Ruth Padel Knihy

When Ruth Padel saw an advert for a cheap break to India, she decided to visit what she had always wanted to see: tropical jungle and a wildlife sanctuary. Her impromptu trip was the start of a remarkable two-year journey in search of that most elusive and beautiful animal: the tiger. Armed with her granny's opera glasses and a pair of Tunisian trainers, she sets off across Asia to ask the question: can the tiger be saved from extinction in the wild? Plunging into leech-infested jungles, she tracks tigers by jeep, by elephant and on foot, from Bangladesh to Bhutan, from China to far-east Russia. The result is a unique blend of natural history, travel literature and memoir, and an intimate portrait of an animal we have loved and feared almost to destruction.

'An intensely readable parable of love and fear' DAILY MAIL

'Making is our defence against the dark...'Through images of conflict and craftsmanship, Ruth Padel's powerful new poems address the Middle East, tracing a quest for harmony in the midst of destruction. An oud, the central instrument of Middle Eastern music , is made and broken.

`Here in deep earth, the blackblossom of mourning still sifting within meI remembered that emerald was my birthstone ...'Prize-winning poet Ruth Padel's heartfelt new collection is a grief observed: an elegy for her mother on her death at the age of ninety-seven.

“Padel’s imagery and imagination took me deeper into Beethoven than many biographies I’ve read.” —Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times A fascinating poetic journey into the mind and heart of a musical genius, from the author of the celebrated Darwin: A Life in Poems Ruth Padel's new sequence of poems, in four movements, is a personal voyage through the life and legend of one of the world's greatest composers. She uncovers the man behind the music, charting his private thoughts and feelings through letters, diaries, sketchbooks, and the conversation books he used as his hearing declined. She gives us Beethoven as a battered four-year-old, weeping at the clavier; the young virtuoso pianist agonized by his encroaching deafness; the passionate, heartbroken lover; the clumsy eccentric making coffee with exactly sixty beans. Padel's quest takes her into the heart of Europe and back to her own musical childhood: Her great-grandfather, who studied in Leipzig with a pupil of Beethoven's, became a concert pianist before migrating to Britain; her parents met making music; and Padel grew up playing the viola, Beethoven's instrument as a child. Her book is a poet and string player's intimate connection across the centuries with an artist who, though increasingly isolated, ended even his most harrowing works on a note of hope.

Ruth Padel's passionate new collection is a woman's eye view of a love affair, with darker undercurrents of mortality and loss.

Her new book, invaluable for all who want to write as well as read poems, reveals the journey of thought, language and music within sixty more poems and also shows how poems fortify us on the journey of our lives, in a collection of essays written in elegant, accessible prose.

Sir Walter Ralegh, poet, scholar, soldier and explorer, travel-writer, historian and favorite courtier of Queen Elizabeth-I, was born in Devon around 1552, knighted in 1584, imprisoned twice in the Tower of London, where he wrote his History of the World, and executed in 1618. This book features a collection of Sir Walter's poems.

Includes poems that use multiple viewpoints - from Darwin himself, to his beloved wife Emma, and even, at one point, the orangutang at London Zoo - and illuminates the development of Darwin's thought, the drama of the discovery of evolution, and the fluctuating emotions of Darwin the husband, and the naturalist and the tender father.

This was my home. This harbour and sea. These golden alleys. But the town I grew up in has disappeared. Ri is a successful international artist who has worked in London all her life. When her English husband dies she turns to her Greek roots on Crete, island of mass tourism and ancient myth, only to discover they are not what she thought. As Brexit looms in the UK, and Greece grapples with austerity and the refugee crisis, she finds under the surface of her home not only proud memories of resisting foreign occupation but a secret, darker history. As an artist, she has lived by seeing and observing. Now she discovers how much she has not seen, and finds within herself the ghost of someone she never even heard of. Unearthing her parents' stories transforms Ri's relationships to her family and country, her identity and her art. Lyrical, unsettling and evocative, Daughters of the Labyrinth explores the power of buried memory and the grip of the past on the present, and questions how well we can ever know our own family.