Cast in the form of a walking tour through Germany, Switzerland, France, and Italy, A Tramp Abroad sparkles with the author's shrewd observations and highly opinionated comments on Old World culture, and showcases his unparalleled ability to integrate humorous sketches, autobiographical tidbit, and historical anecdotes in consistently entertaining narrative.

Meet the drunken Mexicans, the gorgeous girls, the desperate drug-dealer, and the snoring dog... as the author describes his first reading-tour across America. This book is a writer's notebook, intimate travelogue, and a chronicle of experiences both commonplace and extraordinary.

This wonderfully written book tells of the first Herculean expeditions to Antarctica, from astronomer Edmond Halley s 1699 voyage in the "Paramore" to the sealer John Balleny s 1839 excursion in the "Eliza Scott," all in search of land, glory, fur, science, and profit. Life was harsh: crews had poor provisions and inadequate clothing, and scurvy was a constant threat. With unreliable often homemade charts, these intrepid explorers sailed in the stormy waters of the Southern Ocean below the Convergence, that sea frontier marking the boundary between the freezing Antarctic waters and the warmer sub-Antarctic seas. These men were the first to discover and exploit a new continent, which was not the verdant southern island they had imagined but an inhospitable expanse of rock and ice, ringed by pack ice and icebergs: Antarctica."

In this journey of discovery, John Micklewright travels the slow way, on foot, on paths, tracks and byways from the Channel to the Alps - from the coast of Normandy to the flanks of Mont Blanc. The Opening Country is a beautifully written account of his progress through the French countryside, an evocative patchwork of landscape, nature, history, literature, film, and - drawing on his father's diaries that stretch back to the 1930s - of memoir. Always curious, absorbing all around him, ready on a whim to divert from his chosen route as he heads unhurriedly southwards. The natural world unfolds as spring turns to summer with surprises of bird song and butterflies, against a constant background of reminders of the economic and social story of rural France and of wars past. The result is an engrossing record of a classic long-distance walk through Britain's nearest continental neighbour. The Opening Country is a book to fire the imagination - a call to travel slowly, to open eyes and ears, to discover and explore.

Laurens van der Post shared a deep-rooted attachment to Europe, Africa and Japan and this book is a testament to his commitment to writing and initiating cultural and political commentaries on the issues and personalities of his time. A Walk with a White Bushman brings together his conversations with Jean-Marc Pottiez. The result is a book brimming with ideas, insights, people and events; at once thoughtful and exciting, mellow yet full of promise, autobiographical but also topical.

Complete Gentlemen is the first study to look beyond the Italian Grand Tour to the wider culture of educational travel that thrived among British and Irish landowners between 1650 and 1750. Ansell reconstructs dozens of encounters with continental Europe, revealing how the varying means, ambitions, and obligations of families produced widely differing experiences of educational travel. Where historians usually isolate time abroad, he pays unprecedented attention to what families thought and did before, after, and instead of foreign travel, stages that uncover its true significance for British and Irish society. This innovative approach requires a deep source base over several generations, provided by the manuscript archives of four clusters of families from England and Ireland. Ansell uses these archives to relate travel, too often a stand-alone topic, to broader questions in social and cultural history, exploring the meanings of time abroad for social mobility, elite formation, landed identity, masculinity, and Englishness.

The Life and Works of Robert Wood (1717-1771) commemorates the Irish classicist and traveller on the 250th anniversary of his death and provides the general reader with a study that can be regarded as a source book for the fascinating life and career of a much-neglected figure in the realm of Irish eighteenth-century travels and antiquarianism. The book starts by setting the context of eighteenth-century travels to the east and then examines the primary sources emanating from Wood's own eastern voyages, as well as the relevant literary sources available to him before, during, and after his travels. It then provides an extensive and much-needed biographical account of Robert Wood, with particular reference to his Irish and English patrons, before examining the main results of the second tour (1750-1751), namely his three pioneering books: Ruins of Palmyra (1753), Ruins of Balbec (1757), and The Original Genius of Homer (1775). It ends by considering the enormous legacy of Robert Wood, in terms of the popularity of his books; the variety and quality of portraits commissioned by his friends and associates; his contribution to the study of classical literature; his influence on architectural drawing in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe; and the cultural significance of his work on building design. The text also reflects on the somewhat questionable nature of his works, in terms of the fact that his second voyage of the east, and the entire production of the first two books, were financed by his friend Dawkins, whose wealth derived from a slave plantation in Jamaica.

In the first quarter of the 20th century, China was in turmoil, facing an existential crisis. Chinese politicians and intellectuals looked to the Turkish Republic as a role model. Turkey defeated foreign invading forces and renegotiated unfair treaties, adapted to the modern world, and initiated series of reforms in all walks of life. Chinese travellers chronicled their observations, and included the notes of Shi Zhaoji, the first Chinese ambassador to the US, and Hu Hanmin, an early leader in the Kuomintang.

Victorian Women's Travel Writing on Meiji Japan: Hospitable Friendship examines forgotten stories of cross-cultural friendship and intimacy between Victorian female travel writers and Meiji Japanese. Drawing on unpublished primary sources and contemporary Japanese literature hithero untranslated into English it highlights the open subjectivity and addective relationality of Isabella Bird, Mary Crawford Fraser, and Marie Stopes in their interactions with Japanese hosts. Victorian Women's Travel Writing on Meiji Japan demonstates how travel narratives and literary works about non-colonial Japan complicate and challenge Oriental stereotypes and imperial binaries. It traces the shifts in the representation of Japan in Victorian discourse from obsequious mousme to virile samurai alongside transitions in the Anglo-Japanese bilateral relationship and global geopolitical events. Considering the ethical and political implications of how Victorian women wrote about their Japanese friends, it examines how female travellers created counter discourses. It charts the unexplored terrain of female interracial and cross-cultural friendship and love in Victorian literature, emphasizing the agency of female travellers against the scholarly tendency to depoliticize their literary praxis. It also offers parallel narratives of three Meiji women in Britain - Tsuda Umeko, Yasui Tetsu, and Yosano Akiko -and transnational feminist alliance. The book is a celebration of the political possibility of female friendship and literature, and a reminder of the ethical responsibility of representing racial and cultural others.

In 1909, while dreaming of the Himalaya, Norwegian mountaineer Alf Bonnevie Bryn and a fellow young climber, the Australian George Ingle Finch, set their sights on Corsica to build their experience. The events of this memorable trip form the basis of Bryn's acclaimed book Tinder og banditter - 'Peaks and Bandits', with their boisterous exploits delighting Norwegian readers for generations. Newly translated by Bibbi Lee, this classic of Norwegian literature is available for the first time in English. Although Bryn would go on to become a respected mountaineer and author, and Finch would become regarded as one of the greatest mountaineers of all time - a legend of the 1922 Everest expedition - Peaks and Bandits captures them on the cusp of these achievements: simply two students taking advantage of their Easter holidays, their escapades driven by their passion for climbing. As they find themselves in unexpected and often strange places, Bryn's sharp and jubilant narrative epitomises travel writing at its best. Balancing its wit with fascinating insight into life in early twentieth-century Corsica, the infectious enthusiasm of Bryn's narrative has cemented it as one of Norway's most treasured adventure books. Peaks and Bandits embodies the timeless joy of adventure.

This volume is part of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh critical edition, which brings together all Waugh's published and previously unpublished writings for the first time with comprehensive introductions and annotation, and a full account of each text's manuscript development and textual variants. The edition's General Editor is Alexander Waugh, Evelyn Waugh's grandson and editor of the twelve-volume Personal Writings sequence. This is the first fully annotated, critical edition of the travel book Ninety-Two Days (1934), Evelyn Waugh's account of an arduous journey through British Guiana and northern Brazil that provided crucial material for what many consider his finest novel, A Handful of Dust. A biographical and historical introduction places the work in the context of Waugh's life, and among other travel books written about the area; discusses how the text evolved from manuscript to print; and connects it with other literary works such as Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, and with the persistent myth of the lost city of El Dorado.

'She has written the best travel books of her generation and her name will survive as an artist in prose.' - The Observer Written just after the Second World War, Perseus in the Wind (named after the constellation) is perhaps the most personal, and haunting, of all Freya Stark's writings. She muses on the seasons, the effect light has on a landscape at a particular time of day, the smell of the earth after rain, Muslim saints, Indian temples, war and old age. Each chapter is devoted to a particular theme: happiness (simple pleasures, like her father's passion for the view from his cabin in Canada); education (to be able to command happiness, recognise beauty, value death, increase enjoyment); beauty (incongruous, flighty and elusive - a description of the stars, the burst of flowers in a park); death (a childhood awareness of the finality of time, the meaningfulness of the end); memory (the jewelled quality of literature, pleasure, love, an echo or a scent when aged by the passage of time). For those who have loved her travel writing, Perseus in the Wind illuminates the motivations behind Freya Stark's journeys and the woman behind the traveller.

The classic and gorgeous accounts of two legendary naturalists' journeys through summer and winter in the north country-in two new stand-alone paperback editions When Canoe Country and Snowshoe Country were first published, in 1938 and 1944, respectively, readers were charmed by their enchanting portrayal of the wilderness of northern Minnesota. Florence Page Jaques and her husband, Francis Lee Jaques, became celebrated champions of the Boundary Waters and its majestic environs. Now, these classic books are both back in print as paperback editions. A well-traveled New York sophisticate, Florence Page Jaques fell in love with northern Minnesota during her first trips to the region, and she recounted those early experiences in Canoe Country and Snowshoe Country. She writes of the excitement of traveling by foot, canoe, snowshoe, and dogsled. Weeks of solitude canoeing through the Boundary Waters are interrupted by encounters with the denizens of the north country. In these two volumes, her vivid stories are matched by her famous husband's spectacular drawings; Francis Lee Jaques captures the delicate power of Minnesota's seasons, from the cascading falls of summer to the frozen lakes of winter.

This new paperback edition of Henry D. Thoreau's compelling account of Cape Cod contains the complete, definitive text of the original. Introduced by American poet and literary critic Robert Pinsky--himself a resident of Cape Cod--this volume contains some of Thoreau's most beautiful writings.

In the plants, animals, topography, weather, and people of Cape Cod, Thoreau finds "another world" Encounters with the ocean dominate this book, from the fatal shipwreck of the opening chapter to his later reflections on the Pilgrims' landing and reconnaissance. Along the way, Thoreau relates the experiences of fishermen and oystermen, farmers and salvagers, lighthouse-keepers and ship captains, as well as his own intense confrontations with the sea as he travels the land's outermost margins. Chronicles of exploration, settlement, and survival on the Cape lead Thoreau to reconceive the history of New England--and to recognize the parochialism of history itself.

'I felt like one who had first betrayed and then deserted a stricken friend; a friend with whom for the past fourteen years I had spent more time at sea than on land, and who, when not at sea, had seldom been out of my thoughts.' The first of the three voyages described in In Mischief's Wake gives H.W. 'Bill' Tilman's account of the final voyage and loss of Mischief, the Bristol Channel pilot cutter in which he had sailed over 100,000 miles to high latitudes in both Arctic and Antarctic waters. Back home, refusing to accept defeat and going against the advice of his surveyor, he takes ownership of Sea Breeze, built in 1899; 'a bit long in the tooth, but no more so, in fact a year less, than her prospective owner'. After extensive remedial work, his first attempt at departure had to be cut short when the crew 'enjoyed a view of the Isle of Wight between two of the waterline planks'. After yet more expense, Sea Breeze made landfall in Iceland before heading north toward the East Greenland coast in good shape and well stocked with supplies. A mere forty miles from the entrance to Scoresby Sound, Tilman's long-sought-after objective, 'a polite mutiny' forced him to abandon the voyage and head home. The following year, with a crew game for all challenges, a series of adventures on the west coast of Greenland gave Tilman a voyage he considered 'certainly the happiest', in a boat which was proving to be a worthy successor to his beloved Mischief.

This is the story of an anthropological expedition to Albania in 1929. The author, an Albanian educator, accompanied Dr. Carleton S. Coon of Harvard University. He said that his motive in writing the book was to given an account of the rugged Highlands as seen by an Albanian, in contrast to "travel accounts written by foreign visitors" to Albania. The book presents a faithful portrayal of Northern Albania as it was some seventy years ago. Dr. Coon called the book "a remarkably full and enjoyable ethnography of a people and their culture undergoing rapid change."

Since the time of Columbus, explorers dreamed of a water passage across the North American continent. President Thomas Jefferson shared this dream. He conceived the Corps of Discovery to travel up the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains and westward along possible river routes to the Pacific Ocean. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led this expedition of 1804-6. Along the way they filled hundreds of notebook pages with observations of the geography, Indian tribes, and natural history of the trans-Mississippi West.

This volume covers the last leg of the party's route from the Cascades of the Columbia River to the Pacific Coast, and their stay at Fort Clatsop, near the river's mouth, until the spring of 1806. Travel and exploration were hampered by miserable weather. While in winter quarters, Lewis wrote detailed reports on natural phenomena and Indian life. These descriptions were accompanied by sketches of plants and animals as well as of Indians and their canoes, tools, and clothing.

'Oliver is an evocative storyteller, vividly bringing his tales to life' BBC History From Genghis Khan's domination on earth to Armstrong's first steps on the moon, discover the 100 moments that defined humanity and shaped our world forever. Neil Oliver takes us on a whistle-stop tour around the world and through a million years to give us this unique and invaluable grasp of how human history pieces together. From the east to the west, north to south, these 100 moments act like stepping stones allowing us to make sense of how these pivotal events have shaped the world we know today. Including many moments readers will expect - from the advent of the printing press to the birth of the internet - there are also surprises, and with them, some remarkable, unforgettable stories that give a whole new insight on our past. From the bestselling author of The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places, this is outstanding new history of how our world was made from 5000 BC to the present. ********************* Praise for Neil Oliver 'Neil Oliver writes beautifully - bringing the past to life and letting us see ourselves in a new light.' - Professor Alice Roberts 'Brilliantly demonstrates Neil's mastery of the broad sweep of British history and landscape.' - Dan Snow 'Highly-crafted...a vivid, pungent history.' - TLS 'Compelling' - Daily Mail

'it appeared to me that the greatest and best feelings of the human heart were paralyzed by the relative positions of slave and owner' In Domestic Manners of the Americans, Frances Trollope recounts her travels through America between 1827 and 1830, describing her voyage up the Mississippi from New Orleans, a two-year stay in Cincinnati, and a subsequent tour of Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. A transatlantic best-seller on publication in 1832, its forthright criticisms of American manners encompassed spitting, religious extremism, ladies' dress, the relentless pursuit of money, and the unequal treatment of women, slaves, and Native Americans. Witty, satiric, and hugely entertaining, Trollope also had a serious purpose in warning her compatriots of the consequences of democratic freedoms at a time of great social change in England. Deploring slavery and the hypocrisy that sanctioned it, she fuelled abolitionist debate on both sides of the Atlantic and so impressed Mark Twain that fifty years later he considered her book to be the most accurate portrait of American life in the nineteenth century. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Late-18th-century Scotland comes to life, from coaching inns and gig upsets to agriculture and Edinburgh society. Fascinating edition of the travels of two young sprigs of the French aristocracy in search of the secrets of British commercial, industrial and agricultural primacy reaches its climax in this delicious volume... a notable contribution to the topographical and social history of Britain on the eve of the French revolution. COUNTRY LIFE [Richard Ollard] The most satisfying book I read in 2002... Connoisseurs of 18th-century travel books will be enraptured by this diary of a visit to Scotland by a young man from the great French family of Rochefoucauld and his Polish tutor... The diary has been translated, edited and annotated by our leading regional historian, and providesan enormous amount of fascinating detail about Scotland in the first phase of the Industrial Revolution. SUNDAY TELEGRAPH [Paul Johnson] In Norman Scarfe's two earlier books of their travels, Francois and Alexandre de La Rochefoucauld, with their companion, Maximilien Lazowski, have earned their place among the most perceptive and lively commentators on late 18th-century Britain. In this third book, Alexandre and Lazowski tackle a tougher itinerary, seeing for themselves Improved farming from the Fens to the Moray Firth and back via Armagh, Dublin and North Wales, with deviations into Improved industry and trade, as at Rotherham and Paisley; Improved hospitals (notably Dr Hunter's at York); and more picturesque sights such as Fountains Abbey, Edinburgh, the fifty-foot Foyers Fall near Inverness, the Boyne valley and Llansannan. In Edinburgh they dined with Adam Smith. In the infertile Highlands, they were moved by the Highlanders, only lately permitted back into their plaids and kilts: "all their customs at stake, they faced being a former people". Through Scarfe's well-attuned translation, we see these French adventurers for ourselves: the variable hospitality of the inns ("every magnificence" in Edinburgh; "a dreadful inn" - with compensations - at Old Meldrum); and the terrifying treachery of Loch Etive. NORMAN SCARFE's twoprevious volumes of La Rochefoucauld travels are A Frenchman's Year in Suffolk and Innocent Espionage, 1785.

The literary world was shocked when in 1889, at the height of his career, Robert Louis Stevenson announced his intention to settle permanently on the Pacific island of Samoa. His readers were equally shocked when he began to use the subject material offered by his new environment, not to promote a romance of empire, but to produce some of the most ironic and critical treatments of imperialism in nineteenth-century fiction. In these stories, as in his work generally, Stevenson shows himself to be a virtuoso of narrative styles: his Pacific fiction includes the domestic realism of `The Beach at Falese, the folktale plots of `The Bottle Imp' and `The Isle of Voices', and the modernist blending of naturalism and symbolism in The Ebb-Tide. But beyond their generic diversity the stories are linked by their concern with representing the multiracial society of which their author had become a member. In this collection - the first to bring together all his shorter Pacific fiction in one volume - Stevenson emerges as a witness both to the cross- cultural encounters of nineteenth-century imperialism and to the creation of the global culture which characterizes the post-colonial world. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE ACCLAIMED THE GRAN TOUR AND THE MARMALADE DIARIES An irreverent homage to the '95 travel classic. 'It would be wrong to view this book as just a highly accomplished homage to a personal hero. Aitken's politics, as much as his humour, are firmly in the spotlight, and Dear Bill Bryson achieves more than its title (possibly even its author) intended.' Manchester Review In 2013, travel writer Ben Aitken decided to follow in the footsteps of his hero - literally - and started a journey around the UK, tracing the trip taken by Bill Bryson in his classic tribute to the British Isles, Notes from a Small Island. Staying at the same hotels, ordering the same food, and even spending the same amount of time in the bath, Aitken's homage - updated and with a new preface for 2022 - is filled with wit, insight and humour.

In 1894, Laura Ingalls Wilder, her husband, Almanzo, and their daughter, Rose, packed their belongings into their covered wagon and set out on a journey from De Smet, South Dakota, to Mansfield, Missouri. They heard that the soil there was rich and the crops were bountiful -- it was even called "the Land of the Big Red Apple." With hopes of beginning a new life, the Wilders made their way to the Ozarks of Missouri.

During their journey, Laura kept a detailed diary of events: the cities they passed through, the travelers they encountered on the way, the changing countryside and the trials of an often difficult voyage. Laura's words, preserved in this book, reveal her inner thoughts as she traveled with her family in search of a new home in Mansfield, where Rose would spend her childhood, where Laura would write her Little House books, and where she and Almanzo would remain all the rest of their happy days together.

A sparkling new translation of one of the greatest travel books ever written: Marco Polo's seminal account of his journeys in the east. Marco Polo was the most famous traveller of his time. His voyages began in 1271 with a visit to China, after which he served the Kublai Khan on numerous diplomatic missions. On his return to the West he was made a prisoner of war and met Rustichello of Pisa, with whom he collaborated on this book. His account of his travels offers a fascinating glimpse of what he encountered abroad: unfamiliar religions, customs and societies; the spices and silks of the East; the precious gems, exotic vegetation and wild beasts of faraway lands. Evoking a remote and long-vanished world with colour and immediacy, Marco's book revolutionized western ideas about the then unknown East and is still one of the greatest travel accounts of all time. For this edition - the first completely new English translation of the Travels in over fifty years - Nigel Cliff has gone back to the original manuscript sources to produce a fresh, authoritative new version. The volume also contains invaluable editorial materials, including an introduction describing the world as it stood on the eve of Polo's departure, and examining the fantastical notions the West had developed of the East.