7 Books Like The End of the Morning

It's long been assumed that in the 19th century most women (other than domestic servants) stayed home, limited to being wives and mothers. Catherine Bishop's marvellously researched book completely changes our understanding. Through extensive cross-checking of different kinds of records (such as trade directories, newspapers, and personal accounts) Bishop has given us a startling, fact-based picture of colonial Sydney. Suddenly we see the numerous women running boarding houses, taverns, shops, and various kinds of schools, even owning property. They may have been largely excluded from politics and professions, and subject to coverture, but they were astute and active participants in the public, commercial world -- not the 'angel in the house' of earlier misleading representations.

It's well known that in the 20th century Australia reoriented its dependence on a large northern hemisphere power from Britain to America. The shift in military and security cooperation has been central. Undisputed but harder to pin down has been the cultural realignment. Yves Rees gives us a new, historically rich account of how this reorientation has happened. Based on exhaustive research on a large cohort of Australian women who travelled to the United States between 1910 and 1960 for educational, professional and career reasons, Rees shapes the book around detailed stories of ten women. The ten were all achievers, but across fields ranging from a modernist artist, to a musician, a decorator, a swimmer and an economist. What they had in common was finding opportunity in the modern world of which the United States was the acme. They were drawn to it for its size, fast pace of life,… show more.

This is the daddy of travel books about Greece, penned by a Greek from western Turkey who toured the sights during the pax Romana (2nd century AD).

Catching ancient Greece before it fell into ruin, he enthusiastically wrote up the buildings and artworks and the local history of places both famous and obscure. My own copy, decidedly battered, has been a companion of my academic career since my twenties.

You can still follow Pausanias on certain archaeological sites, like Delphi or Olympia. On others it’s fascinating, after visiting them, to turn to this ancient guide to read how he described the same places when they were intact.

Peter Levi’s translation is highly readable and well equipped, but not overladen, with footnotes.  

This book is a gem for lovers of Greece and of superlative English prose.

For me the book is far and away the best evocation of a wild and remote part of Greece that I got to know and treasure when tramping through its olive fields in search of ancient inscriptions. Leigh Fermor was incapable of writing a dull sentence.

His imagination allied with what he observed himself in his wanderings combine to bring out all the strangeness of Mani’s history of brigands and vendettas, of villages bristling with defensive towers and of fishermen descended—perhaps—from Byzantine emperors.   

This book brings back to life the pioneering British archaeologists who, basing themselves at the atmospheric Villa Ariadne, rediscovered the prehistoric civilisation of the Minoans at Knossos on the island of Crete.

I love this book because it brings back memories of when I excavated at Knossos—the local workmen lowered an apprehensive me into an ancient well to measure its depth and I stayed next door to the Villa, taking walks in the surrounding countryside carpeted with wildflowers.

The Villa was purloined by the Germans in World War II. The book also taught me about the bravery of the Cretan resistance to the Nazis, including the dramatic kidnap of a German general on the Villa’s doorstep. 

Clift creates a sympathetic and highly informative picture of the islanders of Kalymnos in Greece’s Dodecanese.

She lived here with her family in the 1950s, when the island’s males made their dangerous living from diving for sponges. Clift brilliantly captures the suspended animation of the families left behind by the diving fleet, loved ones who could only hope that fathers and sons would return alive and intact.

I’m familiar with today’s Kalymnos, its port choc-a-bloc with tourist boats. It’s salutary to be reminded of the hardships of traditional island life and how modern tourism can be a benefit, not a blight.

This is a dreamer’s book—notes about life, literature, and the universe written by the author after accepting on the spur of the moment a Greek friend’s invitation to go island-hopping in a little sailing boat.

I like it not just because I knew the author’s late daughter and treasure his affectionate references to her, but also for its erudite musings and reflections. They remind me of how, even from the deck of one of today’s decidedly unromantic ferries, the glinting sea and island silhouettes induce a state of semi-trance or reverie, pushing your thoughts into overdrive.

The author was a heavyweight figure on Greece’s literary scene, but this little book is charming, short, and accessible.