'Are we the same, I wonder, when all our surroundings, association, acquaintances are changed? I conclude that it is not the person who danced with you at Mansfield St who writes to you today from Persia. Yet there are dregs, English sediment at the bottom of my sherbet, and perhaps they flavour it more than I think. I write to you of Persia: I am not me, that is my only excuse. I am merely pouring out for you some of what I have received in the last two months.' When Gertrude Bell's uncle was appointed Minister in Tehran in 1891, she declared that the great ambition of her life was to visit Persia. Several months later, she did. And so began a lifetime of travel and a lifelong enchantment with what she saw as the romance of the East, which evolved into a deep understanding of its cultures and people. This vivid and impressionistic series of sketches, her first foray into writing, is an evocative meditation that moves between Persia's heroic past and its long decline; the public face of Tehran and the otherworldly 'secret, mysterious life of the East', the lives of its women, its lush, enclosed gardens; from the bustling cities to the lonely wastelands of Khorasan.

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.

A remarkable nineteenth-century account of Istanbul - which begins with a dazzling description of the city gradually appearing through the fog as the author's ship approaches the harbour - Constantinople expertly combines personal anecdote, breathtaking visual observation and entertaining historical information. An invaluable record of the metropolis as it used to be - a fascinating crossroads between Eastern and Western civilization and one of the most cosmopolitan cities of its time - as well as a vivid example of a European tourist's reaction to it - part delight, part incomprehension - this book will provide an enriching read for lovers of history or those planning to visit Istanbul themselves.

"I traveled through the Caucasus like a perfect vagabond, one who] seeks to know the world and its people as they are and, in order to acquire that knowledge, is ready to become all things with all men and to make himself equally at home in all places. In this sense of the word I do not hesitate to avow myself a vagabond of the most pronounced type."

George Kennan (1845--1924) was a pioneering explorer, writer, and lecturer on Russia in the nineteenth century, the author of classic works such as "Tent Life in Siberia" and "Siberia and the Exile System," and great-uncle of George Frost Kennan, the noted historian and diplomat of the Cold War.

In 1870, Kennan became the first American to explore the highlands of Dagestan, a remote Muslim region of herders, silversmiths, carpet-weavers, and other craftsmen southeast of Chechnya, only a decade after Russia violently absorbed the region into its empire. He kept detailed journals of his adventures, which today form a small part of his voluminous archive in the Library of Congress. Frith Maier has combined the diaries with selected letters and Kennan's published articles on the Caucasus to create a vivid narrative of his six-month odyssey.

The journals have been organized into three parts. The first covers Kennan's journey to the Caucasus, a significant feat in itself. The second chronicles his expedition across the main Caucasus Ridge with the Georgian nobleman Prince Jorjadze. In the final part, Kennan circles back through the lands of Chechnya to slip once again into the Dagestan highlands.

Kennan's remarkable curiosity and perception come through in this lively and accessible narrative, as does his humor at the challenges of his travels.

In her Introduction, Maier discusses Kennan's illustrious career and his reliability as an observer, while providing background on the Caucasus to help clarify Kennan's descriptions of daily life, religion, etiquette, customary law, and local government. In an Afterword, she retraces Kennan's steps to find descendants of Prince Jorjadze and describes her work in coproducing, with filmmaker Christopher Allingham, a documentary inspired by Kennan's Caucasus journey.

Frith Maier shares Kennan's adventurous spirit; she became interested in his writings as a student of Russia and went on to a career in adventure travel herself. She is the author of "Trekking in Russia and Central Asia: A Travelers Guide." She lives in Seattle. Additional contributions have been provided by Daniel C. Waugh, professor of history and international studies at the University of Washington.

**TOP TEN BESTSELLER** 'I would rather read Colin Thubron than any other travel writer alive' John Simpson Mount Kailas is the most sacred of the world's mountains - holy to one fifth of humanity. Isolated beyond the central Himalayas, its summit has never been scaled, but for centuries the mountain has been ritually circled by Hindu and Buddhist pilgrims. Colin Thubron joins these pilgrims, after an arduous trek from Nepal, through the high passes of Tibet, to the magical lakes beneath the slopes of Kailas itself. He talks to secluded villagers and to monks in their decaying monasteries; he tells the stories of exiles and of eccentric explorers from the West. Yet he is also walking on a pilgrimage of his own. Having recently witnessed the death of the last of his family, his trek around the great mountain awakes an inner landscape of love and grief, restoring precious fragments of his own past.

Published posthumously in 1930, Stendhal's travel notes on his 1838 journey to southern France contain descriptions of cities such as Bordeaux, Toulouse and Marseilles, peppered with numerous personal digressions, anecdotes and cultural musings. Both an addition to the Stendhalian canon and a pioneering work of the travel-writing genre, Travels in the South of France provides an illuminating perspective on this popular region and the phenomenon of tourism in general.

Marco Polo’s account of his journey throughout the East in the thirteenth century was one of the earliest European travel narratives, and it remains the most important. The merchant-traveler from Venice, the first to cross the entire continent of Asia, provided us with accurate descriptions of life in China, Tibet, India, and a hundred other lands, and recorded customs, natural history, strange sights, historical legends, and much more. From the dazzling courts of Kublai Khan to the perilous deserts of Persia, no book contains a richer magazine of marvels than the Travels.

This edition, selected and edited by the great scholar Manuel Komroff, also features the classic and stylistically brilliant Marsden translation, revised and corrected, as well as Komroff’s Introduction to the 1926 edition.

The era in which Ibn Battuta traveled to the East was exciting but turbulent, cursed by the Black Plague and the fall of mighty dynasties. His account provides a first-hand account of increased globalisation due to the rise of Islam, as well as the relationship between the Western world and India and China in the 14th century. There are insights into the complex power dynamics of the time, as well a personal glimpse of the author's life as he sought to survive them, always staying on the move. The Ri?la contains great value as a historical document, but also for its religious commentary, especially regarding the marvels and miracles that Ibn Battuta encountered. It is also an entertaining narrative with a wealth of anecdotes, often humorous or shocking, and in many cases touchingly human. The book records the journey of Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan jurist who travels to the East, operating at high levels of government within the vibrant Muslim network of India and China. It offers fascinating details into the cultures and dynamics of that region, but goes beyond other travelogues due to the dramatic narrative of its author - tragedies and wonders fill its pages - shared for the greater glory of Allah and the edification of its contemporary audience in the West.

The classic travel narrative of a Don Quixote-of-the-seas – the first man to circumnavigate the world singlehandedly.

Joshua Slocum’s autobiographical account of his solo trip around the world is one of the most remarkable – and entertaining – travel narratives of all time. Setting off alone from Boston aboard the thirty-six-foot wooden sloop Spray in April 1895, Captain Slocum went on to join the ranks of the world’s great circumnavigators – Magellan, Drake, and Cook. But by circling the globe without crew or consorts, Slocum would outdo them all: his three-year solo voyage of more than 46,000 miles remains unmatched in maritime history for its courage, skill, and determination.

Sailing Alone around the World recounts Slocum’s wonderful adventures: hair-raising encounters with pirates off Gibraltar and savage Indians in Tierra del Fuego; raging tempests and treacherous coral reefs; flying fish for breakfast in the Pacific; and a hilarious visit with fellow explorer Henry Stanley in South Africa. A century later, Slocum’s incomparable book endures as one of the greatest narratives of adventure ever written.

Sixteen months on a small Greek island? Not the holiday of a lifetime, but the start of anthropologist Margaret E. Kenna's involvement with the residents of Anafi and its migrant community in Athens. Greek Island Life gives a vivid and engaging account of research on Anafi in the 1960s, and is based on letters, progress reports, field-notes and diary entries made at the time. Since then the author has returned to the island many times and her later impressions and knowledge are integrated into the earlier texts. The islanders, who once regarded themselves to be so remote as to be 'far from God', are now making a living from tourism, marketing their island as an unspoilt idyll. Anyone interested in Greece and travel will find this book illuminating and captivating, as will students and teachers of anthropology, sociology, modern history, travel writing and Modern Greek studies. 'In the whole of the Cycladic and Sporadic groups there exists no island so remote in its solitude as Anafi' wrote the traveller Theodore Bent in the early 1880s: 'it is a mere speck in the waves in the direction of Rhodes and Crete, where no one ever goes, and the 1000 inhabitants of the one village are as isolated as if they dwelt on an archipelago in the Pacific.' So Anafi remained until the mid 1960s when Margaret E. Kenna stepped ashore to begin a memorable stay, and a lifetime's connection, described in this lovely book. Full of wonderful observation, scrupulously honest, it would be compelling simply as a travel book, but it is much more: it is a landmark study of the Greek island world on the eve of the huge changes that would transform Greece by mass tourism from the early 1970s, and it is all the more poignant now given the crises currently engulfing the country. All lovers of Greece will relish and admire this book for its insight, its realism and its humanity: a portrait of a world which is almost gone, but as Margaret Kenna shows in her updates, not quite yet. Michael Wood, Professor of Public History, Manchester University, and broadcaster This wonderful book counters the common accusation that anthropologists do such interesting things and then write boring books about them. This is a unique document, a narrative of fieldwork, written not retrospectively but in the actual ethnographic present, in lucid and lyrical prose worthy of Jane Austen. We the readers are invited to participate in the unfolding of events from Kenna's arrival to her departure, sharing in the first puzzles and initial descriptions of strangers who, by the end, become familiar figures and friends. The narrative confirms how, contrary to the scientistic tradition of advancing hypotheses, the role of chance is crucial to anthropological practice: as in a detective novel, once strange things are gradually given sense. Professor Judith Okely, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, Hull University