Philip Marsden

A revelatory journey from the tin mines of Cornwall to the gold mountains of Georgia in search of the substances which have both shaped our imagination and imperilled our very existence

From the acclaimed author of The Crossing Place and The Bronski House. In Moscow, a man points on a map to the place where he was born. He is a Doukhobor, a spirit-wrestler, a member of a group of radical Russian sectarians. He is pointing to a village beyond the southern steppe, at the far south of the old Russian empire: I was born here, he says. On the edge of the world.So begins Philip Marsdens Russian journey perhaps the most penetrating account of Russian life since the Soviet Unions collapse made travel possible again. In villages unseen by outsiders since before the revolution, he encounters men and women of fabulous courage, larger than life, dazed by the centurys turbulence. By turns wise, devout, comic, they seem to have stepped straight from the pages of Turgenev, Gogol and Babel. Marsden meets such figures as the Yezidi Sheikh of Sheikhs, an exiled Georgian prince and a cast of passionate scholars, stooping survivors of the gulags, strutting Cossacks and extreme, isolated sects of Milk-Drinkers and Spirit-Wrestlers.The Spirit-Wrestlers peels away the grey facade of post-Soviet Russia and reveals a people as committed as ever to answering that great Tolstoyan question: how a man should live. Even more than in The Bronski House and The Crossing Place, Philip Marsden shows that behind the horrors of the Soviet years the human spirit remained triumphant. In so doing, he shows himself to be one of the most exciting and original travel writers of his generation.

Cuando el cónsul británico Charles Cameron llega a Abisinia en octubre de 1862, es hecho prisionero por el emperador Tewodros II. A los intentos de liberación se va sumando una sucesión de guerras tribales, de matanzas, de intrigas, que culminará con el desembarco en las costas del mar Rojo del general Napier comandando once mil soldados británicos. Su objetivo será alcanzar, tendiendo una línea de ferrocarril y apoyándose de elefantes indios para el trasporte de la artillería, el bastión de Meqdela al que el propio Tewodros intentaba trasportar, construyendo una carretera, la joya de su defensa, un cañón bautizado con el nombre de Sebastopol. Los acontecimientos de aquella epopeya son los que narra Philip Marsden en este libro apasionante.

A fascinating narrative excursion into a bizarre episode in 19th century Ethiopian and British imperial history, featuring a remote African despot and his monstrous European-built gun. Towards the end of 1867, Emperor Tewodros II of Ethiopia burnt his own capital, took his vast mortar named Sevastopol and began a retreat to the mountain stronghold of Mekdala. For months thousands of his followers struggled to build a road for the great gun, levelling the soil of the high plains, hacking out a way down into mile-deep gorges. At the same time, a hostile British force, under General Napier, was advancing from the coast. It was the climax to the reign of one of the most colourful and extraordinary rulers in African history. Discovering traces of the road in the highlands, and drawing on years of involvement with Ethiopia, Philip Marsden recounts the story of Tewodros. From his spectacular rise from camel-raider to King of Kings Tewodros was a man who combined a sense of Biblical destiny with personal charisma and military genius. He restored the fortunes of the ancient Christian kingdom, introduced reforms to his army and to the church, and dreamed of an alliance with the great powers of Europe. But as his reforms stalled and the British Foreign Office lost his letter to Queen Victoria, Tewodross behaviour became more and more violent and erratic. When he imprisoned the British consul, years of negotiation culminated in one of the most bizarre and expensive campaigns of the Victorian age. The Barefoot Emperor is history at its most thrilling and dramatic. Using narrative skills proven in such acclaimed books as The Bronski House and The Chains of Heaven, Philip Marsden recreates scenes and characters of glittering intensity and the intriguing paradoxes of a central figure grappling not only with his own people and his own demons, but with the seductive and unstoppable approach of the modern world.

Philip Marsden returns to the remote, fiercely beautiful landscape that has exercised a powerful mythic appeal over him since his first encounter with it over twenty years ago. Ethiopia bred in me the conviction that if there is a wider purpose to our life, it is to understand the world, to seek out its diversity, to celebrate its heroes and its wonders in short, to witness it. When Philip Marsden first went to Ethiopia in 1982, it changed the direction of his life. What he saw of its stunning antiquity, its raw Christianity, its extremes of brutality and grace prompted his curiosity, and made him a writer. But Ethiopia at that time was torn apart by civil war. The north, the ancient heartland of the country, was closed off. Twenty years later, Marsden returned. The result is this book the account of a journey deferred. Walking hundreds of miles through a landscape of cavernous gorges, tabletop mountains and semi-desert, Marsden encounters monks and hermits, rebels and farmers. And he creates an unforgettable picture of one of the most remote regions left on earth. As in his award-winning book The Spirit-Wrestlers, Marsden reminds us of the brilliant heights that travel writing can attain, whilst celebrating the ageless rewards of the open road and the people for whom the mythic and the everyday are inextricably joined.

The story of Britains colourful maritime past seen through the changing fortunes of the Cornish port of Falmouth. Within the space of few years, during the 1560s and 1570s, a maritime revolution took place in England that would contribute more than anything to the transformation of the country from a small rebel state on the fringes of Europe into a world power. Until then, it was said, there was only one Englishman capable of sailing across the Atlantic. Yet within ten years an English ship with an English crew was circumnavigating the world. At the same time in Cornwall, in the Fal estuary, just a single building a lime kiln existed where the port of Falmouth would emerge. Yet by the end of the eighteenth century, Falmouth would be one of the busiest harbours in the world. The Levelling Sea uses the story of Falmouths spectacular rise and fall to explore wider questions about the sea and its place in history and imagination. Drawing on his own deep connection with Cornwall, award-winning author Philip Marsden writes unforgettably about the power of the sea and its ability to produce greed on a piratical scale, dizzying corruption, and grand and tragic aspirations.

Discover the wonders and perils of the earths precious metalswhat they have offered us as humans, and how theyve forever changed our relationship with the world around usThe ground beneath our feet is full of riches: the ocher that allowed prehistoric humans to paint on cave walls; the tin that drove the early Industrial Revolution; radium, the source of Marie Curies wonder; and lithium, the essential mineral of modern life found in our mobile phones and laptops. Each of these minerals has a story to tell, and each has its place in the broader story of human history.Under a Metal Sky takes us on a journey across the peat-rich Dutch lowlands, through Prague and Bohemia, and on to the gold-rich mountains of Georgia. Along the way, Philip Marsden uncovers the strange and colorful histories of alchemy, scientific revolution, industrialization, and technological innovation, peopled by figures like the Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II, Goethe, Marie Curie, and William Blake. But alongside wonder and inspiration, there has also been plunder and heedless exploitation, the consequences of which have set us on a path toward our own extinction.Beautifully written and wildly mind-expanding, Under a Metal Sky seamlessly blends travel writing, cultural history, and geology. Who knew the history of rocks could be such a page-turner?

Ebook edition of Philip Marsdens classic travel book, published to coincide with the centenary of the Armenian massacres. After centuries of prominence as a world power, Armenia has withstood every attempt during the 20th century to destroy it. With a name redolent both of dim antiquity and of a modern world and its tensions, the Armenians founded a civilization and underwent a diaspora that brought many of the great ideas of the East to Western Europe. The Crossing Place is Philip Marsdens gripping account of his remarkable journey through the Middle East, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus in a quest to discover the secret of one of the worlds most extraordinary peoples. Caught between opposing empires, between warring religions and ideologies at the crossing place of history the Armenians have somehow survived against the odds. This is their story told by one of the finest travel writers at work today.

A remarkable, multifaceted story made up of journal accounts, memories, conversations and personal experience, The Bronski House is a paean to Poland, a landmark in travel writing, and a family history tied together by the unique experience of returning from exile. In the summer of 1992, accompanied by Philip Marsden, the exiled poet Zofia Hinska stepped into the Belorussian village where she had spent her childhood. The Bronski House is in part the remarkable story of what she found. It is also the story of her mother, Helena Bronska of her coming of age during the Russian revolution, her dramatic escapes from Bolsheviks, Germans and partisans, of her love and loss in a now vanished world. It brilliantly reconstructs a world which vanished in 1939 when Soviet tanks rolled into eastern Poland.

The acclaimed first novel by one of Harper Perennials most gifted young writers, author of The Bronski House and The Spirit Wrestlers. Philip Marsdens brilliant first novel is set in the 1930s, in the small Cornish fishing village of Polmayne. A newcomer to the village, Jack Sweeney, buys a boat and establishes himself as a fisherman, gradually winning the respect even of the village elders. But times are changing, and a new kind of visitor is beginning to appear in Polmayne. A bohemian colony of artists offends some sensibilities, while a hotel is opened to accommodate the summer tourists, and pleasure steamers mingle with the fishing boats in the harbour. Yet, despite the superficial changes, the old ways and the old hazards of Cornish life endure. Offshore, just below the surface of the waves, lie the Main Cages, a treacherous outcrop of rock where many ships and many lives have been lost. Firmly rooted in a particular place and time, yet recalling in its universality such books as Graham Swifts Waterland and E. Annie Proulxs The Shipping News, The Main Cages is a gripping story of love and death, and a remarkable fictional debut.