Introduced by Margaret Drabble, this selection of 13 pieces by Georges Perec (1936-1982) begins with a short literary self-portrait and includes various exercises in the art of classification, including Three Bedrooms Remembered and 81 Easy-Cook Recipes for Beginners.

Thoughts of Sorts

Literature & Fiction

PEREC, GEORGES

Literary

Notting Hill Editions

Jonathan Keates's passion for collecting historic guidebooks has resulted in a beguiling work of cultural archaeology, which explores the experience of travel for the British before the First World War. Unlike Lucy Honeychurch in E.M.Forster's A Room with a View, he revels in Baedeker, Murray and other Victorian examples, taking us on a poignant, funny and often revealing tour through this undiscovered genre.

The Portable Paradise: Baedeker, Murray and the Victorian Guidebook

Jonathan Keates

Joseph Roth, best known as the author of the novel The Radetzky March and the nonfiction work The Wandering Jews, was one of the most seductive, disturbing, and enigmatic writers of the twentieth century. Born in 1894 in the Habsburg Empire in what is now Ukraine and dying in Paris in 1939, he was a perpetually displaced person, a traveler, a prophet, a compulsive liar, and a man who covered his tracks. Throughout the eastern borderlands of Europe, Dennis Marks explores the spiritual geography of a still-neglected master and uncovers the truth about Roth’s lost world.

Wandering Jew: The Search for Joseph Roth

Marks, Dennis

Travel

Foreigner

Richard Sennett has spent an intellectual lifetime exploring how humans live in cities. In this pair of essays he visits two of the world's greatest cities at crucial moments in their history to meditate on the condition of exile in both geographical and psychic space: the Jewish Ghetto of Renaissance Venice, where state-imposed outsiderdom was translated into a rich community identity; and nineteenth-century Paris, a magnet for political exiles, where the experience of displacement seeped into the city's culture at large.

Biographies & Memoirs

RICHARD SENNETT

Professionals & Academics

'The death of Henriette Binger (b. 1893) happened back in 1977. She was no writer but the mother of one, Roland Barthes, whose Mourning Diary has now emerged into print. Precise and touching memories intersect with spare and at times desperate notes on time, death and grief, written "despite the fear of making literature out of it". ' - Julian Barnes

The Mourning Diary: Introduced by Michael Wood

ROLAND BARTHES

Poet and novelist Lavinia Greenlaw's poetic reflections on William Morris's Icelandic Journal, one of the overlooked masterpieces of travel literature The great Victorian designer and decorative artist William Morris was fascinated by Iceland and wrote a book documenting his travels there. He gets caught up with questions of travel, noting his reaction to the idea of leaving or arriving, to hurry and delay, what it means to dread a place you’ve never been to or to encounter the actuality of a long-held vision. He is sensitive to the emotional landscape of his band of travelers and, above all, continuously analyzing and fixing this “most romantic of all deserts.” Lavinia Greenlaw follows in his footsteps, and interposes his prose with her own “questions of travel.” The result is a new and composite work that brilliantly explores our conflicted reasons for not staying at home.

Questions of Travel: William Morris in Iceland

Greenlaw, Lavinia

Genre Fiction

From Macaulay in the 19th century to Fukuyama in the late 20th, historians have often been lulled into thinking that things can only get better. Such belief in progress, argues leading political commentator Simon Heffer, may be typical of times of plenty, but it ignores a less palatable truth: that, since the beginnings of recorded history, the major events in international relations can be attributed to a single cause, the desire by rulers to assert or protect their power. Taking a panoramic view from the days of Thucydides up to the present, Heffer offers a fourfold analysis of the motive forces behind the pursuit of power: land, wealth, God and minds. If we understand these forces, he contends, we can more clearly understand why history is destined to repeat itself.

A Short History of Power [May 31, 2012] Heffer, Simon

SIMON HEFFER

The European project is in collapse. Far from bringing prosperity and peace, the euro has catalysed an economic crisis and stirred up national antagonisms. We can now see clearly that the intellectual basis of European integration was false. Here is an alternative vision, adumbrated from first principles: a statement of the case for national self-determination and parliamentary supremacy. Daniel Hannan is a committed European. He speaks French and Spanish, has lived and worked all over Europe, and has served in the European Parliament since 1999. He believes that the EU is making its constituent nations poorer, less democratic and less free. It is time to rediscover the virtues that raised Europe to greatness: diversity, pluralism, personal freedom, national independence and parliamentary democracy.

A Doomed Marriage: Britain and Europe

Politics & Social Sciences

Hannan, Daniel

Politics & Government

Road to Apocalypse

Munro Price

Stanely Price

'Cataract from Greek kataraktes, meaning waterfall or portcullis, an obstruction that descends from above.' Notes and reflections by one of our great soothsayers of seeing, John Berger, on the minor miracle of cataract surgery. With drawings by the Turkish artist Selcuk Demirel. 'If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.' - William Blake

Cataract

BERGER, JOHN

Arts & Photography

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Notting Hill Editions publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Notting Hill Editions