Bøger udgivet af Signal Books Ltd

?Mark Bardell explores the Isle of Wight and Portsmouth and the surrounding maritime landscapes, revealing unexpected historical and literary associations. Englands largest island, (at most 23 miles long), anchored close to the Hampshire coast, has a sheltered waterway, the Solent, with its own local roadsteads and a unique double tidal system. This geography has shaped the areas history.

?In this fascinating book, Terry Cudbird reveals the obsession that is long distance walking. His itinerary covered the six sides of the French hexagon. In a years walking he passed through the Pyrenees, the Languedoc, Provence, the Alps, the Jura, Alsace, Lorraine, Picardy, Normandy, Brittany, and Aquitaine. En route he discovered the astonishing variety of Frances regions, their culture, history, languages, architecture, and food.

?This is a guidebook with a differenceone residents and visitors alike will want to treasure, reread and show their friends. That Sweet City offers a beguiling introduction to one of the fairest and most enthralling places in the world. Designed as seven walks across and around the citys centre, and radiating out from Oxford into the surrounding countryside, it provides pictures and poems describing each of the selected sights, together with a commentary and maps of the walks.

Provides information on the river Thames, how it evolved into a prime commercial artery linking the heart of England with the ports of Europe. This book tracks the Thames from source to sea, documenting internationally-known landmarks such as Tower Bridge and Windsor Castle and revealing features such as Godstow Abbey, Canvey Island, and more.

?By tradition, Moscow is the easternmost bastion of western civilisation. Moscow has stood against invasion and war, pestilence and fire. It has been rejected by its own rulers, and its destruction has been planned by its dreamers and invaders alike. Yet it has survived. How this happened is the story of historical accident, the vagaries of geography and economicsand upon occasion, sheer human will and faith. Moscow is also the object of stereotype, from barbaric oriental capital to Holy city on the Hill. In its secular and religious manifestations it has been the goal of pilgrimage and a city of transcendent aspiration. In the twentieth century it was the headquarters of a class-based pogrom of appalling dimensions even as it was proclaimed the capital of global revolution. If Moscow has endured catastrophes barely imagined, it has also been the scene of creative brilliance. It holds a deep contradiction as being both the pilot-boat to hell, and a celestial city of the future. Moscow has bemused visitors, and even the most perceptive of them have fallen victim to their own preconceptions. This is a portrait of Moscow through time. It has one constant, the Kremlin, at once the supreme metaphor of state power but also a symbol of Russian national identity. The tension between Moscow as an urban community and the Moscow of empire and belief is fundamental to the citys narrative. Above it all stands the Kremlin, Moscows arbiter of history. This is also a historical case- study of the growth, development and near-death experiences of a single city to become a living monument to its own survival. It will be of interest to travellers, Urbanists and historians alike.

Athens is an historical anomaly. Excavations date itsfirst settlement to over seven thousand years ago, yet itonly became the capital of Greece in 1834. During theintervening centuries it was occupied by almost everymobile culture in Europe: from its earliest likelysettlers, tribes from what is now Albania, to Nazi forcesduring the second World War, and in between by successivewaves of Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Slavs, Goths,Venetians, French, Catalans, Turks, Italians, Bulgariansand the clans of various kings and tyrants of theregion's early city-states. There has been a structure onits 'high city', the acropolis, since at least the bronzeage, although it was subsequently altered by successiveoccupiers, becoming a fort, castle, temple, mosque,church and even a harem. its 'Golden Age' peaked in thefifth century BCE, with the great building projects ofPericles and Themistocles, and its later history is oneof a city already nostalgic for its past, although at atime when other European cities had yet to beginconstructing a past.

A re-exploration of the historic journey made by the first man to walk the Alps from 'end to end'

Comic look at Oxford by a local comedian

Since 1997 John Lichfield, The Independents correspondent in France, has been sending dispatches back to the newspaper in London. More than transient news stories, the popular Our Man in Paris series consists of essays on all things French.

At the beginning of the fourteenth century, anarchy in Italy led to the capital of the Christian world being moved from Romefor the first and only time in history. It was a critical moment, and it resulted in seven successive popes remaining in exile for the next seventy years. The city chosen to replace Rome was Avignon.

Few countries are as marked by their history as the Maltese islands of Malta and Gozo. Each period of Maltas turbulent historynot least its heroic role during the Second World Warhas added to its rich cultural fabric.

The world's media has chronicled Haiti's long history of political instability and social unrest. But perhaps more importantly, Haitians themselves reacted to the cycle of hope and despair in the form of hundreds of spontaneous street murals. Mostly in the capial, Port-au-Prince, these colorful and expressive paintings both recorded key events and articulated the hopes and fears of their creators. Tragically, many of these paintings were among the casualties of the earthquake that struck the island in early 2010.

A visual record of a stay in Signy Island, Antarctica, containing sketches, photographs and a written journal. "Due South" is published to coincide with exhibitions at the Natural History Museum and Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum.

The Danube is the longest river in western and central Europe. Rising amidst the beautiful wooded hills of Germanys Black Forest, it touches or winds its way through ten countries and four capital cities before emptying into the Black Sea through a vast delta whose silt-filled channels spread across eastern Romania.

No railway journey on Earth can equal the Trans-Siberian between Moscow and Vladivostok. It is not just its vast length and the great variety of the lands and climes through which it passes. It is not just its history as the line that linked the huge territories which are Russia together.

From its obscure origins as a fishing village along a marshy estuary, Tokyo grew into one of the world s largest and most culturally vibrant metropolises. For all its modernity and craving for the new, it is a city impregnated with the past. In the backstreets of districts that have inspired the setting for science fiction novels are wooden temples, fox shrines, mouldering steles and statues of Bodhisattvas that evoke a different age. The point where time past, present and future coexist, Tokyo s thirst for the contemporary is moderated by nostalgia for the past. As an urban laboratory where the cultures of the East and West are remixed into perceptibly Japanese forms, Tokyo embraces sudden transitions, constant flux and transformation. The courtesans of its pleasure quarters inspired Edo-period woodblock artists, novelists and poets. In a later age, its experimental artists, feminist writers and Modern Girls of 1920s Ginza both shocked and electrified the capital. Stephen Mansfield explores a city rich in diversity, tracing its evolution from the founding of its massive stone citadel through rise of a merchant class whose wealth transformed Edo into a home for artists, writers and performers. In contemporary Tokyo he explores the unique crossbred cultures of taste that make the giant conurbation one of the most exciting and creative cities in the world. * City of Literature, Theatre and Art: The print masters Hokusai, Hiroshige and Utamaro; the Kabuki theatre; authors Nagai Kafu, Tanizaki Junichiro, Mishima Yukio, Murukami Haruki; foreign writers Angela Carter, William Gibson and Donald Richie. * City of Architecture: From the fortifications of Edo Castle, great temples and shrines, via the western hybrids of the Meiji era to the post-modernist skyscrapers, giant neon screens and digitalized surfaces of today s city. * City of Calamities: The great fires of the Edo period; floods, famines and typhoons; the 1923 Earthquake, coups and rising militarism in the 1930s; the fire bombings of the Second World War; the 1995 subway gas attack by members of a death cult and the fatalism of residents living on one of the earth s largest fault lines.

This book tells the story of how a group of distinctly average cricketers became unlikely sporting ambassadors and, quite by accident, helped re-introduce an island to its forgotten past.

From border garrison of the Roman Empire to magnificent Baroque seat of the Habsburgs, Vienna's fortunes have swung between survival and expansion. This book looks at everything from the Baroque architecture to the contemporary slow food scene.

The Andes form the backbone of South America. The mountain range was home to an extraordinary theocratic empire and civilisation, the Incas, who built stone temples, roads, palaces and forts.

Sir Learie Constantine was an extraordinary figure by any yardstick. One of the greatest and most popular of all West Indian cricketers, he left the game to become, among other things, a barrister, cabinet minister, diplomat, broadcaster, author and journalist.

Presents a cultural history of Catalonia, exploring the distinctive nature of Catalan identity through the perspectives of political struggle, a vibrant literary tradition and world-famous innovations in architecture and the visual arts.

Argentine by birth, Ernesto Che Guevara came to embody the spirit of the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro. Guevara spent two years fighting in the sierras of Cuba, and after the revolutionaries victory became one of the most important members of the government as well as one of Castros closest and most controversial associates.

A garden at the foot of Europe and a crossroads between Spain, Africa and the New World, Andaluca has been a cultural customs house on the border of the Mediterranean and Atlantic civilisations for more than ten thousand years. This book covers the whole historyy of the region.

Forever linked in the public mind with the Pol Pot tyranny, Phnom Penh only became Cambodia's permanent capital in 1866. This book presents the cultural and literary history of Cambodia's capital, exploring its colonial past, the long reign of King Sihanouk and the horror of the Pol Pot regime.