Δοκίμιο & Πολιτισμός

Reconnect with nature from the ground up and nurture not only your garden but your body, mind, and soul. There's a lot of advice out there that would tell you how to do numerous things in your garden. But not so much that invites you to think about how to be while you're out there.

With increasingly busy lives, yet another list of chores seems like the very last thing any of us needs when it comes to our own practice of self-care, relaxation and renewal. After all, aren't these the things we wanted to escape to the garden for in the first place?Put aside the 'Jobs to do this week' section in the Sunday papers. What if there was a more low-intervention way to garden, some reciprocal arrangement through which both you and your soil get fed, with the minimum degree of fuss, effort and guilt on your part, and the maximum measure of healthy, organic growth on that of your garden?Dive straight into this great gardening book to discover: - A simple visual approach to nurturing your garden, with key infographics and illustrations.

- Text accurately integrates observation, personality and delight. - Small drop in devices of 'how to' - including topics such as soil, compost, pruning and how to plant a bulb. In To Stand and Stare, Andrew Timothy O'Brien weaves together strands of botany, philosophy and mindfulness to form an ecological narrative suffused with practical gardening know-how.

Informed by a deep understanding and appreciation of natural processes, O'Brien encourages the reader to think from the ground up, as we follow the pattern of a plant's growth through the season - roots, shoots, flowers, and fruits - while advocating an increased awareness of our surroundings.

The private letters of Truman Capote, lovingly assembled here for the first time by acclaimed Capote biographer Gerald Clarke, provide an intimate, unvarnished portrait of one of the twentieth century s most colorful and fascinating literary figures. Capote was an inveterate letter writer. He wrote letters as he spoke: emphatically, spontaneously, and passionately. Spanning more than four decades, his letters are the closest thing we have to a Capote autobiography, showing us the uncannily self-possessed naif who jumped headlong into the post World War II New York literary scene; the more mature Capote of the 1950s; the Capote of the early 1960s, immersed in the research and writing of "In Cold Blood"; and Capote later in life, as things seem to be unraveling. With cameos by a veritable who s who of twentieth-century glitterati, "Too Brief a Treat" shines a spotlight on the life and times of an incomparable American writer."

Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, often noted as the most important philosophical work of the 20th century, had a broad goal: to identify the relationship between language and reality, and to define the limits of science. Following on from Wittgenstein 100 years later, Signe Gjessing updates and reimagines the Tractatus, marrying poetry with philosophy to test the boundaries of reality. Stunning, knowing, and revitalising, and glinting with stars, silk, and ecstasy, this is poetry which exacts the logical consequence of philosophy, while locating beauty and significance in the nonsense of the world.

Robin Lane Fox's Travelling Heroes: Greeks and their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer proposes a new way of thinking about ancient Greeks, showing how real-life journeys shaped their mythical tales. The tales of the ancient Greeks have inspired us for thousands of years. But where did they originate? Esteemed classicist Robin Lane Fox draws on a lifetime's knowledge of the ancient world, and on his own travels, to open up the age of Homer. His acclaimed history explores how the intrepid seafarers of eighth-century Greece sailed around the Mediterranean, encountering strange new sights - volcanic mountains, vaporous springs, huge prehistoric bones - and weaving them into the myths of gods, monsters and heroes that would become the cornerstone of Western civilization: the Odyssey and the Iliad. 'A beautiful evocation of a tantalizing world ... Travelling Heroes is a tour de force' Rowland Smith, Literary Review 'Lyrical, passionate ... his great gift is to make this long-ago world a vivid, extraordinary and sometimes frightening place ... a wonderful story' Elizabeth Speller, Sunday Times 'Original, daring and arguably life-enhancing ... produced with a sweeping narrative flourish worthy of a cinematographer or screenwriter' Paul Cartledge, Independent 'Lane Fox argues his case with tremendous style and verve ... learned, and always lively' Mary Beard, Financial Times Robin Lane Fox (b. 1946) is a Fellow of New College, Oxford, and a University Reader in Ancient History. His other books include The Classical World, Alexander the Great, Pagans and Christians and The Unauthorized Version. He was historical advisor to Oliver Stone on the making of Stone's film Alexander, for which he waived all his fees on condition that he could take part in the cavalry charge against elephants which Stone staged in the Moroccan desert.

First published English translation of the landmark 1840 utopian novel. Radical in its day, this landmark utopian 1840 novel traces the journey of fictional British Lord Clarisdall to the exotic island nation of Icaria. To Clarisdell's amazement, devoid of competition or property, Icaria flourishes, triumphing over the social evils of 19th-century capitalism.

Albert Camus's lively journals from his eventful visits to the United States and South America in the 1940s, available again in a new translation. In March 1946, the young Albert Camus crossed from Le Havre to New York. Though he was virtually unknown to American audiences at the time, all that was about to change-The Stranger, his first book translated into English, would soon make him a literary star. By 1949, when he set out on a tour of South America, Camus was an international celebrity. Camus's journals offer an intimate glimpse into his daily life during these eventful years and showcase his thinking at its most personal-a form of observational writing that the French call choses vues (things seen). Camus's journals from these travels record his impressions, frustrations, joys, and longings. Here are his unguarded first impressions of his surroundings and his encounters with publishers, critics, and members of the New York intelligentsia. Long unavailable in English, the journals have now been expertly retranslated by Ryan Bloom, with a new introduction by Alice Kaplan. Bloom's translation captures the informal, sketch-like quality of Camus's observations-by turns ironic, bitter, cutting, and melancholy-and the quick notes he must have taken after exhausting days of travel and lecturing. Bloom and Kaplan's notes and annotations allow readers to walk beside the existentialist thinker as he experiences changes in his own life and the world around him, all in his inimitable style.

When the dust settled and the blood dried after the Battle of Plataea, Greeks might have thought that their freedom was secured. But before the corpse of the Great King's general was cold, Athens and Sparta began to bicker over dividing up the spoils. After an autumn of victory, it's a long cold winter among the burned cities and destroyed shrines of Greece, and a hungry spring. And when Arimnestos goes to sea to cruise the Persian-held coasts, he finds that Persia is still not beaten... and that old alliances are now fraying. Is the impossible true? Would the Spartans rather see Athens destroyed than Persia defeated? And who will save the cities of Ionia from the Great King's wrath?It's the spring of 478BCE, and the Long War isn't over yet.

In the 1970s I was teaching in Athens and came across the account by Lord Hunt, of Everest fame, of his 1963 traverse of the Pindos mountains with a mixed party of Greek and English youngsters. I decided that I would try to retrace his itinerary and my route became the backbone of the first edition of this guide in 1986. Since then I have added descriptions of most of the interesting mainland massifs so that the book became a general guide to mountain trekking in Greece. At the time of the last revision I acquired a colleague, Michael Cullen, who was born and grew up in Greece and founded its first ever trekking company. This time we decided to change the format of the guide quite radically, ditching almost everything in favour of a single route that runs pretty much the length of the country from the northern frontier with Albania to the southernmost reaches of the Peloponnese. We have accordingly also changed the title to The Peloponnese and Pindos Way, in the hope that this will give the book a clearer focus and identity and help to attract walkers to come and sample the real charms and beauties of Greece's mountains. If you are in any doubt, there is no better taster than the blog of Jane and Alan Laurie (http://greekhiking.com) describing their epic 2014 walk from the Prespa Lakes on the Albanian-Greek border to their home in the southern Peloponnese, most of it following a route identical with or very close to ours. And keep an eye on our websites, www.thepindosway.com and www.thepeloponneseway.com, for additional photographs and various extra snippets and bits of information which we will add as time goes by.

Twelve Voices from Greece and Rome is a book for all readers who want to know more about the literature that underpins Western civilization. Chistopher Pelling and Maria Wyke provide a vibrant and distinctive introduction to twelve of the greatest authors from ancient Greece and Rome, writers whose voices still resonate strongly across the centuries: Homer, Sappho, Herodotus, Euripides, Thucydides, Plato, Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Juvenal and Tacitus. To what vital ideas do these authors give voice? And why are we so often drawn to what they say even in modern times? Twelve Voices investigates these tantalizing questions, showing how these great figures from classical antiquity still address some of our most fundamental concerns in the world today (of war and courage, dictatorship and democracy, empire, immigration, city life, art, madness, irrationality, and religious commitment), and express some of our most personal sentiments (about family and friendship, desire and separation, grief and happiness). These twelve classical voices can sound both compellingly familiar and startlingly alien to the twenty-first century reader. Yet they remain suggestive and inspiring, despite being rooted in their own times and places, and have profoundly affected the lives of those prepared to listen to them right up to the present day.

It was a massive, yet little-known landmark in modern history: in 1923, after a long war over the future of the Ottoman world, nearly two million citizens of Turkey or Greece were moved across the Aegean, expelled from their homes because they were the 'wrong' religion. Orthodox Christians were deported from Turkey to Greece, Muslims from Greece to Turkey. At the time, world statesmen hailed the transfer as a solution to the problem of minorities who could not co-exist. Both governments saw the exchange as a chance to create societies where a single culture prevailed. But how did the people who crossed the Aegean feel about this exercise in ethnic engineering? Bruce Clark's fascinating account of these turbulent events draws on new archival research in Greece and Turkey, and interviews with some of the surviving refugees, allowing them to speak for themselves for the first time.