The author of Oblomov spent the years 1852-1854 as secretary to Admiral Putyatin on board the Pallada; they sailed to Java, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Shanghai, the Philippines and Korea. ... 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
There are those who swear he was a spy, others who insist he was too scatty or essentially lazy to be one. Whatever the truth, he was an exceptional linguist (Iranian, Afghan Persian, Arabic... read more
Louis-Antoine de Bougainville and Pierre Magnol to Sir David Attenborough, via Lady Gaga... The author is, amongst other roles, the president of the Linnaean Society.
Is it to exalt the mountain or the climber that the mountain should be climbed? Or to gain a good vantage point for telling things, pace James Baldwin?
In 1930 a (very) young British explorer led a small team to explore the eastern coast of Greenland - an unknown expanse, mysterious even to the Inuits.
The story of the first contact between the Haida and other indigenous peoples of the Pacific North West with Europeans - and what came after. Told very powerfully in a graphic form that comb... read more
How the daughter of Babur, first Mughal Emperor, wrangled her way out of the harem (for a while) to travel around India, to Persia and beyond. Based on her own account.
Its second subtitle is "an adventurous history of botany". JG is a scientist and an historian of exploration (his "The Rattlesnake: A Voyage of Discovery to the Coral Sea" was excellent).
A revisionist account by the distinguished historian, which argues that Magellan was less of a hero and more of a treacherous, irresponsible, tyrannical adventurer.
A brilliant narrative of the interconnected lives of two Renaissance Portuguese men whose travels to India and China unseated contemporary certainties. Dazzling.
Thorogood's version of 'up hill and down dale' takes him over cliffs and up volcanoes - all in the pursuit of pitcher plants, irises, orchids... Illustrated by the author.
The Endurance was found in March of this year. Mensun Bound, a leading marine archaeologist, was the Director of Explorations of the two expeditions that set out to find it in 2019 and 2022.... read more
The first biography of the extraordinary writer who died in 2020. An officer in the 9th Lancers, Morris was posted to Trieste in 1945. He was the only journalist to accompany the 1953 Britis... read more
Fritz D?rries was a German entomologist who first travelled to Siberia as a young man in 1877. He went on to spend a total of twenty-two years there, encountering tigers, bandits, vipers and... read more