Tell me a story, sing me a song

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Roderick Grant

"Based on hundreds of interviews with gardeners, gamekeepers, maids, governesses, lairds, chaffeurs, cooks and housekeepers. Roderick Grant creates a poignant and candid picture of a way of life which, although much changed, still survives in modern times. In addition to the harshness of work on the farms and the gradual transformation of the estate into a commercial business, we also learn much about the people themselves - their relationships with each other and those they worked for, and also their loyalties and disloyalties"--Back cover.

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Gavin Young

It was the legendary traveller Wilfred Thesiger who first introduced Gavin Young to the Marshes of Iraq. Since then Young has been entranced by both the beauty of the Marshes and by the Marsh Arabs who inhabit them, a people whose lifestyle is almost unchanged from that of their predecessors, the Ancient Sumerians. On his return to the Marshes some years later Gavin Young found that the twentieth-century had rudely intruded on this lifestyle and that war was threatening to make the Marsh Arabs existence extinct. Return to the Marshes, first published in 1977, is at once a moving tribute to a unique way of life as well as a love story to a place and its people. 'A superbly written essay which combines warmth of personal tone, a good deal of easy historical scholarship and a talent for vivid description rarely found outside good fiction.' Jonathan Raban, Sunday Times

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Barbara A. Margolies

An eight-year-old boy who lives in the city of Kathmandu takes a tour of several small towns and villages of Nepal, observing many traditional customs and activities.

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Richard Lansdown

Includes generous excerpts from the work of explorers, soldiers, naturalists, anthropologists, artists, and writers - some famous, some obscure. This book shows how "the Great South Sea" has been an irreplaceable "distant mirror" of the West and its intellectual obsessions since the Renaissance.