Examines the experiences of Japanese travellers during the 1860s and 1870s, particularly with regard to their impressions of Victorian Britain. Japan had been culturally isolated for the previous 200 years and the observations they made still underpin much of their understanding today.

Dutch Sailmaker and sailor Jan Struys' (c.1629-c.1694) account of his various overseas travels became a bestseller after its first publication in Amsterdam in 1676, and was later translated into English, French, German and Russian. This new book depicts the story of its author's life as well as the first singular analysis of the Struys text.

Lose yourself in this dazzling travelogue of the idyllic Greek Islands by the king of travel writing and real-life family member of The Durrells in Corfu. 'Incandescent.' Andre Aciman 'A magician.' The Times 'Invades the reader's every sense ... Remarkable.' Victoria Hislop 'Nobody knows the Greek islands like Durrell.' New York Times White-washed houses drenched in pink bougainvillea; dazzling seascapes and rugged coastlines; colourful harbours in quaint fishing villages; shady olive and cypress groves; terraces bathed in the Aegean sun ... The Greek islands conjure up a treasure-chest of images - but nobody brings them to life as vividly as the legendary travel writer Lawrence Durrell. It was during his youth in Corfu - which his brother Gerald fictionalised in My Family and Other Animals, later filmed as The Durrells In Corfu - that his love affair with the Mediterranean began. Now, in this glorious tour of the Greek islands, he weaves evocative descriptions of these idyllic landscapes with insights into their ancient history, and shares luminous personal memories of his time in the local communities. No traveller to Greece or admirer of Durrell's magic should miss it. 'Masterly ... Casts a spell.' Jan Morris 'Charming ... Delightful.' Sunday Times 'Our last great garlicky master of the vanishing Mediterranean.' Richard Holmes 'Like long letters from a civilized and very funny friend - the prose as luminous as the Mediterranean air he loves.' Time

In 1912, a young D.H. Lawrence left England for the first time and travelled to northern Italy. He spent nearly a year on the shores of Lake Garda, lodged in elegantly decaying houses set amid lemon groves and surrounded by the fading life of traditional Italy. This is a travel book unlike any other, where landscapes and people are backdrops to Lawrence's deeper wanderings - into philosophy, opinion, life, nature, religion and the fate of man. With sensuous descriptions of late harvests, darkening days and fragile ancient traditions, Twilight in Italy is suffused with nostalgia and premonition. For, looming over the idyll of rural Italy hover dark spectres: the arrival of the industrial age and the brewing storm of World War I, upheavals that would change the face of Europe forever.

In Love with Paris is an irresistible combination of 50 mouth-watering sweet and savoury recipes and heart-melting love stories. Take a culinary walk through the city of love and its most romantic spots, and enjoy classic French cuisine, from croque madame and coq au vin, to madeleines and lemon tarts. Immerse yourself in the city that inspired writers and photographers like Victor Hugo, Ernest Hemingway, Francis Scott Fitzgerald and Victor Doisneau, and visit the iconic locations of films like The Lovers on the Bridge and Amelie. In Love with Paris will make you fall in love with Paris - again and again.

In Richard Pococke's Letters from the East (1737-1740), Rachel Finnegan provides edited transcripts of the full run of correspondence from Richard Pococke's famous eastern voyage from 1737-40, together with updated biographical accounts of the author and his correspondents (his mother, Elizabeth Pococke and his uncle and patron, Bishop Thomas Milles).

A collection of the greatest women's travel writing selected by journalist and presenter Mariella Frostrup. From Constantinople to Crimea; from Antarctica to the Andes. Throughout history adventurous women have made epic, record-breaking journeys under perilous circumstances. Whether escaping constricted societies back home or propelled by a desire for independence, footloose females have ventured to the four corners of the earth and recorded their exploits for posterity. For too long their triumphs have been overshadowed by those of their male counterparts, whose honourable failures make bigger news. In curating this collection of first-hand accounts, broadcaster, writer and traveller Mariella Frostrup puts female explorers back on the map. Her selection includes explorers from the 1700s to the present day, from iconic heroines to lesser-known eccentrics, celebrating 300 years of wild women and their amazing adventures over land, sea and air. Reviews for Wild Women: 'A stirring whistle-stop tour, led by women who often risked disapproval in leaving home to roam the world' Vanity Fair 'Like any good travel book, Wild Women succeeds in casting the reader's mind off on journeys of its own, inspiring fresh plans and what the Germans call Fernweh, or a longing for faraway places' TLS 'Required reading for anyone who assumed that 'the road less travelled' was a solely masculine preserve' Sunday Independent

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. Peel Me a Lotus, the companion volume to Mermaid Singing relays their move to Hydra where they bought a house and grappled with the chaos of domestic life and three children whilst also becoming the centre of an informal community of artists and writers. The group later included Leonard Cohen who became their lodger and his girlfriend Marianne Ihlen. Clift paints an evocative picture of the characters and sun-drenched rhythms of traditional life, long before backpackers and mass tourism descended.

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.
In The Middle Passage, Naipaul watches a Trinidadian movie audience greeting Humphrey Bogart's appearance with cries of "That is man " He ventures into a Trinidad slum so insalubrious that the locals call it the Gaza Strip. He follows a racially charged election campaign in British Guiana (now Guyana) and marvels at the Gallic pretension of Martinique society, which maintains the fiction that its roads are extensions of France's "routes nationales." And throughout he relates the ghastly episodes of the region's colonial past and shows how they continue to inform its language, politics, and values. The result is a work of novelistic vividness and dazzling perspicacity that displays Naipaul at the peak of his powers.

Over twenty years ago, Sven Lindqvist, one of the great pioneers of a new kind of experiential history writing, set out across Central Africa. Obsessed with a single line from Conrad's The Heart of Darkness - Kurtz's injunction to 'Exterminate All the Brutes' - he braided an account of his experiences with a profound historical investigation, revealing to the reader with immediacy and cauterizing force precisely what Europe's imperial powers had exacted on Africa's peoples over the course of the preceding two centuries. Shocking, humane, crackling with imaginative energies and moral purpose, Exterminate All the Brutes stands as an impassioned, timeless classic. It is essential reading for anybody ready to come to terms with the brutal, racist history on which Europe built its wealth.

"Travel Fact and Travel Fiction" contains 18 articles by different authors on important examples of travel writing from Classical Antiquity (Herodotus) until the first half of the nineteenth century. Discussed are among others Herodotus, Egeria, Rubruck, Marco Polo, Columbus, Joachim Du Bellay, Busbequius, Gryphius, Goethe and Dickens. Central themes are fiction, literary tradition, scholarly discovery and observation.

For centuries, travel was an important part of a gardener's initial and continuing professional training. Educational journeys to parks and gardens at home and abroad were consistently recorded in lengthy reports and articles for professional journals. The travel report by Hans Jancke (1850-1920), a court gardener who served the Prussian kings in Potsdam, Germany, is typical of this genre. Jancke's manuscript, which until now remained unpublished, describes his 1874-1875 apprenticeship at Knowsley, the seat of the Earl of Derby near Liverpool, England.

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:

• the story of his life (called “Reminiscences concerning the life of William James Bushnell Chapman”) until 1902, written at his home Mont Verdun or Sandula, Mombolo, Angola and dated 22nd March 1918, his sixtieth birthday anniversary.
• his reminiscences from 1903 to 1916
• an account of the entry of the Trek-Boers into Angola and of their sojourn during the forty-eight years they struggled in that country under Portuguese rule, which he was still writing in 1932.

Through these diaries, and with extensive research by Nicol Stassen, we are offered a unique insight into Chapmans’s journeys, travels and encounters.

In the summer of 1936, W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice visited Iceland on commission to write a travel book, but found themselves capturing concerns on a scale that were far more international. 'Though writing in a "holiday" spirit,' commented Auden, 'its authors were all the time conscious of a threatening horizon to their picnic - world-wide unemployment, Hitler growing everyday more powerful and a world-war more inevitable.' The result is the remarkable Letters from Iceland, a collaboration in poetry and prose, reportage and correspondence, published in 1937 with the Spanish Civil War newly in progress, beneath the shadow of looming world war.

Charles R. Cockerell (1788-1863) was one of the most significant nineteenth-century British architects and a major player in the cultural shift from the Georgian eighteenth to the Victorian nineteenth century. Charles R. Cockerell (1788-1863) was one of the most significant nineteenth-century British architects and a major player in the cultural shift from the Georgian eighteenth to the Victorian nineteenth century. Cockerell's travelsin the eastern Mediterranean between 1810 and 1817 were the formative experience of his life. His forty letters from this period, held in the archives of the Royal Institute of British Architects and published here for the first time, give crucial day-to-day insights into his actions, thoughts and feelings in relation to the intricate histories of the re-discovery and sales of the Aegina and Bassae marbles and, equally importantly, illuminate his hugely significant work on temple architecture and sculpture in mainland Greece, the great cities of Asia Minor, and the significant temples of Sicily. Drawing on these letters, and on some 150 unpublished letters sent by his friends while they were all in Greece and now held in the British Museum, this book elucidates what Cockerell did and why by analyzing his methods of work and their significance. It discusses Cockerell's aesthetic and conceptual development during his time abroad, particularly his influential part in the changing vision of Greek sculpture and architecture, from Winkelmann's static ideal to one rooted in dramatic tension and contextual contingency. The book unravels the emergence of Cockerell's crucial historical perspective and shows how he arrived at a new view of the ancient Greek past as made up of real lived lives, rather than just existing as a back drop to the present. By offeringa complete edition of the RIBA letters, this book fills a significant gap in our understanding of the thought and work of one of the formative spirits of nineteenth century visual historical culture. SUSAN PEARCE is Professor Emeritus of Museum Studies, University of Leicester. THERESA ORMROD has extensive experience in archival research, manuscript transcription and editing.

Originally published in 1932, this book contains an edited edition in French of the autobiographical account by the sailor and tennis champion Alain Gerbault of his solo circumnavigation of the globe in the 1920s. The story of Gerbault's feat was originally the subject of three volumes, here condensed into one and supplied with a glossary and a guide to certain French phrases and idioms that appear in the text. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Gerbault's feats or nautical history.

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.

When Dreams Collide is Nicholas Allan's intimate pilgrimage across the former states of Yugoslavia. Shedding the received knowledge of headlines, he explores the splintered co-evolution of these lands over the last ten centuries, guided by the inimitable Rebecca West's masterpiece, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. Written 80 years in the past, West's account serves as a fascinating reference for the optimistic interwar years of the 20th century between the Ottoman decline and the Nazi onset. The evolving balancing act of Tito's Yugoslav experiment and the atrocities following its break-up were still to come. Collapsing empires and proud young nations, monasteries and mosques, brotherhood, hatred, war, music, frescoes, food, costume, people, mountains, rivers and seas, the distant rumbles of the centuries take many forms. At a turning point in his own life, Allan is drawn to explore this complex area, through the lens of his part Eastern European heritage. He records personal encounters and richly drawn characters interwoven with history and art, politics and religion (too often one and the same). Enhanced with delightful hand-drawn maps of the Balkans including Montenegro, Kosovo, Serbia, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia. 73 informative photograph's showing some the areas key historical figures including Ibrahim Rugova, Hitler, Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, Tito, Draza Mihailovic, Slobodan Milosevic, Alecksandar Vucic, Alija Izetbegovic, Radovan Karadzic, Ante Pavelic, Franjo Tudjman, and Fitzroy Maclean.

Aged sixteen, Alexander Burnes (1805 41) took up a post in the Bombay army, and speedily learned both Hindustani and Persian. His skills led him to political work, and he himself proposed a covert expedition to Bukhara, to survey the country, but also to observe the expansionist activities of the Russians in central Asia. In 1832, he set off, with an army doctor, and two Indians as surveyor and secretary. They travelled in local dress and adopted whatever personas a situation required. Having reached Bukhara, they continued overland to the Caspian Sea, and then to Tehran, returning to Bombay by sea in 1833. This three-volume account of his adventures, published in 1834, was an instant bestseller. Volume 2 completes the journey, and describes the geography and history of central Asia. Burnes continued his diplomatic activities in Afghanistan, but was murdered there by a mob in 1841."

The Great Game, a coinage credited to the British officer Arthur Conolly (1807 42), refers to the nineteenth-century rivalry between Britain and Russia as each power sought supremacy in Central Asia. In a climate of tension and suspicion that the Russians might attempt to invade India via Afghanistan, Conolly, returning from sick leave in England, embarked in 1829 on an expedition through the region. His narrative provides observations on the various Asiatic peoples he encountered, including the social, religious and political aspects of their cultures. He describes also the many dangers he had to deal with, requiring him to assume a series of false identities. The risks that Conolly faced were underscored some years later, when he was captured and executed in Bukhara. Volume 1 recounts the first part of his journey, from St Petersburg, through the Caucasus, via Tiflis and Tehran, towards Herat."

The Great Game, a coinage credited to the British officer Arthur Conolly (1807 42), refers to the nineteenth-century rivalry between Britain and Russia as each power sought supremacy in Central Asia. In a climate of tension and suspicion that the Russians might attempt to invade India via Afghanistan, Conolly, returning from sick leave in England, embarked in 1829 on an expedition through the region. His narrative provides observations on the various Asiatic peoples he encountered, including the social, religious and political aspects of their cultures. He describes also the many dangers he had to deal with, requiring him to assume a series of false identities. The risks that Conolly faced were underscored some years later, when he was captured and executed in Bukhara. Volume 2 recounts the time Conolly spent in Afghanistan. Included also are appendices addressing the possible overland invasion of India as well as the history of Afghanistan."

John Bell (1691 1780) trained as a physician, but preferred a life of travel and diplomacy. He entered the service of Tsar Peter the Great of Russia, and had already taken part (as the expedition's doctor) in a government mission to Persia in 1715 18 when he was asked to join a further embassy to China. This two-volume work, published in 1763, describes both these journeys. Volume 2 takes up the story with the embassy's reception in Beijing, with accounts of the Chinese emperor and his court, and the return journey. It also includes the journal of Lorenz Lange (c.1690 1752), a Swede in Russian service who was an agent at the court of Beijing at the time of Bell's own mission, and short accounts of Bell's later visits to Derbent on the Caspian Sea, and to Constantinople. This is a delightful account of an area then hardly known in the west."