William Dalrymple on Don McCullin's Journeys Across Roman Asia Minor

I am not neutral about Don McCullin.When I was a photography-obsessed teenager,
he was quite simply my God. I well remember sitting in the back row at maths classes 
in 1980s Yorkshire, covertly flicking through the school library’s copy of Don’s
 Hearts of Darkness, transported from a dull world of equations and trigonometry – taught, for duffers like me, in a shabby, paint-peeling Portakabin – to the war-torn jungles of Vietnam and Laos, the darkly barricaded streets of Famagusta and Beirut, the Killing Fields of Cambodia and Biafra. Don’s work was eye-opening, shocking, exhilarating, frightening and deeply disturbing all at once; and for a teenager it was utterly irresistible. Moreover, it
 spoke to a heady and thrilling world of photojournalism that I longed to be part of.

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Dervla Murphy on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters

Extracted from Dervla Murphy’s afterword to Eland’s new edition of The Turkish Embassy Letters

The letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu have long been a favourite ‘quote-mine’ for historians, biographers, essayists and travel writers. Yet to most general readers she herself has never seemed more than an astringent commentator on the sidelines – almost a disembodied voice. In our own day, with its over-fondness for labels, she has been referred to as a ‘pioneer woman traveller and/or feminist’, though it is impossible to squeeze her into either category without distorting her personality. Any reader of her letters must think of her, primarily, as an individual: strong-willed, warm-hearted, keen-witted, high-spirited, often unpredictable, sometimes downright eccentric – a woman who rarely allowed her many disappointments and misfortunes to provoke recriminations or self-pity. She was at once stoical and imaginative, gullible and shrewd, childishly vain and touchingly humble, sincere and loyal in her affections but occasionally indiscriminate in her choice of friends. As the years taught her to value wisdom above knowledge, she became wryly self-mocking. And nowhere in her own writings – feline as she could be in her snap judgements – is there anything approaching the scurrility with which she was repeatedly tormented by Alexander Pope, Horace Walpole and their (often anonymous) hangers-on.

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The Travellers’ Film Club

We are delighted to announce that a new series of the Travellers’ Film Club hosted by Waterstones, Piccadilly (203-206, Piccadilly, London)  starts this week on Wednesday 27th January, 7pm.

Antony Wynn, author of Persia in the Great Game: Sir Percy Sykes: Explorer, Consul, Soldier, Spy  will introduce and discuss GRASS: A Nation’s Battle for Life.

This 1925 silent documentary follows Haidar Khan and his Bakhtiari tribe on their Spring migration across the flooded Karun River and the snowbound Zagros Mountains of southern Persia to their summer pastures.  Filmed on location between Turkey and Iran, Grass is the first ethnographical account of the nomadic Bakhtiari people and was selected for preservation in the US National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being ‘culturally and historically significant’.  

Directed and photographed by Merian C. Cooper,  Ernest B. Schoedsack (who would later go on to produce ‘King Kong’) and Marguerite Harrison, Grass is deliberately styled as a story of man’s triumph over nature, as much a mythic narrative of migration and settlement as a simple travelogue.  Venturing through deserts, mountains, rivers and snowy wastelands in search of the life-sustaining grasslands, the Bakhtiari’s 50,000 strong caravan - complete with 500,000 cattle and goats - become the sole focus of the camera’s gaze.

Antony Wynn, who is Chairman of the Iran Society, lived in Iran for many years and has visited each end of this migration -  he has yet to ride the middle part.  

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