of essays about the human relationship to nature. A literary cabinet of curiosities about the wonders and oddities of the natural world, Helen Macdonald's best loved pieces plus new essays range from nostalgia from the countryside of her youth to a true account of a refugee's flight to the UK. Meditating on notions of captivity and freedom, immigration and flight, she observes the massive migration of songbirds from the top of the Empire State Building, watches tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary, seeks the last golden orioles in Suffolk's poplar forests. She writes with heart-tugging clarity about wild boar, swifts, mushroom hunting, migraines, the strangeness of birds' nests and the unexpected guidance and comfort we find when watching wildlife. Chapters include Swan Upping, Deer in the Headlights, The Falcon and the Tower, The Observatory, Murmurations, A Cuckoo In the House, The Arrow-Stalk, Berries, Cherry Stones, Rescue and Goats and What Animals Taught Me. In her own words 'Many of the essays here are exercises in interrogating such human ascriptions and assumptions' on how we inevitably view the natural world as a mirror of ourselves reflecting our own world view and needs, thoughts and hopes. As a scientist she explains how migrating birds navigate by visualising the Earth's magnetic field through detecting quantum entanglement taking place in the receptor cells of their eyes. Science does what we would like literature to do - explain an exquisitely complicated world that is not all about us. We need to communicate the value of things so that more of us can fight to save them. Desirable US roughcut page edges, 260pp. First edition US.

Sub-titled 'The Greatest Lost Love Letters of the Second World War', Eileen Alexander graduated in 1939 with a brilliant First Class degree in English from Girton College, Cambridge. Her subsequent accident in a car driven by her future husband, Gershon Ellenbogen, begins the correspondence and their love affair. There were approximately 1,400 of these letters, written almost daily, covering the years 1939 to 1947. Eileen became a noted teacher, writer and translator, especially of George Simenon's Maigret books. Her husband who was in the RAF in WW2 worked for British Military Intelligence in Cairo. With war brewing in 1939, Eileen wrote her first letter from her hospital bed, the first in this book after the car accident: 'Monday 17th July Gershon - what everyone seems to have forgotten is that if I hadn't asked you to drive me to London that Tuesday, you would never have had your arm broken and your life thoroughly disorganised for a considerable period of time. Furthermore if I had directed you rightly we'd never have got into that damned death trap of a side-road.' Her letters are vibrant, intimate, joyous, dark, angry, obsessive, neurotic, generous, scurrilous and very, very funny by turns and speak of the remarkable woman who wrote them. She is frank about sex and her ambitions, hilariously caustic about colleagues, rationing rules and life on the home front, and painfully honest about loving a man away at war. A magical literary find, condensed into one superb heavyweight volume of 474pp with 16 pages of archive b/w photos. 2020 first edition.

The Indian and Pacific oceans constitute a forgotten quarter of this planet, brought here together perhaps for the first time in a sustained work of history by the Cambridge academic. The decades straddling the late 18th and early 19th centuries, called the 'Age of Revolutions', traditionally uncovers an Atlantic triangle of grand defence including the American Revolution, the French Revolution and revolts in the Caribbean and then independence movements in Latin America in the early 19th century. Among what was made anew are the organisation of politics, the conception of equality and rights, the mechanics of governance and empire, the status of labour and enslaved people, the workings of technology and science and the characterisations of nation and self. The intention of this history is to turn the story of the dawn of our times inside out and insist on the critical significance of the people and places in this oceanic tract. A sequence of voices across the sea embody an energetic indigenousness: Pacific Islander, Maori, Aboriginal Australian, Arab, Qasimi, Omani, Parsi, Javanese, Burmese, Chinese, Indian, Sinhalese, Tamil, Malay, Mauritian, Malagasy and Khoisan perspectives come into view. These and other peoples took passage as sailors, partners, fighters, labourers and travellers in these decades of unprecedented globalisation. Great empires, political units, kingdoms were realigned or organised from Oman to Tonga and Sri Lanka and venerable Eurasian empires were transformed at their maritime frontiers. Here is heavy militarised British Colonial states as the Empire spread with Allies and collaborators and sought to neutralise or adopt the ideas, people, structures and modes of organisation which arose from the age of revolutions from 1790 to 1850. Superbly illustrated throughout, very useful Timeline and series of maps. 468pp, 2020 first edition.

Sub-titled 'A Journey Through the Bitter History and Current Conflicts of China, Korea, and Japan' the book explores the intertwined cultures and often fraught history of these neighbouring countries. Currently China's economic power continues to grow, Japan is becoming more militaristic, and Korea is divided between its westernised South and the dictatorial North. Michael Booth, long fascinated with the region, travels by car, ferry, train and foot, experiencing the people and culture of these nations up close. The burden of history and the memory of past crimes such as the sexual enslavement of women by the Japanese military during World War Two continued to sour relationships. South Korea, Taiwan and Japan ought to be the firmest of allies. All three are democracies with developed economies and significant mutual trade and militarily dependent upon the US. All share grave concerns about China. Although there are obvious ideological and political differences between China and its neighbours, all these countries are deeply intertwined culturally, genetically and historically. China has given its neighbours Confucian philosophy, rice cultivation, Buddhism, porcelain manufacture and tea, as well as the secrets of metallurgy, written language, and the art of calligraphy. In recent times Korea and Japan have also contributed to a great cultural exchange. From Korea have come K-Pop, histrionic TV dramas and very violent movies massively popular throughout China, Japan and beyond constituting the hallyu or Korean wave phenomenon. 'I begin my journey not in a place but a year: 1853. And at this early stage, of one thing I am convinced, if you go back far enough, everything is the fault of the Americans. 315pp, map, US first edition.

Sub-titled 'The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J. B. S. Haldane', J. B. S. grew up in Edinburgh into a family of important landowners who led strict, spare lives, obedient to their Calvinist virtue, but aristocrats all the same. The family lived for much of the year near Gleneagles where Robert had bought a farmhouse and to achieve a manorial look dressed it up with a turret. J. B. S.'s life was rich and strange, from his boyhood apprenticeship to his scientist father who first instilled in him a devotion to the scientific method, to his time in the trenches during WW1 where he wrote his first scientific paper, to his numerous experiments on himself including inhaling dangerous levels of carbon dioxide and drinking hydrochloric acid, to his clandestine research for the British Admiralty during WW2. Haldane is best remembered as a geneticist who revolutionised our understanding of evolution, but his peers hailed him as a polymath. One student called him 'the last man who might know all there was to be known.' Haldane foresaw invitro fertilisation, peak oil, and the hydrogen fuel cell, and his contributions ranged over physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology, mathematics and biostatistics. He was also a staunch Communist, which led him to Spain during its Civil War and sparked suspicions that he was spying for the Soviets. He wrote copiously on science and politics in newspapers and magazines, and gave speeches in town halls and on the radio, all of which made him, in his day, as famous in Britain as Einstein. It is the duty of scientists to think politically Haldane believed and sought not simply to tell his readers what to think, but to show them how to think. Although he hated to be bothered by correspondence, he had letters piled up around his various offices over the years - in Cambridge in the 1920s, in University College London until the 1950s, in Calcutta and Bhubaneswar thereafter, but he always tried to reply and never shrank from exalting the scientific method, even in casual correspondence - 'Science advances by successive improvements in former theories.' 383pp, illus., 2020 US first edition.

The growth of the scientific study of earthquakes is woven into this far-reaching history. The story begins with a series of earthquakes in England in 1750. Today seismologists can monitor the vibrations of the planet second by second, and the movement of tectonic plates millimetre by millimetre, yet even in the 21st century great earthquakes are still essentially 'acts of god', striking with much less warning than volcanoes, floods, hurricanes and even tornadoes and tsunamis. Since antiquity on every continent human beings in search of attractive landscapes and economic prosperity have made a Faustian bargain with the risk of devastation by an earthquake. Today around half of the world's largest cities, as many as 60, lie in areas of major seismic activity. Many such as Lisbon, Naples, San Francisco, Teheran and Tokyo have been severely damaged or destroyed by earthquakes in the past. Throughout history starting with ancient Jericho, Rome and Sparta, cities have proved to be extraordinarily resilient. Only one, Port Royal in the Caribbean, was abandoned after an earthquake. The book seeks to understand exactly how humans and earthquakes have interacted. In some cases, physical devastation has been followed by decline but in others, the political and economic reverberations of earthquake disasters have presented opportunities for renewal. After its wholesale destruction in 1906, San Francisco went on to flourish, eventually giving birth to the high-tech industrial area on the San Andreas fault known as Silicon Valley. An earthquake in Caracas in 1812 triggered the creation of new nations in the liberation of South America from Spanish rule. Another in Tang Shan in 1976 catalysed the transformation of China into the world's second largest economy. Other chapters look at grief and growth in the land of Gandhi, Gujarat 2001, the tsunami in the Indian Ocean 2004, and meltdown and after in Fukushima 2011. With chronology of earthquakes, maps and references, a very well illustrated 256 page Thames & Hudson 2016 first edition.

A number one bestseller in Ireland, the author lives on his family farm Birchview in County Longford, Ireland. He writes about the connection between people and land in a way that goes beyond mere affection. For him, farming is hard graft and yet a spiritual process too that binds him to family, nationhood, language and myth. Farming has been in John Connell's family for generations, but he never intended to follow in his father's footsteps. One winter, after more than a decade away, John finds himself back on the farm. He records the hypnotic rhythm of the farming day - cleaning the barns, caring for the herd, tending to sickly lambs, helping the cows give birth. Alongside the routine events there are the unforeseen moments when things go wrong - a calf fails to thrive, a sheep goes missing, illness breaks out, an argument between father and son erupts and things are said that cannot be unsaid. It is also the story of a man who emerges from depression to find hope in the place he least expected to find it. In this new hidden Ireland, the book is also a fascinating portrait of a born noticer, someone on whom nothing is lost, observing birth and death, the landscape and his own heritage with intelligent reflection on the state of modern farming and the cycles of life and death that mark our days. With US desirable roughcut edges, 242pp, US first edition.