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.

This volume contains Elizabeth Isabella Spence's Letters from the North Highlands, one of the Romantic era's most successful non-fictional accounts of the Scottish Highlands (1816), a work that, while influenced by Grant's Letters from the Mountains (1806), attempted to move the genre of the Scottish travelogue in new directions.

The first English translation, presented with pictures and a piece by De Amicis's contemporary Louis Laurent Simonin

As a first-time visitor to London, De Amicis was awestruck by the bustle and magnificence of the Victorian metropolis and wrote a number of sketches in his trademark witty, observational style, which made him one of the bestselling travel writers of his age. Originally conceived as a series of newspaper articles and later published in volume form, "Memories of London" brings back to life all the bygone charm of the capital of the British Empire. De Amicis's impressions are paired here with a piece written by the French writer Louis Laurent Simonin, which leaves the city's opulence and grandeur behind and offers an uncompromising look at the poverty and squalor of its most deprived areas.

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.

A sparkling new translation of one of the greatest travel books ever written: Marco Polo's seminal account of his journeys in the east, in a collectible clothbound edition. 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. Marco Polo was born in 1254, joining his father on a journey to China in 1271. He spent the next twenty years travelling in the service of Kublai Khan. There is evidence that Marco travelled extensively in the Mongol Empire and it is fairly certain he visited India. He wrote his famous Travels whilst a prisoner in Genoa. Nigel Cliff was previously a theatre and film critic for The Times and a regular writer for The Economist, among other publications, and now writes historical nonfiction books. His first book, The Shakespeare Riots, was published in 2007 and shortlisted for the Washington-based National Award for Arts Writing. His second book, The Last Crusade: Vasco da Gama and the Birth of the Modern World appeared in 2011 and was shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize.

While visiting Europe In 1844, Harry McCall of Philadelphia wrote to his cousin back home of his disappointment. He didn't mind Paris, but he preferred the company of Americans to Parisians. Furthermore, he vowed to be "an American, heart and soul" wherever he traveled, but "particularly in England." Why was he in Europe if he found it so distasteful? After all, travel in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was expensive, time consuming, and frequently uncomfortable.

"Being American in Europe, 1750-1860" tracks the adventures of American travelers while exploring large questions about how these experiences affected national identity. Daniel Kilbride searched the diaries, letters, published accounts, and guidebooks written between the late colonial period and the Civil War. His sources are written by people who, while prominent in their own time, are largely obscure today, making this account fresh and unusual.

Exposure to the Old World generated varied and contradictory concepts of American nationality. Travelers often had diverse perspectives because of their region of origin, race, gender, and class. Americans in Europe struggled with the tension between defining the United States as a distinct civilization and situating it within a wider world. Kilbride describes how these travelers defined themselves while they observed the politics, economy, morals, manners, and customs of Europeans. He locates an increasingly articulate and refined sense of simplicity and virtue among these visitors and a gradual disappearance of their feelings of awe and inferiority.

'Years and years ago, observing that nobody in the history of man had ever seen and described the entire urban world, I resolved to do it myself ...'

It was thirty years later, standing in the great square in Beijing, that Jan Morris realized that she had achieved her extraordinary ambition. Among the Cities (1985) is a magnificent collection which presents her personal selection of travel pieces, with definitive evocations of places as different as Alexandria and Bath, Warsaw and Wyoming.

Whether she is describing Beirut before the lights went out, the cloying charms of Vienna ('no place for a Welsh republican'), the dream-world of Kashmir or the 'impending euphoria of Rio de Janeiro, Jan Morris never leaves us in doubt that she is one of the greatest travel writers - and one of the greatest prose writers - of our time.

'I don't think there is a writer alive who has Jan Morris's serenity or strength.' Paul Theroux

'She can even impart a place's smell.' "Observer"

A Year in Jamaica is a complex memoir telling the story of two simultaneous journeys: Diana Lewes' 1889 trip from England to visit her family's sugar plantations in the Caribbean, and more intriguingly, the internal rite of passage of a Victorian girl on her journey to adulthood. For it is in Jamaica that Miss Lewes tries to find a place for herself in the mysterious adult world, to understand its coded rules and hidden passions. Set primarily on a plantation called Arcadia, overlooking the sea and a distant Cuba from on high, Miss Lewes alternates between the acceptable pursuits of a Victorian gentlewoman - sewing, social visits, riding - and trying to find a more meaningful role for herself in this man's world. She delights in the exhilarating freedom of careering across the countryside on horseback with her sister, is cowed by the roaring rains and horrified at watching a hen peck a lizard to death. Against this background, we see this intelligent and competent young woman appraising the society around her, and struggling with its contradictions. Quite how complex those contradictions were is only finally revealed in the publisher's afterword.

The Marquis de Custine's record of his trip to Russia in 1839 is a brilliantly perceptive, even prophetic, account of one of the world's most fascinating and troubled countries. It is also a wonderful piece of travel writing. Custine, who met with people in all walks of life, including the Czar himself, offers vivid descriptions of St. Petersburg and Moscow, of life at court and on the street, and of the impoverished Russian countryside. But together with a wealth of sharply delineated incident and detail, Custine's great work also presents an indelible picture--roundly denounced by both Czarist and Communist regimes--of a country crushed by despotism and "intoxicated with slavery."
"Letters from Russia," here published in a new edition prepared by Anka Muhlstein, the author of the Goncourt Prize-winning biography of Custine, stands with Tocqueville's Democracy in America as a profound and passionate encounter with historical forces that are still very much at work in the world today.

'To those who went to the War straight from school and survived it, the problem of what to do afterwards was peculiarly difficult.' For H.W. 'Bill' Tilman, the solution lay in Africa: in gold prospecting, mountaineering and a 3,000-mile bicycle ride across the continent. Tilman was one of the greatest adventurers of his time, a pioneering climber and sailor who held exploration above all else. He made first ascents throughout the Himalaya, attempted Mount Everest, and sailed into the Arctic Circle. For Tilman, the goal was always to explore, to see new places, to discover rather than conquer. First published in 1937, Snow on the Equator chronicles Tilman's early adventures; his transition from East African coffee planter to famed mountaineer. After World War I, Tilman left for Africa, where he grew coffee, prospected for gold and met Eric Shipton, the two beginning their famed mountaineering partnership, traversing Mount Kenya and climbing Kilimanjaro and Ruwenzori. Tilman eventually left Africa in typically adventurous style via a 3,000-mile solo bicycle ride across the continent - all recounted here in splendidly funny style. Tilman is one of the greatest of all travel writers. His books are well-informed and keenly observed, concerned with places and people as much as summits and achievements. They are full of humour and anecdotes and are frequently hilarious. He is part of the great British tradition of comic writing and there is nobody else quite like him.

This volume contains the second 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. It is part of a four volume set, edited by Kirsteen McCue and Pam Perkins, which is accompanied by new editorial material including a new general introduction and headnotes to each work.

This volume contains the third 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.

In 1782 an enthusiastic young German landed in England. Through the fresh eyes of a foreigner we get a wonderful insight into what has or hasn't changed within the last two hundred years. In a series of letters home he describes his amazement at the number of English people who wore spectacles, the amount they drank, the dreadful food they ate, the expense of a simple salad, the drunkenness of the dons, the riotous behaviour in Parliament, and the high level of education among ordinary people.

Alexander Stavely Hill was the founder of Alberta's famous Oxley Ranch. A British Conservative MP from 1868 to 1900, he travelled to Canada annually between 1881 and 1884. "From Home to Home", first published in 1885, is an account of those travels. Interested in developing a new enterprise in a new country, Hill founded the Oxley in 1882, persuading veteran livestock breeder John R. Craig - later the manager of Oxley, who wrote his own memoir, "Ranching with Lords and Commons" (reprinted by Heritage House in 2006) - to drop his Canadian investors in favour of some English gentlemen whom Hill claimed had much more to invest. Ironically, a bitter feud later developed between Craig and Hill when the latter could not (or would not) supply enough money to run the enterprise properly. "From Home to Home" is a fascinating look at this historically important time and place from the perspective of a late-19th century version of an absentee landlord.

Artists and writers from the colder climes of northern Europe have long felt the lure of the South of the continent. Goethe was revitalised by his encounters with Mediterranean culture on his journey to Italy. Nietzsche took flight to the south to begin his life anew. D H Lawrence sought the health-giving southern sun in Sicily and Sardinia. Over many years, other versions of the South have also held their own fascination. The South Seas cast a spell over writers like Herman Melville and Robert Louis Stevenson, and painters like Paul Gauguin. The American Deep South had (and has) its own, particular literary tradition. The white empty spaces of the frozen South of Antarctica were filled by the fantasies of writers like Edgar Allan Poe and H P Lovecraft. Even London south of the river is a place where novelists like Angela Carter and Michael Moorcock have staked out literary territory. Moving between geography and mythology, literature and history, this is the first book to look at all things Southern in one volume. It examines the South as a symbol of freedom and escape, the South as the location of Northern visions of Utopia, and the South as the imagined site of decadence, poverty and backwardness. From Tahiti to the streets of Peckham, from Naples to New Orleans, Merlin Coverley's brilliant and wide-ranging study throws light on how and why the idea of the South, in all its forms, has come to exert such a powerful hold on our imaginations.

'No sea voyage can be dull for a man who has an eye for the ever-changing sea and sky, the waves, the wind and the way of a ship upon the water.' So observes H.W. 'Bill' Tilman in this account of two lengthy voyages in which dull intervals were few and far between. In 1966, after a succession of eventful and successful voyages in the high latitudes of the Arctic, Tilman and his pilot cutter Mischief head south again, this time with the Antarctic Peninsula, Smith Island and the unclimbed Mount Foster in their sights. Mischief goes South is an account of a voyage marred by tragedy and dogged by crew trouble from the start. Tilman gives ample insight into the difficulties associated with his selection of shipmates and his supervision of a crew, as he wryly notes, 'to have four misfits in a crew of five is too many'. The second part of this volume contains the author's account of a gruelling voyage south, an account left unwritten for ten years for lack of time and energy. Originally intended as an expedition to the remote Crozet Islands in the southern Indian Ocean, this 1957 voyage evolved into a circumnavigation of Africa, the unplanned consequence of a momentary lapse in attention by an inexperienced helmsman. The two voyages described in Mischief goes South covered 43,000 miles over twenty-five months spent at sea and, while neither was deemed successful, published together they give a fine insight into Tilman's character.

'We had climbed a mountain and crossed a pass; been wet, cold, hungry, frightened, and withal happy. One more Himalayan season was over. It was time to begin thinking of the next. "Strenuousness is the immortal path, sloth is the way of death".' First published in 1946, the scope of H.W. 'Bill' Tilman's When Men & Mountains Meet is broad, covering his disastrous expedition to the Assam Himalaya, a small exploratory trip into Sikkim, and then his wartime heroics. In the thirties, Assam was largely unknown and unexplored. It proved a challenging environment for Tilman's party, the jungle leaving the men mosquito-bitten and suffering with tropical diseases, and thwarting their mountaineering success. Sikkim proved altogether more successful. Tilman, who is once again happy and healthy, enjoys some exploratory ice climbing and discovers Abominable Snowman tracks, particularly remarkable as the creature appeared to be wearing boots - 'there is no reason why he should not have picked up a discarded pair at the German Base Camp and put them to their obvious use'. And then, in 1939, war breaks out. With good humour and characteristic understatement we hear about Tilman's remarkable Second World War. After digging gun pits on the Belgian border and in Iraq, he was dropped by parachute behind enemy lines to fight alongside Albanian and Italian partisans. Tilman was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his efforts - and the keys to the city of Belluno, which he helped save from occupation and destruction. Tilman's comments on the German approach to Himalayan climbing could equally be applied to his guerrilla warfare ethos. 'They spent a lot of time and money and lost a lot of climbers and porters, through bad luck and more often through bad judgement.' While elsewhere the war machine rumbled on, Tilman's war was fast, exciting, lightweight and foolhardy - and makes for gripping reading.

The book begins with the letter to Clark proposing a "trip to explore those western rivers which may run all the way across North America to the western ocean" and Clark's reply "to cheerfully join you in this rewarding endeavor." From there, every stage of the journey is shown - from the building of the ships the crew would use, the choosing of the crew itself, and the farewell from St. Louis on May 14, 1804 to meetings with friendly and unfriendly Indian tribes, discovering a wealth of previously unknown plants and animals, bouts with fleas and fever, a miserable climb through the Bitterroot Mountains, and finally the much-longed-for view of the Pacific Ocean. The text is taken directly from the journals of Lewis and Clark, which makes it excellent primary source material. In addition, every page is filled with illustrations in a charming folk-art style that bring the scenes to life.

In the autumn of 1915, in a "slightly heroic mood", E.M. Forster arrived in Alexandria, full of lofty ideals as a volunteer for the Red Cross. Yet most of his time was spent exploring "the magic, antiquity and complexity" of the place in order to cope with living in what he saw as a "funk-hole". With a novelist's pen, he brings to life the fabled, romantic city of Alexander the Great, capital of Graeco-Roman Egypt, beacon of light and culture symbolised by the Pharos, where the doomed love affair of Antony and Cleopatra was played out and the greatest library the world has ever known was built. Threading 3,000 years of history with vibrant strands of literature and punctuating the narrative with his own experiences, Forster immortalised Alexandria, painting an incomparable portrait of the great city and, inadvertently, himself.

This an authoritative scholarly edition of Mansfield's camping journal, offering new understandings of her colonial life. Katherine Mansfield filled the first half of the 'Urewera Notebook' during a 1907 camping tour of the central North Island, shortly before she left New Zealand forever. Her camping notes offer a rare insight into her attitude to her country of birth, not in retrospective fiction but as a nineteen year old still living in the colony. This publication aims to be the first scholarly edition of the 'Urewera Notebook', providing an original transcription, a collation of the alternative readings and textual criticism of prior editors, and new information about the politics, people and places Mansfield encountered on her journey. As a whole, this edition challenges the debate that has focused on Mansfield's happiness or dissatisfaction throughout her last year in New Zealand to reveal a young writer closely observing aspects of a country hitherto beyond her experience and forming a complex critique of her colonial homeland. This is a new, more accurate transcription of the notebook, which can be read either as standalone text, or in tandem with commentary and textual notes. It's an introductory essay drawing on important new developments in New Zealand literary criticism, advances in historiography of the period and legal history, notably Judith Binney's Te Urewera: Encircled Lands (2009), Richard Boast's Buying the Land, Selling the Land (2008) and the Waitangi Tribunal Reports. It offers a route map, revised itinerary and authoritative annotation for the text, all based on fresh archival research of primary history material. It offers previously unpublished photographs from a Beauchamp family photograph album in the Alexander Turnbull Library and in the Ebbett Papers held at the Hawke's Bay Museum.

A wonderfully quixotic, charming and surprisingly uplifting travelogue which sees Jack Cooke, author of the much-loved The Treeclimbers Guide, drive around the British Isles in a clapped-out forty-year old hearse in search of famous – and not so famous – tombs, graves and burial sites. Along the way, he launches a daredevil trespass into Highgate Cemetery at night, stumbles across the remains of the Welsh Druid who popularised cremation and has time to sit and ponder the imponderables at the graveside of the Lady of Hoy, an 18th century suicide victim whose body was kept in near condition by the bog in which she was buried. A truly unique, beautifully written and wonderfully imagined book.

In his perfectly crafted haiku poems, Basho described the natural world with great simplicity and delicacy of feeling. When he composed The Narrow Road to the Deep North he was a serious student of Zen Buddhism setting off on a series of travels designed to strip away the trappings of the material world and bring spiritual enlightenment. He wrote of the seasons changing, of the smell of the rain, the brightness of the moon and the beauty of the waterfall, through which he sensed the mysteries of the universe. These travel writings not only chronicle Basho's perilous journeys through Japan, but also capture his vision of eternity in the transient world around him.

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

'Hand (man) wanted for long voyage in small boat. No pay, no prospects, not much pleasure.' So read the crew notice placed in the personal column of The Times by H.W. 'Bill' Tilman in the spring of 1959. This approach to selecting volunteers for a year-long voyage of 20,000 miles brought mixed seafaring experience: 'Osborne had crossed the Atlantic fifty-one times in the Queen Mary, playing double bass in the ship's orchestra'. With unclimbed ice-capped peaks and anchorages that could at best be described as challenging, the Southern Ocean island groups of Crozet and Kerguelen provided obvious destinations for Tilman and his fifty-year-old wooden pilot cutter Mischief. His previous attempt to land in the Crozet Islands had been abandoned when their only means of landing was carried away by a severe storm in the Southern Ocean. Back at Lymington, a survey of the ship uncovered serious Teredo worm damage. Tilman, undeterred, sold his car to fund the rebuilding work and began planning his third sailing expedition to the southern hemisphere. Mischief among the Penguins (1961), Tilman's account of landfalls on these tiny remote volcanic islands, bears testament to the development of his ocean navigation skills and seamanship. The accounts of the island anchorages, their snow-covered heights, geology and in particular the flora and fauna pay tribute to the varied interests and ingenuity of Mischief's crew, not least after several months at sea when food supplies needed to be eked out. Tilman's writing style, rich with informative and entertaining quotations, highlights the lessons learned with typical self-deprecating humour, while playing down the immensity of his achievements.