This brilliant, vivid and impressionistic series of sketches, formed during her 1892 stay in Persia, is Gertrude Bell's first published work. Infused with a distinctive orientalism, 'Persian Pictures' is an evocative, virtuosic meditation, moving sinuously between Persia's heroic, complex, mythical past and its present decline; the public face of Tehran and the otherworldly 'secret, mysterious life of the East', the lives of its women, its enclosed, quasi-medieval gardens; from the bustling cities to the lonely wastelands of Khorasan. Bell's documentation of Muharram - the month of...

'London: A Pilgrimage' was conceived in 1868 by the journalist and playwright Blanchard Jerrold. Accompanied by the famous artist Gustave Dore, Jerrold prowled every corner of the heaving metropolis, sometimes with plain-clothes police for protection. 'London: A Pilgrimage' is a forgotten classic of social journalism, a frank and brutal look at the poverty striken, gin-swilling London of the nineteenth century, written in a perceptive, bold and gripping style.

180 incredible etchings by Dore escort Jerrold on his odyssey through the pulsating city, into the Lambeth gas works, seedy...

Anthem's Travel Classics presents Thomas Holmes' masterpiece of early-twentieth-century social journalism: a quirky, engaging and witty look at London's criminal and social underworld of 1912. Holmes investigates the seedy intentions of the pickpockets, prostitutes, prisoners, drunks and murderers that comprise the capital's criminal element, all of whom he rather tends to admire A more reflective and progressive theme also runs through this work, as the author considers the serious social problems faced by women, the disabled and the unemployed. Both a thrilling expose and a considered...

A war correspondent's breathtaking account of early twentieth-century wars, including the Greek-Turkish War (1897) and the Spanish-American War (1898). These events have fallen into relative obscurity, following the two World Wars, yet remain important forces shaping modern politics. 'Moments in Hell' reveals the conflicting loyalties of the war correspondent, caught between political ideologies and personal suffering, and provides an enlightening background to recent conflicts. Harding Davis was a dashingly fashionable figure in turn-of-the-century New York, and cited as the inspiration...

A beguiling account of twentieth-century America through the eyes of an outsider, a remarkable inversion of the standard 'Westerner observing the exotic' travel writing formula. Wu Tingfang wrote this book at an intriguing juncture in history - aeroplanes and motion pictures had recently been invented (and his musings on both of these have proven correct) and while he did not know it, a tremendous cultural shift was about to take place in the West due to the First World War. The unassuming and inquisitive diplomat delves into topics such as: immigration; the Arms Race and changes in...