You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
‘Frozen Desire is concerned with humanity itself. Describing a portrait of Judas, Buchan observes: “Money provokes people to act, for the sake of payment, in a fashion that, if they knew how the action would turn out, they would not contemplate.” This sustained, wide-ranging essay has a spiritual quality’ Paul Bailey, Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year ‘A delightfully quirky book about one man’s obsession with everybody else’s obsession with money . . . a great read’ William Keegan, Guardian ‘An original, elegant, powerful and often beautiful work . . . Buchan in full flow is magnificent’ Nick Cohen, New Statesman ‘Easily the most pleasure I’ve had from a book this ye...
A myth-busting insider’s account of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that destroyed US influence in the country and transformed the politics of the Middle East and the world. The 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran was one of the seminal events of our time. It inaugurated more than thirty years of war in the Middle East and fostered an Islamic radicalism that shapes foreign policy in the United States and Europe to this day. Drawing on his lifetime of engagement with Iran, James Buchan explains the history that gave rise to the Revolution, in which Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters displaced the Shah with little difficulty. Mystifyingly to outsiders, the people of Iran turned their backs o...
In the early 18th century, Edinburgh was a filthy backwater town synonymous with poverty and disease. Yet by century's end, it had become the marvel of modern Europe, home to the finest minds of the day and their breathtaking innovations in architecture, politics, science, the arts, and economies - all of which continues to echo loudly today. Adam Smith penned "The Wealth of Nations". James Boswell produced "The Life of Samuel Johnson". Alongside them, pioneers such as David Hume, Robert Burns, James Hutton, and Sir Walter Scott transformed the way we understand our perceptions and feelings, sickness and health, relations between the sexes, the natural world, and the purpose of existence. James Buchan beautifully reconstructs the intimate geographic scale and boundless intellectual milieu of Enlightenment Edinburgh. With the scholarship of an historian and the elegance of a novelist, he tells the story of the triumph of this unlikely town and the men whose vision brought it into being.
At the summit of his power, John Law was the most famous man in Europe. Born in Scotland in 1671, he was convicted of murder in London and, after his escape from prison, fled Scotland for the mainland when Union with England brought with it a warrant for his arrest. On the continent he lurched from one money-making scheme to the next - selling insurance against losing lottery tickets in Holland, advising the Duke of Savoy - amassing a fortune of some £80,000. But for his next trick he had grander ambitions. When Louis XIV died, leaving a thoroughly bankrupt France to his five-year-old heir, Law gained the ear of the Regent, Philippe D'Orleans. In the years that followed, Law's financial wiz...
The final battle of the Cold War is about to begin a secret battle for the divided heart of Germany."
Sir Edward Leithen is given a year to live and decides to devote his last months to seeking out and restoring to health Galliard, a young Canadian banker, who is searching for the 'River of the Sick Heart'. Braving an Arctic winter, Leithen finds the banker and then his own health returns, yet only one of the men will return to civilization ....
None
In mid-1920s Iran in a crumbling house in a provincial town, the last survivor of a deposed dynasty is slowly dying from tuberculosis. The old prince's domain has been reduced to his domestic household, where the former glories of his ancestors haunt him. Drifting in and out of reality, the prince relives episodes of his forbearers' exulted and often brutal past; a macabre time of public despotism when men were put to death by being sheathed in plaster, and when a child might be beheaded as punishment for poor schoolwork. Long-dead relatives threaten menacingly from photographs the old prince surrounds himself with, damaged images fleetingly brought to life by a fractured hallucinatory mind, only to fade away as another vestige from the past rattles in its picture frame. As hazy memories bleed into one another, it soon becomes clear that the most torturous for the dying man is that of his wife Fakronessa, who used to taunt him with the energy and violence of his grandfather and great-grandfather, forcing him then to avenge himself by sleeping with their servant Fakhri, and subsequently driving his wife to an early grave.
Tells of two societies at the point of collapse: an England clinging desperately to the wreckage of its history & Beirut under bombardment.
None