How much has yoga changed over the past 2,000 years? What comes from where? This book is an engaging and authoritative guide to the shifts in priorities that shaped new techniques over the centuries, making yoga more appealing to contemporary practitioners. Drawing on the latest research, it examines key trends, influential teachers, issues of authenticity, concerns about cultural appropriation, and questions of ownership. The overall aim is to explore how innovation relates to tradition.

Subtitled “A Comprehensive Guide to Yoga’s History, Texts, Philosophy, and Practices,” this book presents an overview of yoga’s development from its earliest origins to what it is today. Structured in concise and accessible chapters, it outlines key themes that have influenced practices over the centuries, while also dispelling common misconceptions. The Truth of Yoga combines ancient wisdom with the latest research, highlighting ways to keep traditions alive in the twenty-first century.

Once upon a time, I was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times. Disillusioned by the paper’s support for starting wars, I resigned to start a Balkan “summer of love”. Needless to say, that didn’t go to plan. A tragi-comic caper ensued, as this memoir records. It probably didn’t help to do business with gangsters, but it seemed to make sense at the time. In the process, I learned how not to change the world, and why being enlightened isn’t the same as getting high…