Canongate Classics

Written on the brink of World War II, Rebecca West's classic examination of the history, people, and politics of Yugoslavia illuminates a region that is still a focus of international concern. A magnificent blend of travel journal, cultural commentary, and historical insight, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon probes the troubled history of the Balkans, and the uneasy relationships amongst its ethnic groups. The landscape and the people of Yugoslavia are brilliantly observed as West untangles the tensions that rule the country's history as well as its daily life.

Set over two thousand years ago on the clam and fertile shores of the Black Sea, The Corn King and the Spring Queen tells of ancient civilisations where tenderness, beauty and love vie with brutality and dark magic.

"The poetry of the Makars marked an extraordinary flowering of Scottish culture and the Scots language in the 15th and early 16th centuries. This anthology, introduced, edited and annotated by J. A. Tasioulas, makes available for the modern reader the complete poems of both Henryson and Dunbar, as well as Gavin Douglas's The Palis of Honoure. Old Scots words are glossed and medieval and classical references are explained to make this the most approachable collection of major poems in a period which forged a nation's cultural and political sense of itself, from the moral subtlety of Henryson, to the wild flytings of Dunbar, to the democratic humanism of Gavin Douglas."--BOOK JACKET.

Lanark, a modern vision of hell set in the disintegrating cities of Unthank and Glasgow, tells the interwoven stories of Lanark and Duncan Thaw. A work of extraordinary, playful imagination, it conveys a profound message, both personal and political, about humankind's inability to love, and yet our compulsion is to go on trying. First published in 1981, Lanark immediately established Gray as one of Britain's leading writers, compared with - among others - Dante, Blake, Joyce, Orwell, Kafka, Huxley and Lewis Carroll. This new edition includes an introduction by William Boyd as well as the author's fascinating addendum, the 'Tailpiece' (2001).

A son examines his father's participation in the Vichy government during World War II, and arrives at some surprising discoveries. Examines the nature of loyalties in private life, loyalty to one's family, one's heritage and one' s country, as well as the nature of betrayal.