Martin and Osa Johnson thrilled American audiences of the 1920s and 30s with their remarkable movies of far-away places, exotic peoples, and the dramatic spectacle of African wildlife. Their own lives were as exciting as the movies they made--sailing through the South Sea Islands, dodging big game at African waterholes, flying small planes over the veldt, taking millionaires on safari. Osa Johnson's ghostwritten autobiography, I Married Adventure, became a national bestseller. The 1939 film version was billed as "the story of World Exploration's First Lady, whose indomitable daring would be stayed by neither snarling lion nor crouching leopard, tropic tempest nor savage tribesman " Heroes to millions, Osa and Martin seemed to embody glamor, daring, and the all-American ideal of self-reliance. Probing beneath the glamor of the Johnsons' public image, Pascal and Eleanor Imperato explore the more human side of the couple's lives--and ways the Johnsons shaped, for better and for worse, America's vision of Africa. Drawing on many years of research, access to a wealth of letters and archives, interviews with many who worked closely with the Johnsons, and their own deep knowledge of Africa, the authors present a fascinating and intimate portrait of this intrepid couple.

In June 1862 Fyodor Dostoevsky left Petersburg on his first excursion to Western Europe. Ostensibly making the trip to consult Western specialists about his epilepsy, Dostoevsky also wished to see firsthand the source of the Western ideas he believed were corrupting Russia. Over the course of his journey he visited a number of major cities, including Berlin, Paris, London, Florence, Milan, and Vienna. He recorded his impressions of everything he saw, and published them as "Winter Notes on Summer Impressions" in the February 1863 issue of Vremya (Time), the periodical he edited.

Best Known for his novels and plays, Somerset Maugham also produced the most delightfully engaging and absorbing non-fiction, of which The Gentleman in the Parlour is a prime example. First published in 1935 it is the account of a journey the author took form Rangoon to Haiphong.Whether by river to Mandalay, on horse through the mountains and forests of the Shan States to Bangkok, or onwards by sea, Maugham's muse is in the spirit of Hazlitt, who wrote: 'It is great to shake off the trammels of the world and public opinion...and become the creature of the moment.and to be known by no other title than "The Gentleman in the Parlour".'

Portuguese explorations opened the sea-route to Asia, bringing armed trading to the Indian Ocean. This Element examines the impact of the 1511 Portuguese conquest of the port-kingdom of Melaka on early travel literature. Putting into dialogue accounts from Portuguese, mestico, and Malay perspectives, this study re-examines early modern 'discovery' as a cross-cultural trope. Trade and travel were intertwined while structured by religion. Rather than newness or wonder, Portuguese representations focus on recovering what is known and grafting Asian knowledges-including local histories-onto European epistemologies. Framing Portuguese rule as a continuation of the sultanate, they re-spatialize Melaka into a European city. However, this model is complicated by a second one of accidental discovery facilitated by native agents. For Malay texts too, travel traverses known routes and spaces. Malay travelers insert themselves into foreign spaces by forging new kinship alliances, even as indigenous networks were increasingly disrupted by European incursions.

Greece and Asia Minor proved an irresistible lure to English visitors in the seventeenth century. These lands were criss-crossed by adventurers, merchants, diplomats and men of the cloth. In particular, John Covel (1638-1722) - chaplain to the Levant Company in the 1670s, later Master of Christ's College, Cambridge - was representative of a thoroughly eccentric band of Englishmen who saw Greece and the Ottoman world through the lens of classical history. Using a variety of sources, including Covel's largely unpublished diaries, Lucy Pollard shows that these curious travellers imported, alongside their copies of Pausanias and Strabo, a package of assumptions about the societies they discovered. Disparaging contemporary Greeks as unworthy successors to their classical ancestors allowed Englishmen to view themselves as the true inheritors of classical culture, even as - when opportunity arose - they removed antiquities from the sites they described. At the same time, they often admired the Turks, about whom they had fewer preconceptions. This is a major contribution to reception and post-Restoration ideas about antiquity.

Henry Lansdell was one of the great travellers of the Victorian age. Unlike many explorers of the time, Lansdell was open to different cultures and his travels yielded detailed accounts that were free from the racial and religious prejudices typical of the period. Chinese Central Asia recounts Lansdell's 9,000-mile journey across the Tian Shan Mountains and into Western China, and describes the peoples he encountered, their history and religion, crafts and customs, modes of dress, natural history, trade and medicine. The two-volume set provides the first account in the English language of Chinese Turkestan, contains an extensive bibliography of more than 750 books and includes a new introduction by Irina Kantarbaeva-Bill.

'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.

Norman Douglas, one of the 20th century's great travellers in Italy, was for most of his life inextricably, passionately, connected to the Bay of Naples. This breathtaking sweep of sea and coastline - dominated by Vesuvius and with Pozzuoli and Sorrento standing sentinel - was Douglas' first experience of Italy. It was here, on the island of Capri, that he died, some 55 years after first buying a villa in Naples. Siren Land, Douglas' first travel book, is a homage to a part of the world that captivated him more than any other. Weaving the myths of the Sirens into the landscape and history of the region, Douglas writes with knowledge and an irrepressible exuberance of the past and the present, of legends and archaeology, folklore and daily life, patron saints, local ghosts, wine and the wind. As the summer draws to a close, Douglas' prose becomes suffused with a melancholy tinged with excitement at what still remains to be discovered: 'relics of Roman rule, of old Hellas, or medieval romance... These are the delights of Siren Land'. 'What makes Siren Land exceptional is the quality of the telling. Weaving scholarship, impressions, fact and fantasy into an intricate fabric as enchantingly entertaining and full of human interest as the best of fairy tales or ancient myths. One of the most memorable books of its genre' - Mark Holloway, in his introduction to Siren Land.

Even before the advent of mass tourism, Verona was a popular destination for travellers, including those undertaking the popular 'Grand Tour' across Europe. In this book, Caroline Webb compares the experiences of travellers from the era of Shakespeare to the years following the incorporation of the Veneto into the new kingdom of Italy in 1866. She considers their reasons for visiting Verona as well as their experiences and expectations once they arrived. The majority of English visitors between 1670 and 1760 were young members of the aristocracy, accompanied by tutors, who arrived on their way to or from Rome, as part of a 'Grand Tour' intended to 'finish' their classical education. With the Industrial Revolution in the second half of the eighteenth century, and the resultant increasing wealth of the upper middle classes, the number of visitors to Verona increased although this tourism was derailed once Napoleon invaded Italy in the late 1790s. After 1815 and the allied victory at Waterloo, there was a new flood of visitors previously deprived of the opportunity of continental travel during the Napoleonic wars. As the nineteenth century progressed, especially with the arrival of the railway, an increasing number of visitors appeared from across Europe and even from across the Atlantic, keen to explore the fabled city of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In comparing a myriad of varied accounts, this book provides an unrivalled perspective on the history of one of Italy's most seductive cities.

The eighteenth century witnessed the publication of an unprecedented number of voyages and travels, genuine and fictional. Within a genre distinguished by its diversity, curiosity, and experimental impulses, Katrina O'Loughlin investigates not just how women in the eighteenth century experienced travel, but also how travel writing facilitated their participation in literary and political culture. She canvases a range of accounts by intrepid women, including Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters, Lady Craven's Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople, Eliza Justice's A Voyage to Russia, and Anna Maria Falconbridge's Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone. Moving from Ottoman courts to theatres of war, O'Loughlin shows how gender frames access to people and spaces outside Enlightenment and Romantic Britain, and how travel provides women with a powerful cultural form for re-imagining their place in the world.

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.

In 1974, Paul M. Fink published Backpacking Was the Only Way, a memoir of exploration in the Smoky Mountain backcountry that is long out of print. The basis of the book was a journal kept from 1914 to 1938, combined with evocative photographs that Fink compiled into a manuscript he called Mountain Days. The manuscript is now considered to be a unique and insightful first-person account of the region. Containing rare historical accounts of the manways, camps, and cabins once used by adventurers exploring the mountains before the advent of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, this is the first widely-accessible publication of Mountain Days. This edition features a new foreword by Ken Wise, professor and director of the Great Smoky Mountain Regional Project at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville's John C. Hodges Library. An open access edition of Mountains Days is available from the Hunter Library at Western Carolina University.

The Innocents Abroad is one of the most prominent and influential travel books ever written about Europe and the Holy Land. In it, the collision of the American “New Barbarians” and the European “Old World” provides much comic fodder for Mark Twain—and a remarkably perceptive lens on the human condition. Gleefully skewering the ethos of American tourism in Europe, Twain’s lively satire ultimately reveals just what it is that defines cultural identity. As Twain himself points out, “Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” And Jane Jacobs observes in her Introduction, “If the reader is American, he may also find himself on a tour of his own psyche.”

In the second half of the nineteenth century, accounts of the journey down the Nile became increasingly common. This narrative by William John Loftie (1839-1911), who wrote prolifically on travel, art, architecture and history, was published in 1879. (His A Century of Bibles is also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection.) Loftie spent in total about 15 months in the Nile valley over several seasons, and justifies his book by the rate of archaeological discoveries: 'books published even three years ago are already behind the times'. He gives details of his journeys to and from Egypt, and of visits to the famous sites, but, unusually, he takes notice of the current political and economic state of Egypt, and is trenchant in some of his criticisms. He also goes off the beaten tourist track, hiring donkeys to make excursions away from the river, rather than travelling only by boat.

The charm of Madrid is elusive, but for those who know how to find it, Madrid has magic. Its magic can be found in the shadow cast over the present by the past. In this Traveller's Reader, a city that was once the seat of power for perhaps the most ambitious political enterprise the western world had seen since the fall of Rome, the Spanish Empire, is brought to life in vivid diaries, letters, memoirs and histories. The Earl of Clarendon describes seventeenth-century bullfights; Salvador Dali plays a surrealist joke on a snooty barman at the Ritz; Rubens visits the Alcázar; Manet is at the Prado; generals and anarchists meet in the Puerta del Sol. The many stories included here evoke for today's tourist the dramas and personalities of a city's past, by drawing on the eyewitness accounts and commentaries of visitors and residents of earlier centuries. Hugh Thomas has chosen these and other vivid snapshots of Madrid's history from diaries, letters, memoirs and novels across five centuries to delight and fascinate the armchair and prospective traveller alike.

One of the most revealing things about national character is the way that citizens react to and report on their travels abroad. Oftentimes a tourist's experience with a foreign place says as much about their country of origin as it does about their destination. A Happy Holiday examines the travels of English-speaking Canadian men and women to Britain and Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It describes the experiences of tourists, detailing where they went and their reactions to tourist sites, and draws attention to the centrality of culture and the sensory dimensions of overseas tourism. Among the specific topics explored are travellers' class relationships with people in the tourism industry, impressions of historic landscapes in Britain and Europe, descriptions of imperial spectacles and cultural sights, the use of public spaces, and encounters with fellow tourists and how such encounters either solidified or unsettled national subjectivities. Cecilia Morgan draws our attention to the important ambiguities between empire and nation, and how this relationship was dealt with by tourists in foreign lands. Based on personal letters, diaries, newspapers, and periodicals from across Canada, A Happy Holiday argues that overseas tourism offered people the chance to explore questions of identity during this period, a time in which issues such as gender, nation, and empire were the subject of much public debate and discussion.

'New York is an aquarium ... where there are nothing but hellbenders and lungfish and slimy, snag-toothed groupers and sharks' In 1935 Henry Miller set off from his adopted home, Paris, to revisit his native land, America. Aller Retour New York, his exuberant, humorous missive to his friend Alfred Perles describing the trip and his return journey on a Dutch steamer, is filled with vivid reflections on his hellraising antics, showing Miller at the height of his powers. This edition also includes Via Dieppe-Newhaven, his entertaining account of a failed attempt to visit England. 'The greatest American writer' Bob Dylan