Tim Smith-Laing Boeken

A guide to Scotland's gin scene - the history, the distillers and their gins.

"Tim Robinson’s Stones of Aran is one of the most striking and original literary undertakings of our time. Robinson’s ambition is to find out both what it is to know a landscape, know it as extensively and intimately as possible, and what it takes to make that knowledge, the sense of the landscape itself, come alive in writing. It is a project that draws on the legacies of Thoreau and Joyce, to which Robinson brings his own polymathic gifts as cartographer, mathematician, historian, and, above all, shaper of words. In Pilgrimage Robinson walked the entire coast of Airann, largest of the Aran islands. In Labyrinth he turns in to the island’s interior. These two books—parts of an inseparable whole that can, for all that, be read quite separately from each other—constitute a vast polyphonic composition, at once encyclopedic and lyrical, scientific and surprisingly personal. Exploring the illimitable complexity and bounty contained in the seemingly limited confines of a single island, Robinson invites us to look without and within and to see the wonder of the world." Back cover comments.

Butler's 1990 work shook the foundations of feminist theory and changed the conversation about gender. While many thinkers already accepted that gender was a category constructed by society defined by one's genitalia, Butler went further and argued that gender is performative-it exists only in the acts that express it.

Jacques Derrida's Structure, Sign, and Play is one of the most controversial and influential philosophical texts of the 20th century. Delivered at a conference on structuralism at Johns Hopkins, the lecture took aim at the critical and philosophical fashions of the time and radically proposing a world in which meaning cannot be pinned down or traced to an origin, but instead is continuously shifting, fleeting, and open to play. Hailed by many as a watershed in philosophy and literary theory, Derrida's lecture has shaped both disciplines. At once dense, brilliant, and humorous, it is a crucial read for anyone interested in questioning our natural assumptions about meaning in the world.

Deals with the people, places and history of south Connemara - one of Ireland's last Gaelic-speaking enclaves - with the encyclopaedic knowledge of a cartographer and the grace of a born writer.

Long recognised as perhaps the greatest non-fiction writer at work in Ireland for his vast, polymathic accounts of nature and culture in the Aran Islands and Connermara, Tim Robinson is also an essayist of genius whose fascinations range across the globe. In 'Experiments on Reality', he shines the light on his own life, and on some of the most fascinating questions in science and culture

A guide to Yorkshire's gin scene - the history, the distillers and their gins.

As recently as the 1920s, the lack of great female writers was often considered evidence of women's inferiority. Virginia Woolf disagreed. Her 1929 essay argues that creativity is impossible without privacy and freedom from financial worries, and throughout history, women have had neither therefore, no tradition of great female writing existed.

Woolf's focus on the everyday suppression of women was a turning point in feminism, marking a realization that gaining legal and voting rights was just the first step on the road to true equality. Everyday life had to be altered, too. Woolf's essay remains deeply relevant, providing a framework for analysis of any group suffering injustice.

From the remote Kingdom of Bhutan, a memoir about running, teaching, and what really matters.