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A riveting, comprehensive history of the Arab peoples and tribes that explores the role of language as a cultural touchstone This kaleidoscopic book covers almost 3,000 years of Arab history and shines a light on the footloose Arab peoples and tribes who conquered lands and disseminated their language and culture over vast distances. Tracing this process to the origins of the Arabic language, rather than the advent of Islam, Tim Mackintosh-Smith begins his narrative more than a thousand years before Muhammad and focuses on how Arabic, both spoken and written, has functioned as a vital source of shared cultural identity over the millennia. Mackintosh-Smith reveals how linguistic developments--from pre-Islamic poetry to the growth of script, Muhammad's use of writing, and the later problems of printing Arabic--have helped and hindered the progress of Arab history, and investigates how, even in today's politically fractured post-Arab Spring environment, Arabic itself is still a source of unity and disunity.
Practical guidance and a fresh approach for more accurate value-based pricing Pricing Done Right provides a cutting-edge framework for value-based pricing and clear guidance on ideation, implementation, and execution. More action plan than primer, this book introduces a holistic strategy for ensuring on-target pricing by shifting the conversation from 'What is value-based pricing?' to 'How can we ensure that our pricing reflects our goals?' You'll learn to identify the decisions that must be managed, how to manage them, and who should make them, as illustrated by real-world case studies. The key success factor is to build a pricing organization within your organization; this reveals the rela...
In an industry littered with great characters and extraordinary personalities, Joe Hobbs stands out as one of the whisky world’s most colourful and interesting entrepreneurs, a man who packed more into each decade of his life than most people manage in a lifetime. Whilst individual episodes and activities of his life are quite well known, his fascinating and wide-ranging full life story has not been told before, despite the fact Joe features in Whisky Magazine’s list of ‘Top 100 Most Influential Whisky Figures’ of all time. Not Your Average Joe tells the fascinating story of how the son of a bankrupt English farmer rose to be one of the leading figures in the history of the Scotch wh...
Traces the pre-mechanical age travels of Ibn Battutah, who set out in 1325 from his native home and spent twenty-nine years visiting most of the known world, from Tangiers to Constantinople.
The Grand Trunk Road is one of the oldest and longest highways in southern Asia. Through oral testimonies, photographs and texts, Tim Smith explores its history and shows how close links between Britain and places along the road continue to this day. The Grand Trunk Road was the main artery for conquest by the British Raj and passes through the ancestral homes of many British Asians. For the first time, the story of the profound impact of the British on this highway and its people is told in image and word.
Arguably the most fascinating but least known country in the Arab world, Yemen has a way of attracting comment that ranges from the superficial to the wildly fictitious. In Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land, Tim Mackintosh-Smith writes with an intimacy and depth of knowledge gained through over twenty years among the Yemenis. He is a travelling companion of the best sort - erudite, witty and eccentric. Crossing mountain, desert, ocean and three millennia of history, he portrays hyrax hunters and dhow skippers, a noseless regicide, and a sword-wielding tyrant with a passion for Heinz Russian salad. Yet even the ordinary Yemenis are extraordinary: their family tree goes back to Noah and is rooted in a land which, in the words of a contemporary poet, has become the dictionary of its people. Every page of this book is dashed - like the land it describes - with the marvellous.
How do movies engage us so thoroughly, capturing our sensations, thoughts, and emotions? This edited volume introduces psychocinematics, which brings together film theorists, philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists to consider the viability of a scientific approach to our movie experience.
'A gripping and accomplished travel book . . . [it] stands out for its integrity and intelligence' Anthony Sattin, Sunday Times Ibn Battutah was the greatest traveller of the pre-mechanical age, journeying for twenty nine years and covering three times the ground Marco Polo covered. Tim Mackintosh-Smith follows the first stage of Ibn Battutah's journey, from Tangier to Constantinople. Destinations include an Islamic Butlin's in the Egyptian desert, Assassin castles in Syria, the Kuria Maria Islands in the Arabian Sea and some of the greatest cities of Medeival Islam. He also cleverly compares the contemporary Muslim world with the past. 'Mackintosh-Smith slips effortlessly between our world and that of the fourteenth century. In doing so, he has created a gripping and accomplished travel book... We will be lucky if there is a better one published this year' Sunday Times 'An immensely engaging book...Subversive good humour without relentless jokiness; and a descriptive eye capable of sketching complext details in a few telling lines' Daily Telegraph
Thirteen leading actors take us behind the scenes, each recreating in detail a memorable performance in one of Shakespeare's major roles. * Brian Cox on Titus Andronicus in Deborah Warner's visceral RSC production * Judi Dench on being directed by Franco Zeffirelli as a twenty-three-year-old Juliet * Ralph Fiennes on Shakespeare's least sympathetic hero Coriolanus * Rebecca Hall on Rosalind in As You Like It, directed by her father, Sir Peter * Derek Jacobi on his hilariously poker-backed Malvolio for Michael Grandage * Jude Law on his Hamlet, a palpable hit in the West End and on Broadway * Adrian Lester on a modern-dress Henry V at the National, during the invasion of Iraq * Ian McKellen o...
A masterful history of the great dynasty of the Netherlands' Middle Ages. 'A sumptuous feast of a book' The Times, Books of the Year 'Thrillingly colourful and entertaining' Sunday Times 'A thrilling narrative of the brutal dazzlingly rich wildly ambitious duchy' Simon Sebag Montefiore 5 stars! Daily Telegraph 'A masterpiece' De Morgen 'A history book that reads like a thriller' Le Soir At the end of the fifteenth century, Burgundy was extinguished as an independent state. It had been a fabulously wealthy, turbulent region situated between France and Germany, with close links to the English kingdom. Torn apart by the dynastic struggles of early modern Europe, this extraordinary realm vanishe...