Найти книгу: "The Ambassadors"

First published in 1903 in serial form, Henry James’ “The Ambassadors” is the story of the middle-aged and naive Lewis Lambert Strether, who travels to Europe at the behest of his widowed fiancee to find her supposedly wayward son, Chad Newsome. Mrs. Newsome fears he has fallen under the spell of a sinful woman and Strether must rescue him. With the intent of bringing Chad back to America and to his post at the family business, Strether encounters many unexpected complications along the way and finds that the situation may not be as his fiancee has imagined. Strether finds himself seduced by the beauty of Europe, the more casual and open relationships of the Europeans he encounters, and the relaxed social mores. Strether is so seduced that he considers never returning to his home and begins to fall in love with another woman. Eventually, Strether comes to his senses and realizes that Europe may not be the paradise he has convinced himself it to be. Strether returns to America as a changed man, less rigid, wiser, and more thoughtful. Hailed as one of James’s finest novel and his own personal favorite, “The Ambassadors” is the perfect blending of the old world with the new. This edition includes a biographical afterword.

An authoritative and entertaining account of the earliest ambassadors, who were at once diplomats, explorers and chroniclers of exotic civilisations.In this book of extraordinary journeys and epochal encounters, Jonathan Wright traces the ambassadors’ story from Ancient Greece and Ashoka’s empire in India to the European Enlightenment and the birth of the nation state. He shows us Byzantine envoys dining with Attila the Hun, 13th-century monks journeying from Flanders to the Asian steppe, and Tudor ambassadors grappling with the chaos of Reformation. He examines the rituals and institutions of diplomacy, asking – for instance – why it was felt necessary to send an elephant from Baghdad to Aachen in 801 A.D. And he explores diplomacy’s dangers, showing us terrified, besieged ambassadors surviving on horsemeat and champagne in 1900s Beijing.Wherever they journeyed, ambassadors reported back on everything they encountered – from moralities and myths to the plants and animals, fashions and foods of the countries in which they found themselves. Exchanging ideas and commodities, they enabled countries and civilisations to get acquainted in sometimes unpredictable ways.Whether discussing the replacement of the roving by the resident ambassador or the subjects of the diplomatic immunity, gift-giving, intelligence-gathering and extraterritoriality, the author has fresh and intriguing things to say. For ambassadors, as much as any conqueror, merchant or explorer, have helped to write the human story.