The description of his mission to the court of the Shah Tahmasp I of Persia by the Venetian Michele Membre is one of the most informative as well as one of the most individual of the few European accounts of 16th century Persia.

The origins of 'Aladdin' continue to fascinate scholars and readers of the tales. The story is believed to have first been written in French, by Antoine Galland, having been told to him in Paris in 1709 by Hanna Diyab - the author of this travel memoir. Written some five decades after this encounter, 'The Life and Times of Hanna Diyab' is part autobiography and part storytelling, a fascinating record of experiences, cultural observations, international relations, medicine, and hearsay. It traces a journey across land and sea from the author's home in Aleppo - through early eighteenth-century Lebanon, Jabal Druze, Cyprus, Egypt, Libya, Tunis, Livorno, Genoa and Marseille - to Paris in the time of Louis XIV; and the author's return to Aleppo across the 'lands of the East', now Turkey. The Foreword explains how this important translation into English came about and the Introduction provides background to some of the features of the memoir, including the Maronite Christian community of the period, the consular system of the Republics of Venice and Genoa, the role of Ottoman ambassadors, and of the French merchant, naturalist and traveller, Paul Lucas. Notes at the end of the book also help the non-specialist reader, and there are two bibliographies.

'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.

Foreign adventurers have been tramping around China for centuries, and this book presents some of the best of the stories from the dozens of travel memoirs published, particularly in the golden era of the late nineteenth century. These accounts, abridged and explained, concentrate on the gripping details with a constant commentary on the significance of what is being recounted. They are a window into old China and also into the mentality of the adventurers. Lost China Travel Classics is a digestible and exciting way of meeting some of the greatest travelers of a bygone age.