Julian Mackenzie

To do an injustice to Tennyson, it’s usually at this time that my fancy turns to get...

Mary Wollstonecraft SHELLEY Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1...

Last week I was fortunate to buy a small quantity of the original 19...

I suppose that whenever people think of the Himalayas, they think of...

Following on from President Erdogan’s December 2021 statement, the...

The joy of book collecting is the freedom to form a library exactly ...

PERSIA & AFGHANISTAN. Seen in the light of the past forty years, sinc...

I have always been fascinated by mountains and tra...

Nowadays India is one of the largest and most important centres of printing and publis...

The first thing that needs saying is that not everybody that sets out for Timbuctoo ge...

Today marks the 150th anniversary of one of those moments that scho...

When putting our new travel catalogue together, one of the first ...

As book lovers we all owe a debt of gratitude to the Sumerians, the ...

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the publicati...

Thinking of the British and Africa, I suppose the things that comes ...

The Tibetan plateau, situated at some 15,000 feet (4500 metres), sur...

Did they really do that? Some of the greatest feats o...

The other day I received an e-mail offering me a copy of Brand’s H...

The Mutiny on the Bounty William Bligh (1754-1815) wi...

An interview with Angus Robb as part of our Books not Border series, wherein we're bre...

The great natural history museum collections have at their foundation, specimens collected by 1...

The sound of leather (ball) against willow (bat) can once again be heard throughout the English...

Birds sat on tables poised at every angle their feathers clouded with motes of dust, p...

Dr Philip Mansel's top picks at Shapero Rare Books

Lines in the Ice: Marginalia My recent talk at Shapero Rare Books gave me the opportun...

On 28 April 1789, disaffected crewmen took control of the HMS Bounty and cast the captain, Capt...

The discovery of John Franklin's HMS Terror at the bottom of an Arctic bay this September co...

Today we are all too aware of the appalling damage inflicted by ISIS on the ancient sites of Ir...

The extraordinary success of a megalomaniac, an uncharted world, and a team of savant explorers

The explorer Sir Richard Burton, after the painting by Lord Leighton.   Frequentl...

Ernest Shackleton, born in County Kildare, Ireland, in 1874, was for many years the forgotten m...

Civil servant, naval secretary, developer, publicist, settler, author and all-round-adventurer ...

During late November we  journey across the high seas to China in Print, Hong Kong’s lead...

From a workhouse in Wales to establishing one of the ...

The industrial revolution in the United Kingdom spawned a host of great British explo...

In the second of our series on great collectors of rare books, we investigate William ...

In the first of our series on great collectors of rare books, we introduce William Beckford.  ...

Ideas, Ideas, Ideas. So many of them around, not always that great, but we are just putting the...

One of the greatest legends associated with Africa concerned the source or sources of the River...