Product Description: As you set out for Ithaka Hope your road is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery… ' Constantine P. Cavafy By the time he was six, John Freely had crossed the Atlantic four times. His childhood was spent on the mean streets of 1930s Brooklyn, where he scavenged for junk to sell and borrowed money for books; his first love being Homer's Odyssey...read more

Product Description: Sinan was the greatest architect of the Ottoman Golden Age of the sixteenth century when the Ottoman Empire reached its zenith of power and magnificence. His style marks the apogee of Turkish art. Under Suleyman the Magnificent and his succcessor Selmi II, Sinan designed hundreds of buildings: mosques, palaces, tombs, mausolea, hospitals, schools, caravanserai, bridges, aqueducts and baths, many of them presented and analysed in this book...read more

Long before the European Renaissance, while the Western world was languishing in what was once called the “Dark Ages,” the Arab world was ablaze with the knowledge, invention, and creativity of its Golden Age. Through the astrologers, physicians, philosophers, mathematicians, and alchemists of the Muslim world, this knowledge was carried from Samarkand and Baghdad to Cordoba and beyond, influencing Western thinkers from Thomas Aquinas to Copernicus and helping to inspire the cultural phenomenon of the Renaissance. John Freely’s spellbinding story is set against a background of the melting pot of the cultures involved and concludes with the decline of Islam’s Golden Age, which led the West to forget the debt it owed to the Muslim world and the influence of medieval Islamic civilization in forging the beginnings of modern science.

Histories of modern science often begin with the heroic battle between Galileo and the Catholic Church, which ignited the Scientific Revolution and led to the world-changing discoveries of Isaac Newton. Virtually nothing is said about the European scholars who came before. In reality, more than a millennium before the Renaissance, a succession of scholars paved the way for the discoveries for which Galileo, Newton, and others are often credited. In Before Galileo, John Freely examines the pioneering research of the first European scientists, many of them monks whose influence ranged far beyond the walls of the monasteries where they studied and wrote. One of the earliest of them, Saint Bede, writing a thousand years before Galileo, was so renowned that two centuries after his death a Swiss monk wrote that "in the sixth day of the world [God] has made Bede rise from the West as a new Sun to illuminate the whole Earth."Before Galileo trenchently fills a notable gap in the history of science, and places the great discoveries of the age in their rightful context.

Product Description: Miletus: one of the wealthiest and most important towns in ancient Greece. It was here, on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, in the 6th century BC, that the great traditions of Greek science and philosophy sparked into life, setting in motion a chain of knowledge that would change the world, forever...read more

Product Description: The once magnificent, now ruined, cities that cluster along the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts of Turkey are reminders of a civilization that produced the first Hellenic enlightenment, giving birth to Homer, Herodotus, and the first philosophers of nature...read more

Product Description: Turkey boasts a legacy of extraordinary richness and magnificence. From the dawn of civilization, Anatolia spawned great empires of her own -- Hittite, Phrygian and Lydian -- and then felt the mark of Persia, Greece and Rome. The story of the country is one of migration and conquest, artistic and spiritual splendor, and cities and gods trampled underfoot...read more

Product Description: Storm on Horseback is both a dramatic history and, uniquely, a traveller’s guide to the extraordinary heritage of the Seljuks in Turkey.Who are the Turks and where did they come from? The successive empires that they created in a whirlwind of conquests from China to North Africa led one chronicler to call the waves of mounted Turkic warriors a ""storm on horseback...read more

Product Description: Now he follows it with a guide to the fascinating sites of the Mediterranean coast and central Anatolia, many of which are still unexplored, and to whose civilisations he is an admirable guide. John Freely's knowledge of Turkey is encyclopaedic, and he is renowned for his interpretation of Turkish life, culture and history through the great monuments of the country's Byzantine, Ottoman and earlier past...read more