In 1814, the war being raged on the seas of the Indian Ocean by the all-powerful Franco-British naval forces trying to dominate the lucrative trade routes to India, had ended with a truce. At the stroke of a pen, far away in the city of Paris, the exotic, tropical islands of the Seychelles became a British colony. Forged from their French descendants and African slave roots, and moulded by their new British rulers, a small nation had emerged.

It is July 1912 on the island of Mahe, and Anna Savy has just turned sixteen. Anna is a passionate, nature-loving and rebellious young woman...

The eighteenth century struggled to define architecture as either an art or a science the image of the architect as a grand figure who synthesizes all other disciplines within a single master plan emerged from this discourse. Immanuel Kant and Johann Wolfgang Goethe described the architect as their equal, a genius with godlike creativity. For writers from Descartes to Freud, architectural reasoning provided a method for critically examining consciousness. The architect, as philosophers liked to think of him, was obligated by the design and construction process to mediate between the...

Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726) was one of the most important figures in English garden history although he is rarely recognised as such. An eclectic early career as a merchant, a soldier and a dramatist preceded Vanbrugh's acceptance of the role of architect to the Third Earl of Carlisle in 1699. His impact on architecture was paralleled by a revolution in landscape design as Vanbrugh shifted the place of the architect from the house to the grounds. He used the ancient rules of proportion combined with an empathetic approach to Nature to create innovative layouts that were geometric, but...

Gobeklitepe, the oldest temple in the world, awakened from its 12,000 years of sleep to tell hacker Kamil a secret. A secret, locked behind the sealed tongue of its guardian, that can only be heard by to the wise and capable...

Kamil is forced to unravel Gobeklitepe's mysteries when a stranger from the southeastern Turkish town of Urfa arrives on his doorstep, asking to buy his house. Kamil, the only Jew left in ancient Carian city of Milas, just buried his linguist mother, but he has no time to mourn when the stranger is murdered and he becomes the prime suspect.

With police...

Im 19. Jahrhundert erlebte Ungarn noch nie dagewesene soziale, wirtschaftliche und kulturelle Entwicklungen. Mit dem Osterreichisch-Ungarischen Ausgleich von 1867 wurde das Land gleichberechtigter Partner in der Doppelmonarchie, Architektur und Kunst erlebten eine Blute. Es entstand ein mitteleuropaischer Geschmack, in dem die kunstlerische Prasenz der deutschsprachigen Lander um den Einfluss von Frankreich und England erweitert wurde. Im Laufe dieses Prozess' wurde versucht zu einer dezidiert ungarischen Kunst zu finden, die sowohl Motiven bauerlicher Kunst als auch realen (oder fiktiven)...