Download or read book Murder in Samarkand written by Craig Murray and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-05-24 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Craig Murray arrived in Uzbekistan to take up his post in 2002, he was a young ambassador with a brilliant career and a taste for whisky and women. But after hearing accounts of dissident prisoners being boiled to death and innocent people being raped and murdered by agents of the state, he started to question both his role and that of his country in so-called 'democratising' states. Following his discovery that the British government was accepting information obtained under torture, Murray could no longer maintain a diplomatic silence. When he voiced his outrage, Washington and 10 Downing Street decided he had to go. But Uzbekistan had changed the high-living diplomat and there was no way he was going to go quietly. In this candid and at times shocking memoir, Murray lays bare the dark and dirty underside of the War on Terror.
Download or read book The Amulet of Samarkand written by Jonathan Stroud and published by Turtleback Books. This book was released on 2004-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humiliated in front of everyone by hotshot wizard Simon Lovelace, Nathaniel seeks revenge by summoning the all-powerful djinni, Bartimaeus. Attempting to steal the Amulet of Samarkand, Nathaniel finds himself in a whirlwind of magical espionage, murd
Download or read book Murder in Samarkand written by Craig J. Murray and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2007-04-03 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Craig Murray's tale of his Ambassadorship to Tashkent became an instant bestseller and is now a classic in several genres. Murray lifts the lid on the British Foreign Office and gives a detailed and fascinating account of the life and work of an Ambassador. But he also thoroughly exposes the lies behind the Blair administration's "War on Terror" and the ruthlessness of its operations. This is vital primary source material for the "extraordinary rendition" policy. But it is still more than that. This is a most detailed travel story and insight into Central Asian society. It is a narration of quite horrifying individual events. And it is the warts and all story of one man's crisis as everything he has believed in crumbles about him. Murray makes no attempt to hide his own imperfections, which adds to the emotional impact of this quite extraordinary book.
Download or read book Murder in Samarkand written by Craig Murray and published by . This book was released on 2007-05-04 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Craig Murray's tale of his Ambassadorship to Tashkent became an instant bestseller and is now a classic in several genres.Murray lifts the lid on the British Foreign Office and gives a detailed and fascinating account of the life and work of an Ambassador. But he also thoroughly exposes the lies behind the Blair administration's "War on Terror" and the ruthlessness of its operations. This is vital primary source material for the "extraordinary rendition" policy.But it is still more than that. This is a most detailed travel story and insight into Central Asian society. It is a narration of quite horrifying individual events. And it is the warts and all story of one man's crisis as everything he has believed in crumbles about him. Murray makes no attempt to hide his own imperfections, which adds to the emotional impact of this quite extraordinary book.
Download or read book The Amulet of Samarkand written by Jonathan Stroud and published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2011-12-13 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Be careful what you wish for. Nathaniel is a magician's apprentice, taking his first lessons in the arts of magic. But when a devious hot-shot wizard named Simon Lovelace ruthlessly humiliates Nathaniel in front of his elders, Nathaniel decides to kick up his education a few notches and show Lovelace who's boss. With revenge on his mind, he summons the powerful djinni, Bartimaeus. But summoning Bartimaeus and controlling him are two different things entirely, and when Nathaniel sends the djinni out to steal Lovelace's greatest treasure, the Amulet of Samarkand, he finds himself caught up in a whirlwind of magical espionage, murder, and rebellion.
Download or read book Dirty Diplomacy written by Craig Murray and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-05-31 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With all the pace and drama of a political thriller, Dirty Diplomacy is a riveting account of a young, fast-living ambassador's battle against a ruthless dictatorship in Central Asia and the craven political expediency in Washington and London that eventually cost him his job. Craig Murray is no ordinary diplomat. He enjoys a drink or three, and if it's in the company of a pretty girl, so much the better. Murray's scant regard for the rules of the game also extends to his job. When, in the first few weeks of his posting to the little-known Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan, he comes across photographs of a political dissident who has literally been boiled to death, he ignores diplomatic nicety and calls it for what it is: torture of the cruelest sort. Murray soon discovers that this is no one-off incident: fierce abuse of those opposing the government is rife. It's not long before he is tearing around the country in his embassy Land Rover, shaking off Uzbek police tails and crashing through roadblocks to meet with dissidents and expose their persecutors. He even confronts the despotic president, Islom Karimov, face-to-face. But Murray's bosses in London's Foreign Office, ever mindful of their senior partners in Washington, don't want to upset the applecart. Karimov is an ally in the newly announced Global War on Terror. His country is host to a big American air base. The last thing they need is a battling young diplomat stirring things up. In Craig Murray, that's exactly what they've got...
Download or read book Sikunder Burnes written by Craig Murray and published by Birlinn Ltd. This book was released on 2016-10-20 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an astonishing true tale of espionage, journeys in disguise, secret messages, double agents, assassinations and sexual intrigue. Alexander Burnes was one of the most accomplished spies Britain ever produced and the main antagonist of the Great Game as Britain strove with Russia for control of Central Asia and the routes to the Raj. There are many lessons for the present day in this tale of the folly of invading Afghanistan and Anglo-Russian tensions in the Caucasus. Murray's meticulous study has unearthed original manuscripts from Montrose to Mumbai to put together a detailed study of how British secret agents operated in India. The story of Burnes' life has a cast of extraordinary figures, including Queen Victoria, King William IV, Earl Grey, Benjamin Disraeli, Lola Montez, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx. Among the unexpected discoveries are that Alexander and his brother James invented the myths about the Knights Templars and Scottish Freemasons which are the foundation of the Da Vinci Code; and that the most famous nineteenth-century scholar of Afghanistan was a double agent for Russia.
Download or read book Samarkand 2 written by Hillel Zaltzman and published by . This book was released on 2019-03-14 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The End of the Party written by Andrew Rawnsley and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2010-09-30 with total page 908 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Andrew Rawnsley's bestselling book lifts the lid on the second half of New Labour's spell in office, with riveting inside accounts of all the key events from 9/11 and the Iraq War to the financial crisis and the parliamentary expenses scandal; and entertaining portraits of the main players as Rawnsley takes us through the triumphs and tribulations of New Labour as well as the astonishing feuds and reconciliations between Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson. This paperback edition contains two revealing new chapters on the extraordinary events surrounding the 2010 General Election and its aftermath.
Download or read book Iphigenia in Forest Hills written by Janet Malcolm and published by . This book was released on 2012-11-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Malcolm's riveting new book tells the story of a murder trial in the insular Bukharan-Jewish community of Forest Hills, Queens, that captured national attention.
Download or read book The Catholic Orangemen of Togo written by Craig J. Murray and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2009-01-12 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this prequel to the bestselling Murder in Samarkand, Craig Murray describes how he discovered the dark heart at the centre of Tony Blair's shiny New Labour administration shortly after its beginning, when Murray was the key witness in the Arms to Africa Affair which rocked the British political establishment. Murray makes a strong case against "liberal intervention" as he describes the use of mercenaries to obtain African mineral resources for Western financial interests. In so doing, Murray takes us on a journey into some of the darkest recesses of colonial history in Africa. As ever with Murray the story is laced with personal anecdotes, sometimes hilarious, sometimes terrifying, and sometimes both.
Download or read book Zionism Is Bullshit written by Kirsten E. Macdonald, Ph. D. and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-06-23 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within the space of a single year, Craig Murray went from being a British Ambassador to describing his occupation as a professional dissident. Tony Blair's premiership was an extraordinary time. It represented the abandonment by the official party of the "left" in the UK to the ideology of neo-liberalism. It also represented a complete commitment to aggressive foreign policy. Tony Blair engaged in more wars than any other British Prime Minister since the heyday of the Empire. This was accompanied by the "War on Terror," a period where the media whipped up fears of terrorist attack and government passed an entire series of measures limiting civil liberties. There was a real sense that society was changing permanently to accept a more authoritarian form of government. Craig Murray was a most improbable focus of resistance to this change. An old fashioned character still given to wearing three piece suits, he regarded himself more as a liberal than a socialist. His political gestures were sometimes Quixotic, for example in standing as an independent candidate against Jack Straw in his Blackburn constituency in the 2005 general election. But a combination of his patent honesty, muscular logic and fluent writing style gradually found its audience. On Murray's part, we could discern a series of influences that were pushing him ineluctably to the left. Firstly, his anti war instincts drove him into the orbit of the Stop the War campaign. Many of his speeches in this period were given alongside Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn. Secondly, his concern for freedom of information left him exasperated with attempts to censor his memoir, Murder in Samarkand. He saw himself as a whistleblower and began contact with Wikileaks. Thirdly, his experience of the persecution of Muslims in Uzbekistan led him to compare that with the impact of the anti-terror legislation on Muslim communities in the UK. Finally, he was horrified by the growth of wealth inequality in the UK and end of state provision of many services, and particularly at the introduction of university tuition fees. While not a major political figure, he is an interesting and a prescient one and can be seen as a precursor to the current age of insurgency politics.
Download or read book Seduction written by Jean Baudrillard and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 1991-01-15 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines modern critical theory, feminism, and psychoanalysis, and discusses the modern concept of sex roles and the political aspect of human sexuality.
Download or read book The Possessed written by Elif Batuman and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2010-02-16 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year THE TRUE BUT UNLIKELY STORIES OF LIVES DEVOTED—ABSURDLY! MELANCHOLICALLY! BEAUTIFULLY!—TO THE RUSSIAN CLASSICS No one who read Elif Batuman's first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. "Babel in California" told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. Over the course of several pages, Batuman managed to misplace Babel's last living relatives at the San Francisco airport, uncover Babel's secret influence on the making of King Kong, and introduce her readers to a new voice that was unpredictable, comic, humane, ironic, charming, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously full of love for literature. Batuman's subsequent pieces—for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the London Review of Books— have made her one of the most sought-after and admired writers of her generation, and its best traveling companion. In The Possessed we watch her investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy's ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin's wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their place in The Possessed. Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence—including her own.
Download or read book The Golden House of Samarkand written by Hugo Pratt and published by EuroComics. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in the years 1921-22, the action leaps from Turkey, to Azerbaijan, and to the Caspian Sea, tracing the path of the legendary Silk Road, as Corto hunts for the fabled treasure of Alexander the Great.
Download or read book Joseph Anton written by Salman Rushdie and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-09-18 with total page 670 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY San Francisco Chronicle • Newsweek/The Daily Beast • The Seattle Times • The Economist • Kansas City Star • BookPage On February 14, 1989, Valentine’s Day, Salman Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC journalist and told that he had been “sentenced to death” by the Ayatollah Khomeini. For the first time he heard the word fatwa. His crime? To have written a novel called The Satanic Verses, which was accused of being “against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran.” So begins the extraordinary story of how a writer was forced underground, moving from house to house, with the constant presence of an armed police protection team. He was asked to choose an alias that the police could call him by. He thought of writers he loved and combinations of their names; then it came to him: Conrad and Chekhov—Joseph Anton. How do a writer and his family live with the threat of murder for more than nine years? How does he go on working? How does he fall in and out of love? How does despair shape his thoughts and actions, how and why does he stumble, how does he learn to fight back? In this remarkable memoir Rushdie tells that story for the first time; the story of one of the crucial battles, in our time, for freedom of speech. He talks about the sometimes grim, sometimes comic realities of living with armed policemen, and of the close bonds he formed with his protectors; of his struggle for support and understanding from governments, intelligence chiefs, publishers, journalists, and fellow writers; and of how he regained his freedom. It is a book of exceptional frankness and honesty, compelling, provocative, moving, and of vital importance. Because what happened to Salman Rushdie was the first act of a drama that is still unfolding somewhere in the world every day. Praise for Joseph Anton “A harrowing, deeply felt and revealing document: an autobiographical mirror of the big, philosophical preoccupations that have animated Mr. Rushdie’s work throughout his career.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “A splendid book, the finest . . . memoir to cross my desk in many a year.”—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post “Thoughtful and astute . . . an important book.”—USA Today “Compelling, affecting . . . demonstrates Mr. Rushdie’s ability as a stylist and storytelle. . . . [He] reacted with great bravery and even heroism.”—The Wall Street Journal “Gripping, moving and entertaining . . . nothing like it has ever been written.”—The Independent (UK) “A thriller, an epic, a political essay, a love story, an ode to liberty.”—Le Point (France) “Action-packed . . . in a literary class by itself . . . Like Isherwood, Rushdie’s eye is a camera lens —firmly placed in one perspective and never out of focus.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “Unflinchingly honest . . . an engrossing, exciting, revealing and often shocking book.”—de Volkskrant (The Netherlands) “One of the best memoirs you may ever read.”—DNA (India) “Extraordinary . . . Joseph Anton beautifully modulates between . . . moments of accidental hilarity, and the higher purpose Rushdie saw in opposing—at all costs—any curtailment on a writer’s freedom.”—The Boston Globe
Download or read book The Anubis Murders written by Gary Gygax and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Someone is murdering the worlds most powerful sorcerers, and the trail of blood leads straight to the god Anubis. Can Magister Setne Inhetep, personal philosopher-wizard to the Pharaoh, reach the distant kingdom of Avillonia and put an end to the Anubis murders, or will he become the next victim?
