First published in 1985, this is a history of the Grand Tour, undertaken by young men in the eighteenth century to complete their education - a tour usually to France, Italy and Switzerland, and sometimes encompassing Germany. Rather than being another popular treatment of the theme, this is a scholarly analysis of the motives, purposes, activities and achievements of those who made the Grand Tour.

The book considers to what extent the Grand Tour did fulfil its theoretical educational function, or whether travellers merely parroted the observations of their guidebooks. It also indicates the importance of the Grand Tour in introducing foreign customs into Britain and extending the cosmopolitanism of the European upper classes.

Red Sands, the follow-up to Caroline Eden's multi-award-winning Black Sea, is a reimagining of traditional travel writing using food as the jumping-off point to explore Central Asia. In a quest to better understand this vast heartland of Asia, Caroline navigates a course from the shores of the Caspian Sea to the sun-ripened orchards of the Fergana Valley. A book filled with human stories, forgotten histories and tales of adventure, Caroline is a reliable guide using food as her passport to enter lives, cities and landscapes rarely written about. Lit up by emblematic recipes, Red Sands is an utterly unique book, bringing in universal themes that relate to us all: hope, hunger, longing, love and the joys of eating well on the road.

Mary Montagu was one of the most extraordinary characters in the world. She was a self-educated intellectual, a free spirit, a radical, a feminist but also an entitled aristocrat and a society wit with powerful friends at court. In 1716 she travelled across Europe to take up residence in Istanbul as the wife of the British ambassador. Her letters remain as fresh as the day they were penned: enchanted by her discoveries of the life of Turkish women behind the veil, by Arabic poetry and by contemporary medical practices - including inoculation. For two years she lovingly observed Ottoman society as a participant, with affection, intelligence and an astonishing lack of prejudice.

Isaac Titsingh was intermittently head of the Japan factory (trading station) of the Dutch East India Company 1780-94. He was a career merchant, but unusual in having a classical education and training as a physician. His impact in Japan was enormous, but he left disappointed in the ability of the country to embrace change. After many years in Java, India and China, he came to London, and then settled in Paris where he devoted himself to compiling translations of prime Japanese texts. It is one of the most exciting anthologies of the period and reveals the almost unknown world of eighteenth-century Japan, discussing politics, history, poetry and rituals. The Illustrations of Japan appeared posthumously in 1821-1822 in English, French and Dutch. This fully annotated edition makes the original English version available for the first time in nearly two centuries

Set in 1867, The Innocents Abroad is a travel book that follows a group of Americans from New York City to the renowned Holy Land. Throughout the journey, author Mark Twain uses humor and wit to make astute observations about the diverse people and legendary locales. Described as the "Great Pleasure Excursion," Twain and his traveling companions visit some of the most illustrious cities in the world. They make stops in Italy, France, and Greece as well as modern-day Israel and Ukraine. With each trip, the author notes the contrast between expectation and reality. He critiques the misrepresentation of cultural sites and events with notable irony and disillusion. The retelling of a worldly expedition through an American lens made >The Innocents Abroad a massive commercial success. It's one Twain's best-selling books and became a staple within the travel genre. Readers will thoroughly enjoy the author's enlightening take on the Old World and public perception. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Innocents Abroad is both modern and readable.

Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) was a war hero whose exploits in Crete are legendary, and above all he is widely acclaimed as the greatest travel writer of our times, notably for his books about his walk across pre-war Europe, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water; he was a self-educated polymath, a lover of Greece and the best company in the world.

Artemis Cooper has drawn on years of interviews and conversations with Paddy and his closest friends as well as having complete access to his archives.

Her beautifully crafted biography portrays a man of extraordinary gifts - no one wore their learning so playfully, nor inspired such passionate friendship.

This study examines and explains how British explorers visualized the African interior in the latter part of the nineteenth century, providing the first sustained analysis of the process by which this visual material was transformed into the illustrations in popular travel books. At that time, central Africa was, effectively, a blank canvas for Europeans, unknown and devoid of visual representations.

While previous works have concentrated on exploring the stereotyped nature of printed imagery of Africa, this study examines the actual production process of images and the books in which they were published in order to demonstrate how, why, and by whom the images were manipulated. Thus, the main focus of the work is not on the aesthetic value of pictures, but in the activities, interaction, and situations that gave birth to them in both Africa and Europe.

INTRODUCED BY WILLIAM ATKINS, author of The Immeasurable World 'I am merely an eccentric, a dreamer who wishes to live far from the civilized world, as a free nomad.' Isabelle Eberhardt's writing chronicles, in passionate prose, her travels in French colonial North Africa at the turn of the 20th century. Often dressed in male clothing and assuming a man's name, she worked as a war correspondent, married a Muslim non-commissioned officer, converted to Islam and survived an assassination attempt, all before dying in a flash flood at the age of 27. Desert Soul brings together her 'Wanderings' and 'The Daily Journals', detailing the ecstatic highs and the depressive lows of her short but unique and extraordinary life.

"Off at last! Farewell comfort, ease, good food, snug beds! Welcome hard riding, rain and cold, scanty diet and the ground for a couch!" So begins Sabine Baring-Gould's account of his journey on horseback around Iceland in 1862. Aged twenty-eight, the young writer and teacher was fascinated by the tradition of the Icelandic sagas, and this was the catalyst for his adventure and the book that emerged from it. His voyage took him from the then tiny settlement of Reykjavik through remote and hostile terrain, passing through the empty expanse of Iceland's countryside. He observed mountains and glaciers, volcanoes and geysers, wondering at the wild beauty of the landscape. He also recorded the rich flora and fauna that he saw--and, to his chagrin, that his companions shot. But Baring-Gould's account is more than a travelogue. Throughout he recreates and interprets Icelandic sagas, bringing to life the extraordinary characters and events of these age-old stories. Evoking a world of trolls, witches and magic, he explores the mythology and language of Icelandic lore. He also turns a critical eye on his fellow travellers and the Icelanders he meets, passing judgment on food such as stuffed puffin, pungent fish and ptarmigan. By turns amusing and acerbic, Baring-Gould provides a detailed and colourful account of an Icelandic society that has long since disappeared. Illustrated with Baring-Gould's own drawings, Iceland: Its Scenes and Sagas is an entertaining and eccentric insight into a world of myth and legend as well as a classic of natural and human observation.

Isaac Titsingh was head of the Japanese station of the Dutch East India Company 1780-94. He was a career merchant, but unusual in having a classical education and training as a physician. He could also read Chinese. In Japan, his impact was enormous. He became a friend and confidant of the shogun's father-in-law, the famously wise but wily Shimazu Shigehide, almost causing war between father and son-in-law. He also attempted the project of equipping Japan with an ocean-going fleet. However, he left Japan disappointed in the ability of the country to embrace change. After many years in India he settled in Paris, where he wrote down his experiences. It is one of the most exciting journals of the period and reveals the almost unknown world of eighteenth-century Japan, discussing politics, history, poetry and rituals. The Illustrations of Japan appeared posthumously in 1822 in English and French. This fully annotated edition makes the original English version available for the first time in 180 years.

The writer Frances Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans, complemented by Auguste Hervieu's satiric illustrations, took the transatlantic world by storm in 1832. An unusual combination of realism, visual satire, and novelistic detail, Domestic Manners recounts Trollope's two years as an Englishwoman living in America. Trollope makes the civility of an entire nation the subject of her keen scrutiny, a strategy which would earn her ""more anger and applause than almost any writer of her day."" Auguste Hervieu's twenty-six original illustrations, placed and scaled as in the first edition, are included in this Broadview Edition, inviting readers to experience the original relationship of image and text.

This is a narrative of travels in Japan undertaken in 1878 by someone who is probably the most famous female traveller and writer of the Victorian era. Travelling alone as a woman, she was the first to enter parts of Japan which had had no cultural contact whatsoever with a European, let alone a woman on her own. The letters which make up this work give a real picture of Japan and Japanese life at the time.

This is the story of Stevenson's Pacific travels on the Casco and the Equator. It is a beautifully observed account of island peoples and their life; it is also the story of the beginning of his love affair with the Pacific, and of his growing commitment to the island cause. "In the South Seas" has been described as "the most solid of Stevenson's general writings;" it is certainly his least known book as well as a unique gem of Pacific literature, and richly deserves to be rediscovered.

First published in 1930. The wandering Jew is a very real character in the great drama of history. He has travelled as nomad and settler, as fugitive and conqueror, as exile and colonist and as merchant and scholar. Of necessity bilingual and therefore the master of many languages, the Jew was the ideal commercial traveller and interpreter.
Based on the volume of 24 Hebrew texts of Jewish travellers by J D Eisenstein, this volume begins with the ninth century. After the sixteenth century geographical discoveries had made the whole world familiar to most people. Consequently, the wandering Jew becomes less the diplomatist or scientist but still remains a link between the scattered members of the Diaspora. The volume ends in the middle of the eighteenth century and taken as a whole provides a survey of Jewish travel during the Middle Ages. For this translation, some of the texts have been abridged, whilst retaining many of the original notes.

First published in 1927. 'This diary is history' The Observer
This is the first complete published edition of Teonge's Diary. The edition of 1825, besides omitting several passages, contained many faulty transcriptions which have now been corrected for this edition. An intensely human document, enlivened with sketches of the people he met and places he visited, Teonge's Diary is one of the finest accounts of life on board ship in the seventeenth century. When not at sea, Henry Teonge's life was as a parson and this edition of his Diary includes a full inventory for his Parish, providing an excellent source of historical and social information on rural life in the late 1600s.

First published in 1926. Don Juan was a Persian Moslem who became a Spanish Roman Catholic. His description of Persia and his account of the wars waged by the Persians during the sixteenth century considerably add to modern day knowledge of the history of the period. The book describes the Safavi rule as first established, and the system of government set up in the prime of Shah 'Abbas, as well as being an account of the long journey from Isfahan to Valladolid.
Guy Le Strange's comprehensive introduction places the book in its historical context, as well as providing important information on how the book was written. Many of the inaccuracies of the original text are corrected in translation with references and notes added to the index to guide the reader.

First published in 1927. John Macdonald (1741-96) was born, and died, a Scottish Highlander. First published at the time of the French Revolution, these memoirs of his days in service provide a rich panorama of life in the company of blind fiddlers, maid-servants, the Scottish aristocracy, soldiers, historians, Oriental Princes, servants of the East India Company and men of great wealth, including James Coutts the banker. In 1768 - as the result of an errand - it fell to Macdonald to witness the death of Laurence Sterne.
'Simply packed with interest' Sunday Times
'..a model of genuine writing' Evening Standard
'Deserves a high place among autobiographies.' Nation

First published in 1929.
'Fire and shipwreck, fights ashore and afloat, the pitting of ceaseless patience and resource against fate, these things make one understand why the book, famous in its original tongue, has but to be savoured in translation to gain an equal popularity.' Manchester Guardian
Bontekoe's East Indian Voyage was one of the most popular books in which the Dutch seventeenth century public delighted and it continued to be reprinted throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
As well as providing an illuminating insight into the machinations of the Merchants and Directors of the East India Company and the often troubled waters of international trade and diplomacy, the account is a very personal one: of a human being battling against elemental forces, at tremendous odds, tenaciously holding on to life and coming through in the end.

First published in 1930. This volume contains letters and narratives of some of the Elizabethans who went to India. Here the beginnings of the British Indian Empire can be seen, arising out of the trading operations of the East India Company.

The 'memsahibs' of the British Raj in India are well-known figures today, frequently depicted in fiction, TV, and film. In recent years, they have also become the focus of extensive scholarship. Less familiar to both academics and the general public, however, are the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century precursors to the memsahibs of the Victorian and Edwardian era. Yet British women also visited and resided in India in this earlier period, witnessing first-hand the tumultuous, expansionist decades in which the East India Company established British control over the subcontinent. Some of these travellers produced highly regarded accounts of their experiences, thereby inaugurating a rich tradition of women's travel writing about India. In the process, they not only reported events and developments in the subcontinent; they also contributed to them, helping to shape opinion and policy on issues such as colonial rule, religion, and social reform. This new set in the Chawton House Library Women's Travel Writing series assembles seven of these accounts, six by British authors (Jemima Kindersley, Maria Graham, Eliza Fay, Ann Deane, Julia Maitland and Mary Sherwood) and one by an American (Harriet Newell). Their narratives - here reproduced for the first time in reset scholarly editions - were published between 1777 and 1854, and recount journeys undertaken in India, or periods of residence there, between the 1760s and the 1830s. Collectively they showcase the range of women's interests and activities in India, and also the variety of narrative forms, voices and personae available to them as travel writers. Some stand squarely in the tradition of Enlightenment ethnography; others show the growing influence of Evangelical beliefs. But all disrupt any lingering stereotypes about women's passivity, reticence, and lack of public agency in this period, when colonial women were not yet as sequestered and debarred from cross-cultural contact as they would later be during the Raj. Their narratives are consequently a useful resource to students and researchers across multiple fields and disciplines, including women's writing, travel writing, colonial and postcolonial studies, the history of women's educational and missionary work, and Romantic-era and nineteenth-century literature.

This volume contains the first volume of Anne Grant's Letters from the Mountains (1806), one of the Romantic era's most successful non-fictional accounts of the Scottish Highlands.

'Matar has produced a valuable and stimulating piece of scholarship ...' - The Daily Telegraph

Pierre Loti was a member of a diplomatic mission to the Sultan of Morocco at Fez, and in this book he gives us an extraordinarily fascinating account of the journey. The departure of the caravan from Tangier, the encampments, the nightly arrival of the Mouna, the crossing of the Oued-M'Cazen in flood, the fantasies and powder-play of the Arab horsemen, and the magnificent state entry into Fez, are described in a succession of vivid vignettes.

"The text describes the discovery of a very remarkable variant of the reported spoken work of Jesus Christ, which will be of interest to all Christians and scholars. To this day I recall my reaction upon first reading the concluding chapter of In the Shadow of Sinai', with its discussion of a remarkable variant of the reported spoken word of Jesus Christ. Brought up with a start, I read the marked passage again and quickly went to the Bible. Sure enough, the reading Matthew xii. 36 was different. But why? Surely those in charge of biblical exegesis would have known of the publication of the Gibson sister's text. And so began a small personal odyssey to bring to light, once again, this remarkable finding." -- Anthony Grahame, From the Foreword.