By one of the finest English writers of our time, a luminous memoir that travels from southern Italy to the banks of the Nile, capturing a lost past both personal and historical. Marina Warner’s father, Esmond, met her mother, Ilia, while serving as an officer in the British Army during the Second World War. As Allied forces fought their way north through Italy, Esmond found himself in the southern town of Bari, where Ilia had grown up, one of four girls of a widowed mother. The Englishman approaching middle age and the twenty-one-year-old Italian were soon married. Before the war had come to an end, Ilia was on her way alone to London to wait for her husband’s return and to learn how to be Mrs. Esmond Warner, an Englishwoman. Ilia begins to learn the world of cricket, riding, canned food, and distant relations she has landed in, while Esmond, in spite of his connections, struggles to support his wife and young daughter. He comes up with the idea of opening a bookshop, a branch of W.H. Smith’s, in Cairo, where he had spent happy times during the North African campaign. In Egypt, however, nationalists are challenging foreign influences, especially British ones, and before long Cairo is on fire. Deeply felt, closely observed, rich with strange lore, Esmond and Ilia is a picture of vanished worlds, a portrait of two people struggling to know each other and themselves, a daughter’s story of trying to come to terms with a past that is both hers and unknowable to her. It is an “unreliable memoir”—what memoir isn’t?—and a lasting work of literature, lyrical, sorrowful, shaped by love and wonder.

By one of the finest English writers of our time, a luminous memoir that travels from southern Italy to the banks of the Nile, capturing a lost past both personal and historical. Marina Warner’s father, Esmond, met her mother, Ilia, while serving as an officer in the British Army during the Second World War. As Allied forces fought their way north through Italy, Esmond found himself in the southern town of Bari, where Ilia had grown up, one of four girls of a widowed mother. The Englishman approaching middle age and the twenty-one-year-old Italian were soon married. Before the war had come to an end, Ilia was on her way alone to London to wait for her husband’s return and to learn how to be Mrs. Esmond Warner, an Englishwoman. Ilia begins to learn the world of cricket, riding, canned food, and distant relations she has landed in, while Esmond, in spite of his connections, struggles to support his wife and young daughter. He comes up with the idea of opening a bookshop, a branch of W.H. Smith’s, in Cairo, where he had spent happy times during the North African campaign. In Egypt, however, nationalists are challenging foreign influences, especially British ones, and before long Cairo is on fire. Deeply felt, closely observed, rich with strange lore, Esmond and Ilia is a picture of vanished worlds, a portrait of two people struggling to know each other and themselves, a daughter’s story of trying to come to terms with a past that is both hers and unknowable to her. It is an “unreliable memoir”—what memoir isn’t?—and a lasting work of literature, lyrical, sorrowful, shaped by love and wonder.

A luminous memoir of post-war childhood, adventure and loss on the banks of the Nile. ‘Wonderful – a brave, inventive, touching distillation of memory and imagination’ JENNY UGLOW

Especially for grown-ups, this is a selection of subversive, satirical, and sophisticated fairy tales full of polished wit and prose.

Shows how the figure of Mary has shaped and been shaped by changing social and historical circumstances and why for all their beauty and power,the legends of Mary have condemned real women to perpetual inferiority.

In this landmark study of the history and meaning of fairy tales, the celebrated cultural critic Marina Warner looks at storytelling in art and legend-from the prophesying enchantress who lures men to a false paradise, to jolly Mother Goose with her masqueraders in the real world. Why are storytellers so often women, and how does that affect the status of fairy tales? Are they a source of wisdom or a misleading temptation to indulge in romancing?

Ogres and giants, bogeymen and bugaboos embody some of our deepest fears, dominating popular fiction, from tales such as 'Jack the Giant Killer' to the cannibal monster Hannibal Lecter, from the Titans of Greek mythology to the dinosaurs of JURASSIC PARK, from Frankenstein to MEN IN BLACK. Following her brilliant study of fairy tales, FROM THE BEAST TO THE BLONDE, Marina Warner's enthralling new book explores the ever increasing presence of such figures of male terror, and the stratagems we invent to allay the monsters we conjure up. From ogres to cradle songs, from bananas to cannibals, Warner traces the roots of our commonest anxieties, unravelling with vigorous intelligence, originality and relish, the myths and fears which define our sensibilities. Illustrated with a wealth of images - from the beautiful and the bizarre to the downright scary - this is a tour de force of scholarship and imagination.

A look at how ideas of translation, migration, and displacement are embedded in the works of prominent artists, from Ovid to Tacita Dean On Belonging and Not Belonging provides a sophisticated exploration of how themes of translation, migration, and displacement shape an astonishing range of artistic works. From the possibilities and limitations of translation addressed by Jhumpa Lahiri and David Malouf to the effects of shifting borders in the writings of Eugenio Montale, W. G. Sebald, Colm Tóibín, and many others, esteemed literary critic Mary Jacobus looks at the ways novelists, poets, photographers, and filmmakers revise narratives of language, identity, and exile. Jacobus’s attentive readings of texts and images seek to answer the question: What does it mean to identify as—or with—an outsider? Walls and border-crossings, nomadic wanderings and Alpine walking, the urge to travel and the yearning for home—Jacobus braids together such threads in disparate times and geographies. She plumbs the experiences of Ovid in exile, Frankenstein’s outcast Being, Elizabeth Bishop in Nova Scotia and Brazil, Walter Benjamin’s Berlin childhood, and Sophocles’s Antigone in the wilderness. Throughout, Jacobus trains her eye on issues of transformation and translocation; the traumas of partings, journeys, and returns; and confrontations with memory and the past. Focusing on human conditions both modern and timeless, On Belonging and Not Belonging offers a unique consideration of inclusion and exclusion in our world.

An account of a remarkable life - of love, courage and survival in the dark days of World War II. Dorothy Eva Ferreira grew up on a remote farm in South Africa, but in 1930, she met and married Engelbert, Count Praschma, Baron von Bilkau, an adventuring German aristocrat. Upon the death of his father in 1933, Engelbert took his wife and children to Germany to claim his rightful inheritance - only to be rebuffed by his status-conscious siblings. The family castle and estates were held in a fideicommiss which stated that the oldest son would be the sole heir. But the family maneuvered to have Engelbert disinherited as he was deemed a black sheep, an irresponsible profligate who married an African peasant while his younger brother had married a princess. The war raging about them, Dorothy and her children found refuge with an aunt and uncle, Count and Countess Stolberg, in Czechoslovakia. The aristocrats soon found it useful to have someone around who knew how to gather berries... how to slaughter a chicken... how to stand up to wave after wave of overbearing Russian soldiers and above all was not German. Her only proof: a small tattered South African flag and stamps of King George on her marriage certificate. In the horrific aftermath of the war, she retrieved her small children from distant boarding schools... and missing relatives from Soviet labor camps. In a world gone mad, she lived by the words, "My heart must never be too small for a woman." *** 31 January, 1941 I know that Engelbert got into financial trouble. He is accused of arms dealing and the family said he was a difficult case but why did they let him be taken to Leubus, this so-called sanatorium where people who are not useful to "the magnificent Third Reich" are sent. Is it possible that the family actually handed him over to the Nazis because he was such a thorn in their sides? Why did his sister Elisabeth who works for the military tell me, ten days ago, heartlessly, that as Engelbert is going to die soon the only thing for me is to go back to Africa and leave the children here to be adopted by suitable families? Leave my children? Never.