On the centennial year of Samuel Beckett's birth, Auster's new novel nods to the old master. We open with a man sitting in a room. The man doesn't remember his name, and a camera hidden in the ceiling takes a picture of him once a second. The man—whom the third-person narrator calls Mr. Blank—spends the single day spanned by the book being looked after, questioned and reading a fragmentary narrative written by a man named Sigmund Graf from a country called the Confederation who has been given the mission of tracking down a renegade soldier named Ernesto Land.
The image of Poland has once again been impressed on European consciousness. Norman Davies provides a key to understanding the modern Polish crisis in this lucid and authoritative description of the nation's history. Beginning with the period since 1945, he travels back in time to highlight the long-term themes and traditions which have influenced present attitudes.
The twentieth-century architect Mies van der Rohe once declared that 'Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together'. In Travels in the History of Architecture, renowned architectural writer Robert Harbison looks closely at these bricks, taking us on a journey through the great themes and movements of architecture, from antiquity to the present day.
The Travels of the King Charles II in Germany and Flanders 1654 - 1660
In a former volume I have dealt with the first eight yearsof Charles II's exile ; in the present one I have sought to follow his career from the time of his departure from France in July 1654 to that of his return to England in May 1660. The story of these six years is a somewhat depressing record of ever-growing misery, despondency, and want, of domestic dissension and moral decadence ; but if this period is less exciting than the earlier one it is also less well known and by no means devoid of incident.
After an absence of twenty-six years, Marco Polo and his father Nicolo and his uncle Maffeo returned from the spectacular court of Kublai Khan to their old home in Venice. Their clothes were coarse and tattered; the bundles that they carried were bound in Eastern cloths and their bronzed faces bore evidence of great hardships, long endurance, and suffering. They had almost forgotten their native tongue. Their aspect seemed foreign and their accent and entire manner bore the strange stamp of the Tartar. The year was now 1295.
