The long Mediterranean coast-line of Spain from the Pyrenees to the Pillars of Hercules, with the Atlantic shore beyond that sweeps round Cadiz Bay to the southern edge of Portugal, is the changing scene of Rose Macaulay's journey, here described, as she drove her car along the fabled shore. Phoenician and Greek settlements, Carthaginian cities, Roman walls, arches, towers aqueducts and theatres, richly exquisite Arab courts and doorways, white Moorish towns, Romanesque churches and monasteries, sumptuous baroque facades, line the coast and its hinterland, a lovely palimpsest of the Mediterranean history of three thousand years. With this book, first published in 1949, Dame Rose Macaulay made her own witty, erudite, observant and poetic addition to the literature of Spain. The Spanish coastline has changed in many aspects, and not for the better, since Fabled Shore first appeared in 1949, but with her strongly developed sense of the past her learning and her humour, Rose Macaulay remains, through this bool one of the best of all companions for the visitor to Spain.

Pirates and smugglers, ghost ships and sea-serpents, fishermen’s prayers and sailors’ rituals – the coastline of the British Isles plays host to an astonishingly rich variety of local legends, customs, and superstitions. In The Fabled Coast, renowned folklorists Sophia Kingshill and Jennifer Westwood gather together the most enthralling tales and traditions, tracing their origins and examining the facts behind the legends. Was there ever such a beast as the monstrous Kraken? Did a Welsh prince discover America, centuries before Columbus? What happened to the missing crew of the Mary Celeste? Along the way, they recount the stories that are an integral part of our coastal heritage, such as the tale of Drake’s Drum, said to be heard when England was in peril, and the mythical island of Hy Brazil, which for centuries appeared on sea charts and maps to the west of Ireland. The result is an endlessly fascinating, often surprising journey through our island history.

The Swifttide Fleet is the least impressive of the four factions that rule the city of Narapan, a nest of pirates, cutthroats and thugs. For years, the competing fleets, stronger one and all, have been driving the Swifttide Fleet closer to the wall. Their numbers, funds, and territory shrink by the day, and unless they act soon, the Fleet might well collapse. Gerris, third in command on the flagship, is a simple man. He’s been indebted to the Fleet for years beyond count, and has spent the majority of his life in service of the Fleet. When the Fleet's last chance at survival is revealed, Gerris has no choice but to pack up his scant possessions, and line up at the docks.

Born in Australia, Shirley Hazzard first moved to Naples as a young woman in the 1950s to take up a job with the United Nations. It was the beginning of a long love affair with the city. The Ancient Shore collects the best of Hazzard’s writings on Naples, along with a classic New Yorker essay by her late husband, Francis Steegmuller. For the pair, both insatiable readers, the Naples of Pliny, Gibbon, and Auden is constantly alive to them in the present. With Hazzard as our guide, we encounter Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and of course Goethe, but Hazzard’s concern is primarily with the Naples of our own time—often violently unforgiving to innocent tourists, but able to transport the visitor who attends patiently to its rhythms and history. A town shadowed by both the symbol and the reality of Vesuvius can never fail to acknowledge the essential precariousness of life—nor, as the lover of Naples discovers, the human compassion, generosity, and friendship that are necessary to sustain it. Beautifully illustrated by photographs from such masters as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Herbert List, The Ancient Shore is a lyrical letter to a lifelong love: honest and clear-eyed, yet still fervently, endlessly enchanted. “Much larger than all its parts, this book does full justice to a place, and a time, where ‘nothing was pristine, except the light.’”—Bookforum “Deep in the spell of Italy, Hazzard parses the difference between visiting and living and working in a foreign country. She writes with enormous eloquence and passion of the beauty of getting lost in a place.”—Susan Slater Reynolds, Los Angeles Times “The two voices join in exquisite harmony. . . . A lovely book.”—Booklist, starred review

'The nightly routine of sirens, barrage, the probing raider, the unmistakable engine ... the bomb-bursts moving nearer and then moving away, hold one like a love-charm' --Graham Greene When the first bombs fell on London in August 1940, the city was transformed overnight into a strange kind of battlefield. For most Londoners, the sirens, guns, planes, and bombs brought sleepless nights, fear and loss. But for a group of writers, the war became an incomparably vivid source of inspiration, the blazing streets scenes of exhilaration in which fear could transmute into love. In this powerful chronicle of literary life under the Blitz, Lara Feigel vividly conjures the lives of five prominent writers: Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Rose Macaulay, Hilde Spiel and the novelist Henry Green. Starting with a sparklingly detailed recreation of a single night of September 1940, the narrative traces the tempestuous experiences of these five figures through five years in London and Ireland, followed by postwar Vienna and Berlin. Volunteering to drive ambulances, patrol the streets and fight fires, the protagonists all exhibited a unified spirit of a nation under siege, but as individuals their emotions were more volatile. As the sky whistled and the ground shook, nerves were tested, loyalties examined and torrid affairs undertaken. Literary historian and journalist Feigel brilliantly and beautifully interweaves the letters, diaries, journalism and fiction of her writers with official records to chart the history of a burning world, experienced through the eyes of extraordinary individuals.