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Books > Travel > Travel writing > Classic travel writing
At age 60 William Chapman began writing down his memoirs and this book contains his engaging and enjoyable diary entries in the late nineteenth century. The book is divided as follows:
Through these diaries, and with extensive research by Nicol Stassen, we are offered a unique insight into Chapmans’s journeys, travels and encounters.
In 1951 the Australian writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston left grey, post-war London for Greece. Settling first on the tiny island of Kalymnos, then Hydra, their plan was to live simply and focus on their writing, away from the noise of the big city. The result is two of Charmian Clift's best known and most loved books, the memoirs Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus. Mermaid Singing relays the culture shock and the sheer delight of their first year on the tiny sponge-fishing island of Kalymnos. Clift paints an evocative picture of the characters and sun-drenched rhythms of traditional life, long before backpackers and mass tourism descended. On Hydra, featured in the companion volume, Peel Me a Lotus, Clift and Johnston became the centre of an informal community of artists and writers including the then unknown Leonard Cohen who lodged with them, and his future girlfriend Marianne Ihlen.
'My life's done a somersault,' wrote acclaimed modernist writer Mário de Andrade. After years of dreaming about Amazonia, he finally embarked on a three-month odyssey up the great river and into the wild heart of his native Brazil with a group of avant-garde luminaries. All abandoned ship but a socialite, her two nieces, and, of course, the author himself. And so begins the humorous account of Andrade's steamboat adventure into one of the most dangerous and breathtakingly beautiful corners of the world. Rife with shrewd observations and sparkling wit, his sarcastic, down-to-earth diary entries not only offer comedic and awe-inspiring details of life and the landscape but also trace his internal metamorphosis: his travels challenge what he thought he knew about the Amazon, and drastically alter his understanding of his motherland.
In 1960 the government of Trinidad invited V. S. Naipaul to revisit
his native country and record his impressions. In this classic of
modern travel writing he has created a deft and remarkably
prescient portrait of Trinidad and four adjacent Caribbean
societies-countries haunted by the legacies of slavery and
colonialism and so thoroughly defined by the norms of Empire that
they can scarcely believe that the Empire is ending.
'One of the non-fiction books of the year.' Andrew O' Hagan A powerful, evocative and deeply personal journey into the world of missing people When Francisco Garcia was just seven years old, his father, Christobal, left his family. Unemployed, addicted to drink and drugs, and adrift in life, Christobal decided he would rather disappear altogether than carry on dealing with the problems in front of him. So that's what he did, leaving his young wife and child in the dead of night. He has been missing ever since. Twenty years on, Francisco is ready to take up the search for answers. Why did this happen and how could it be possible? Where might his father have gone? And is there any reason to hope for a happy reunion? During his journey, which takes him all across Britain and back to his father's homeland of Spain, Francisco tells the stories of those he meets along the way: the police investigators; the charity employees and volunteers; the once missing and those perilously at risk around us; the families, friends and all those left behind. If You Were There is the moving and affecting story of one man's search for his lost family, an urgent document of where we are now and a powerful, timeless reminder of our responsibility to others.
Richard Hakluyt and Travel Writing in Early Modern Europe is an interdisciplinary collection of 24 essays which brings together leading international scholarship on Hakluyt and his work. Best known as editor of The Principal Navigations (1589; expanded 1598-1600), Hakluyt was a key figure in promoting English colonial and commercial expansion in the early modern period. He also translated major European travel texts, championed English settlement in North America, and promoted global trade and exploration via a Northeast and Northwest Passage. His work spanned every area of English activity and aspiration, from Muscovy to America, from Africa to the Near East, and India to China and Japan, providing up-to-date information and establishing an ideological framework for English rivalries with Spain, Portugal, France, and the Netherlands. This volume resituates Hakluyt in the political, economic, and intellectual context of his time. The genre of the travel collection to which he contributed emerged from Continental humanist literary culture. Hakluyt adapted this tradition for nationalistic purposes by locating a purported history of 'English' enterprise that stretched as far back as he could go in recovering antiquarian records. The essays in this collection advance the study of Hakluyt's literary and historical resources, his international connections, and his rhetorical and editorial practice. The volume is divided into 5 sections: 'Hakluyt's Contexts'; 'Early Modern Travel Writing Collections'; 'Editorial Practice'; 'Allegiances and Ideologies: Politics, Religion, Nation'; and 'Hakluyt: Rhetoric and Writing'. The volume concludes with an account of the formation and ethos of the Hakluyt Society, founded in 1846, which has continued his project to edit travel accounts of trade, exploration, and adventure.
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.
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.
First published in 1937 this is a collection of articles written
by the author under the pseudonym 'Waseda Eisaku' for the Japan
Tourist Bureau's magazine over twenty five years. Intended to
satisfy the intellectual curiosity of cultivated tourists from
abroad by giving the insider's view of all things Japanese, it was
published as a book just before the outbreak of World War II. Writing in the first person, Katsumata becomes both guide and confidante, writing about his own travel experiences in Japan and about Japanese customs and practices that interest him, such as traditional incense ceremonies, or fishing with rod and creel. This personal approach results in an unusual selection of topics and itineraries including tray landscapes, old Japanese clocks, hot springs, Japanese humour, sumo wrestling, pines in Japanese scenery, the Japanese sun flag and Buddhist temple bells. The author not only describes, but draws the reader into his own experiences - his joy on buying an antiquarian book he cannot really afford, the monotony he feels when travelling too long through snowy landscapes, the delight he takes in telling you that the best bait for carp fishing is sweet potato. Katsumata's unconventional choice of subjects and his informal and individualistic writing style make this a refreshingly different guide to Japan, and a valuable record of the period in which it was written.
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.
George Sand recounts the story of her 1838 winter in Majorca, a winter she passed in the company of Frederick Chopin. She describes the natural beauties of Majorca as well as the rumblings of approaching war.
Part of a seven-volume facsimile set, this volume comprises firsthand accounts of France in the 1790s. It includes Helen Maria Williams' letters which narrate the fall of Robespierre in 1794 and her 1798 book on Switzerland which comments sceptically on the necessary coexistence of liberty with peace.
** Winner of the RSL Christopher Bland Prize ** Uncovering the hidden love triangle between novelist Elizabeth Bowen and the author's grandparents - the critically acclaimed biography with never-before-seen letters detailing the affair. For readers who were swept up in Laura Cumming's On Chapel Sands, Daniel Mendelsohn's An Odyssey and Francesca Wade's Square Haunting. A death in the family delivers Julia Parry a box of letters. Dusty with age, they reveal a secret love affair between the celebrated novelist Elizabeth Bowen and the academic Humphry House - Julia's grandfather. So begins a life-changing quest to understand the affair, which had profound repercussions for Julia's family, not least her grandmother, Madeline. Julia traces these three very different characters through 1930s Oxford and Ireland, Texas, Calcutta in the last days of Empire, and on into World War II. With a supporting cast that includes Isaiah Berlin and Virginia Woolf, The Shadowy Third opens up a world with complex attitudes to love and sex, duty and ambition, and to writing itself.
This seven-volume facsimile set comprises first-hand accounts of France in the 1790s. Helen Maria William's letters narrate the fall of Robespierre in 1794 and her 1798 book on Switzerland comments sceptically on the necessary coexistence of liberty with peace. Charlotte West (who, like Williams, celebrated the fall of the Bastille but was later imprisoned by the Republic) records the corruption, paranoia and violence of the Terror both in the provinces and in Paris. All texts, the majority of which have never been republished, are reproduced in full, augmented by a substantial general introduction to each set, headnotes, endnotes, and a consolidated index in the final volume. Selected for their rarity, the texts are drawn from the unparalleled Chawton House Library collection; each facsimile page has been digitally cleaned and enhanced, significantly improving on the quality and legibility of the original.
This account shows the full range of Hugh Miller's interests - the lyrical description of the scenery and accounts of beautiful fossils show a deep affection for the Scottish landscape, while his role as a serious religious journalist and social crusader is highlighted in his discussions on the Disruption and the Highland Clearances.
Focusing upon three previously unpublished accounts of youthful English travellers in Western Europe (in contrast to the renowned but maturely retrospective memoirs of other seventeenth-century figures such as John Evelyn), this study reassesses the early origins of the cultural phenomenon known as the 'Grand Tour'. Usually denoted primarily as a post-Restoration and eighteenth-century activity, the basis of the long term English fascination with the 'Grand Tour' was firmly rooted in the mid-Tudor and early-Stuart periods. Such travels were usually prompted by one of three reasons: the practical needs of diplomacy, the aesthetic allure of cultural tourism, and the expediencies of political or religious exile. The outbreak of the English Civil War during the late-1640s acted as a powerful stimulus to this kind of travel for male members of both royalist and parliamentarian families, as a means of distancing them from the social upheavals back home as well as broadening their intellectual horizons. The extensive editorial introductions to this publication of the experiences of three young Englishmen also consider how their travel records have survived in a variety of literary forms, including personal diaries (Montagu), family letters (Hammond) and formal prose records (Maynard's travels were written up by his servant, Robert Moody), and how these texts should now be interpreted not in isolation but alongside the diverse collections of prints, engravings, curiosities, coins and antiquities assembled by such travellers.
This largely unknown travel book, written by a sporting and hunting enthusiast in 1896, recalls his journey with his wife and two dachshunds in what was then a largely unknown part of Europe. Not even Thomas Cook had conducted tours east of Trieste, and our two travelers were exploring territory less well known to the Victorian traveler at the time than Egypt or Brazil.
This is the first fully annotated old-spelling edition of the entire text of the autograph English journal of Robert Bargrave (1628-61), recording his extensive travels as a merchant. This manuscript (now Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson C 799), describes four separate journeys made by Bargrave: his sea voyage from England to Constantinople; an arduous return journey overland from Constantinople to England, via Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Germany, and the Low Countries; extensive travels, for both commercial and cultural purposes, in Spain, Sicily, Italy and the Morea; and a return journey from Venice to Margate, via Trento, Innsbruck, and Augsburg, including his visit to Heidelberg where he met the exiled English royalist community at the court of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia. The introduction to the edition gives detailed consideration to the political, religious, and personal affiliations of the Bargraves, a prominent Kentish family, with special reference to their experiences of overseas travel. While abroad, Robert also twice met up with his cousin, John Bargrave (c. 1610-80), the noted traveller and antiquarian. The introduction also provides an assessment of the historical, literary, and geographical importance of Robert Bargrave's journey; a survey of his extensive musical and dramatic interests; and the first detailed account of the provenances of both MS Rawlinson C 799 and now a lost earlier draft of this journal, identified here as the Eastry Court Manuscript. The edition includes seventeen illustrations, Bargrave family trees, and a selective bibliography of primary and secondary sources consulted.
First published between 1926-1931, with the invaluable addition of introductions and explanatory notes, maps and appendices, this series makes available in English inaccessible texts of travel from around the globe. 'The variety of the Broadway Travellers becomes more remarkable and refreshing with every new addition to the series. It is possible to range from Bristol to Darien, from China to Peru and to pick a Puritan, a Moslem, a Jesuit or a footman for one's guide. The English denounce the Spanish, the Spanish watch the French, and the Portuguese fight the Dutch. The drama of the three great centuries of discovery - the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth - are revealed by the shrewdest of observers' - The New Statesman.
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.
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.
First published in 1928.
When first published in 1928, Herbert's work enjoyed immediate
success. The narrative is of considerable importance from an
historical point of view, as it gives the only detailed account of
the first English embassy to Persia. It also paints a graphic
picture of the Perisa and the Persians in the early part of the
seventeenth century, with vivid and extensive descriptions of the
towns of Abbas, Lar, Shiraz, Persepolis, Isfahan, Ashraf, Tehran,
Qazvin, Qum and Kashan. |
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