Selections from the novels, poems, letters, and diaries of visitors to Leningrad describe the city's history, landmarks, and culture

St.Petersburg (The Travellers' Companion Series)

Travel

Laurence Kelly

Asia

Constable

Writer, cavalry officer, celebrity – Mikhail Lermontov moved in an atmosphere of political intrigue and personal recklessness, producing works considered second only to Pushkin’s in Russian literature and a career which has often been compared to Byron’s.

Lermontov Tragedy In the Causcaus

Robin Clark, Ltd.

Istanbul, A Traveller's Reader is an wide-ranging and carefully chosen selection of writings, offering a richly layered view of Byzantine Constantinople and Turkish Istanbul. During the thousand-year Byzantine empire that followed its founding by Constantine the Great, Istanbul became a city of fabled riches; after falling to the Turks in 1453, its glories continued, maintained by the strength and wealth of the Ottomans. Drawing on diaries, letters, biographies, travelogues and poems from the sixth century AD onwards, this evocative anthology recreates for contemporary visitors the vanished glories of Constantinople. It provides vivid eyewitness accounts of the coronation of a Byzantine emperor; the funeral of a sultan; the triumphal entry of Mehmet the Conqueror; the building of the Suleymaniye, the most magnificent of the city's moques; and the death of Ataturk in 1938. It also describes the rampant sexual exploits of the Byzantine empress-to-be Theodora; the public execution of a Turkish wife and her young, Christian lover; the near execution of an envoy given the unenviable task of transporting a large organ from England to Constantinople in 1599, a gift from Queen Elizabeth to Sultan Mehmet III, who was caught admiring the sultan's personal harem; and the unfortunate Frenchman caught drinking wine and eating a pork sausage while sketching in Hagia Sophia in the 1680s.

Istanbul

Robinson Press

A Traveller's Companion to St.Petersburg

History

Russia

Robinson Publishing

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Books by Laurence Kelly