Finally a new edition of this splendid book, which sheds light on the decadent, complex history of this venerable road. Within years of Wilde praising its 'wonderful possibilities', and Whis... read more
Lucy Atkinson (1817-1893) was an English Atkinson was an English nanny working in Russia. In 1848 she set out with her new husband on a six-year exploration of Siberia and Central Asia, by f... read more
The story of three friendships made when the author lived in Herat in the 1970s; after the Communist coup, Russian occupation and civil war, she was able to pick up the threads of those frie... read more
A traditional rock climber for a decade or more, Fleming describes the dance between the self and the rock and its electrifying charge. It's also, for her, the ultimate way to connect with n... read more
Forster is always undoing, and no less so in this account of the remote princely court of Dewas in Madhya Pradesh, where he visited and worked as private secretary to the Maharajah in the ea... read more
Marzahn is a suburb of prefab GDR housing on the outskirts of Berlin. This odd but brilliant book, about a chiropodist who talks to her clients, is both memoir and portrait of modern Germany... read more
Rejmer has collected personal accounts of survival in one of the most isolated countries on earth, under the brutally oppressive regime of Enver Hoxha. Touching, engrossing, harrowing...
Begins with a Perec epigraph: "De l'autobus, je regarde Paris" - and Elkin does, in a diary of vignettes about the 'infra-ordinary' (Perec again): fellow commuters, a diversion, a girl with ... read more
Despite often possessing cameras, grand tourists persisted in using watercolours. This fascinating, wide-ranging illustrated book explores attitudes towards the picturesque, Empire, the Orie... read more
From the collection of an Italian banker whose work financed infrastructure such as railways, mines, electric power stations and shipping companies in the Near East.
Breathtaking shots from the Himalayas to the Dolomites, via Africa, Patagonia, Alaska... with suitably lofty quotations (Dante, Byron, Austen, Nietzsche et al) alongside them.
Davdison's feel for dusk first came our way with his wonderfully evocative book The Last of the Light: About Twilight. Here he produces a series of nocturnes about cities at night-fall, wint... read more
A journey to find hope - or rather Hope: Fiennes's map for his wanderings are the myths, and then the myths come to infuse what he finds in Arcadia, the Peloponnese and beyond. The river Lou... read more
There was a bit of a gap between Anthony and Cleopatra's Nile cruises and the C19th heyday of purpose-built, shallow-bottomed paddle-wheelers. This book is about the latter - delicious trave... read more
The Dutch historian and journalist on the first two decades of the C21st and the forces that have rocked the European project. How could the dream of unity, peace, prosperity and co-operatio... read more
That venerable and dedicated historian of ancient India travelled half a century ago to northern and north-western China to work at the cave sites of Maijishan and Dunhuang; based on her dia... read more
Some may have supposed that Thubron had done his last Big Journey, but this is arguably his biggest yet, and most arduous. Indomitable, venerable, he follows this immense river from its sour... read more
Artisan trades of Paris - a ribbon maker, the boiseries of Feau et Cie, pastel crayons still rolled as they were in the time of Degas, etc., presented by a designer, artist and shopkeeper. M... read more
Tesson practised living in extreme cold on the shores of Lake Baikal a few years ago, memorably and entrancingly recounted in Consolations of the Forest. Here he has renounced both solitude ... read more
New edition of these wonderful, open-eyed letters by the wife of the British ambassador to the Sublime Porte; fascinating glimpses of the world of Ottoman women, not least their practice of ... read more
In this new book Sinclair has abandoned London for Peru, in an attempt to understand his great-grandfather's colonial career. The narrative Sinclair grew up with ends up as self-serving flot... read more
By the author of 'The Moor's Last Stand', a biography of Boabdil, whose sigh, looking back at the beautiful Granada he had fled, still resonates. Illustrated.
A book of photographs by an Iranian-Australian photographer documenting the islands in the Strait of Hormuz in southern Iran, their eerie, wind-carved landscapes and their wind-haunted inhab... read more
A cultural history of ice and icy places, written between Northern Greenland and the Bodleian Library, in the Alps and at the Kinross Curling Club. NC, a poet, deftly blends memoir, literary... read more
A cultural history of ice and icy places, written between Northern Greenland and the Bodleian Library, in the Alps and at the Kinross Curling Club. NC, a poet, deftly blends memoir, literary... read more
The fiendish young man, having driven poor Verlaine out of his wits and his marriage, abandoned poetry, then Europe, setting in Aden in 1880. A reprint from Eland.
A thousand-mile walk that took Martineau from Accra to Ouidah: a spell-binding account of a young man's journey into the world around him as well as himself. Remarkable meetings open doors t... read more
Nick Hunt has previously walked in the footsteps of Paddy Leigh Fermor, and in search of Europe's great winds. His latest takes him - and us - to the remote and extreme: vestiges of ancient ... read more