MICHAEL PALIN New Europe SIGNED HB DJ Monty Python 2007

A rare opportunity to acquire a SIGNED HARDBACK copy of New Europe by Michael Palin, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2007, complete with UNPRICECLIPPED dust jacket.

Michael Palin has SIGNED it, along with a dedication (see photo).

The book is in VERY GOOD / NEAR FINE condition.

The photographs are by Basil Pao.

The dust jacket (un-price clipped) is in GOOD condition, albeit with a few feint scratches and half a dozen tiny indentations to the front cover, but which have not made any impression on the book itself.

In undertaking his new journey through Eastern Europe, breathing in its rich history, filming its exquisite sights and talking to its diverse peoples, Michael fills what has been a void in his own experience and that of very many of his own generation. As in all his series, Palin's New Europe takes the form of a journey through countries which have rich and complex cultures. Few have survived intact, as the ebb and flow of warring armies has continually changed the map of Europe. Starting in the mountains of Sovenia he travels down through Croatia and the former Yugoslavia to Albania before turning northwards to embrace Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, The Ukraine,The Czech Republic, Slovakia, the former East Germany, Poland, the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad (as Konigsberg originally home to the Teutonic Knights), Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, opening up a new and undiscovered world to millions of viewers and readers.

287 pages, including colour photographs. THIS IS A VERY HEAVY BOOK, AND THE POSTAGE PRICE HAS ALREADY BEEN INCLUDED IN THE TOTAL. 

I have listed other TRAVEL AND EXPLORATION BOOKS on ebay - some of them first edition and some of them signed. Please take a look at my other items.

"Like all my journeys, New Europe was largely the product of an insatiable curiosity. I thought I knew my own continent, but I realised that almost half of it had been closed to me, by politics and ideology, for most of my life. The closer I looked at the eastern half of Europe the more I felt that it had been misrepresented, or even ignored during this time, lumped together in a great blur called Eastern Europe. The predominant colour was grey, the predominant images were of scarcity or conflict. I couldn’t believe that Eastern Europe was as depressed and lifeless as the clichés portrayed it and set out to make a series which would hopefully show the other side of the far side of the continent.

We began filming on May 16th 2006 in the Julian Alps in Slovenia and I delivered my last piece to camera on Rugen Island in the Baltic almost a year later. Our total filming time was just short of six months, approximately the same time it took me to write the book. As soon as we arrived in Slovenia I knew that we were not going to be short of natural beauty and throughout most of the filming the sun shone and revealed eastern Europe as anything but grey. The Danube Delta, the Carpathian Mountains, the Curonian Spit on the Baltic Coast and Cappadocia in Turkey were strikingly beautiful locations. But the main bonus of this journey was the rich variety of people and countries. Since the collapse of the Soviet Empire , a host of new independent states has emerged , all anxious to establish their own identity, parade their own culture and celebrate their own history. The filming and the writing of the book was an intense experience, but an uplifting one, as I learnt so much about my fellow Europeans and came away from it all feeling a cautious but encouraging optimism. As I conclude on camera at the end of the series, there does seem a real hope that Europe could, for the first time in many centuries, be united by co-operation rather than conflict.

We visited twenty countries, twice as many as in Sahara and Himalaya combined, so there was no way that this series seemed tight or constricted. Six one-hour episodes turned into seven but despite that there wasn’t time to do justice to every country we went through. I can only apologise for those that felt hard done by, but everywhere is covered in much more detail in the book and in the DVD.

My account of New Europe is made up as ever from the contents of hand-scribbled note-books which are my most precious travelling companions. For the first time in seven series I lost one of my books, stolen, together with my shoulder bag at Budapest airport. It contained my notes on the Baltic states. But the experiences were so vivid in my memory that I was able to piece most of them together, and with the help of impressions recorded into my personal recorder( as used by Jack Bauer in 24) the damage was not fatal !

I've called eastern Europe New Europe because I had a string sense of vigour and vitality and hope in the countries liberated from years as anonymous pieces of someone else’s empires. They want to speak for themselves and I hope New Europe gives them a voice.

Europe is a much more tangible concept than I thought when I set out. East and west share a heritage and a history going back over centuries. We need to find out more about each other, to learn respect for each other and to do away with the old ideas of Us and Them. The future will be that much more secure if we can all be Us."

About the Author:

Having graduated from Oxford University in 1965 with ambitions to be a writer and performer of comedy, Michael Palin (born Michael Edward Palin in Sheffield on 5 May 1943) made his first television appearance as the rather unlikely sounding host of a regionally-produced pop show for children, Now (Television Wales and West, 1965-66).

Meanwhile, Palin began writing sketch material with Terry Jones (whom he had befriended at university) for various television shows, in addition to working in cabaret with him as a double-act. Their major breakthrough arrived when they were recruited to the writing team of The Frost Report (BBC, 1966-67). Not only was the series itself a huge success, it brought the pair into contact with fellow writers John Cleese (who was also a performer on the show), Graham Chapman and Eric Idle (who they had briefly met at the Edinburgh Festival in 1965).

Although he had begun to appear in sketches on the shows to which he contributed material, Palin's major break as a performer was with the series Do Not Adjust Your Set (ITV, 1967-69). Ostensibly a comedy sketch show for children, but one that quickly gathered an avid adult audience, it featured Palin alongside Jones and Idle (with all three co-writing the series), David Jason and Denise Coffey, with short animation inserts provided by yet another future Python, Terry Gilliam.

Palin and Jones followed this with their own series, The Complete and Utter History of Britain (ITV, 1969), a sketch series with, as the title implies, a history-based theme, although it failed to repeat the success of Do Not Adjust Your Set.

Their next project, however, succeeded on a scale they could not have imagined. Monty Python's Flying Circus (BBC, 1969-74) finally saw Palin and Jones united with Cleese, Chapman, Idle and Gilliam to create what was to become one of British television's most influential series, comedy or otherwise. Launched without any fanfare, the show quickly drew a cult audience for the sheer originality of its humour, turning the writers/performers into arguably the most important and internationally influential comedy team ever to work in television.

Palin followed Monty Python's Flying Circus with his own superbly realised series, Ripping Yarns (BBC, 1976-79). Palin starred in each episode of this anthology series parodying early twentieth century Boys' Own adventure stories, and co-wrote all the stories with Terry Jones. However, despite the success he enjoyed with Ripping Yarns (it won a BAFTA award in 1980 for best light entertainment series) it was the only post-Python comedy television series in which Palin appeared.

He concentrated instead on feature films, co-writing and co-starring in all four Python feature films between 1971 and 1983, and gaining his first solo lead role in Terry Gilliam's Jabberwocky (1977), an uneven fantasy-comedy with a medieval setting, loosely inspired by Lewis Carroll's poem.

Lead roles followed in The Missionary (d. Richard Loncraine, 1981), a period-set story of a refuge for prostitutes in the East End of London which he also wrote and co-produced; A Private Function (d. Malcolm Mowbray, 1984), an Alan Bennett-scripted comedy set in a small rural town in a post-war Britain ruled by austerity and rationing; and American Friends (d. Tristram Powell, 1991), a gentle romantic comedy set within the environs of Oxford University in the 1860s, co-written by Palin and based on the story of his great-grandfather, an Oxford don. He also won a BAFTA award as best supporting actor for his performance in the comedy A Fish Called Wanda (d. Charles Crichton, 1988).

Although he co-starred in the Alan Bleasdale-scripted drama series G.B.H. (C4, 1991), playing a teacher in this story of political corruption, acting, whether in comedy or straight drama, increasingly took a back seat from the late 1980s, as he began to steer his career into new territory.

Since the phenomenal success of the documentary series Around the World in Eighty Days (BBC, 1989), in which he followed the route taken by the fictional Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne's novel, Palin has enjoyed renewed success with a spate of travel documentaries. All written and presented by Palin, they are - to date - Pole to Pole with Michael Palin (BBC, 1992), Full Circle with Michael Palin (BBC, 1997), Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure (BBC, 1999), Sahara with Michael Palin (BBC, 2002) and Himalaya with Michael Palin (BBC, 2004).