'Sometimes you just have to do something, don't you? Sometimes an injustice comes along and you think 'No, this cannot be', and rather than just turn off the TV, you know it's time to act. At sixteen the Dalai Lama became the political leader of Tibet at the very moment it was invaded by Communist China - nine years later, amid terror, brutality and killing, he was forced to abandon his people. I couldn't help noticing, on the same day he was making his epic escape, I was being born.' And so begins Isabel Losada's extraordinary For Tibet With Love in which she explores whether it's possible for an ordinary person to change the world, just a little, and if something so serious can be achieved with joy in one's heart. From visits to Nepal and Tibet, to meetings with the Chinese ambassador and Tibetan awareness-raising groups, Isabel single-handedly hatches a stunning PR coup involving Nelson's Column, a 15 metre banner and a base-jumping parachutist that captured headlines worldwide. And then she meets the Dalai Lama...Warm and funny, moving and thought-provoking, the astonishing For Tibet With Love celebrates the fact that we can make a difference.

Airportness takes the reader on a single day's journey through all the routines and stages of an ordinary flight. From curbside to baggage, and pondering the minutes and hours of sitting in between, Christopher Schaberg contemplates the mundane world of commercial aviation to discover "the nature of flight." For Schaberg this means hearing planes in the sky, recognizing airline symbols in unlikely places, and navigating the various zones of transit from sliding doors, to jet bridge, to lavatory. It is an ongoing, swarming ecosystem that unfolds each day as we fly, get stranded, and arrive at our destinations. Airportness turns out to be more than just architecture and design elements-rather, it is all the rumble and buzz of flight, the tedium of travel as well as the feelings of uplift.

In recent decades the masquerade has enjoyed a revival in literary and cultural studies. It has been seen as a symptom of the irrational trends permeating the Age of Reason and as a sign of the instability, arbitrariness as well as non-essentiality of personal identity; notions testifying to affinities between the eighteenth century and our own time. In Quest of the Self offers a new consideration not only of the masquerade as such, but also of the ways in which it was transposed into literature during the period. Here it emerges as a dominant trope governing the poetics and the ideological dimensions of selected eighteenth-century novels by Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett and Laurence Sterne. Throughout, the book demonstrates that the travelling protagonists of the novels, metaphorically speaking, take part in the 'masquerade of the world', finding themselves in quest of their own selves and struggling to determine who they really are.

A Financial Times Travel Book of the Year 2021 Where can travel writing go in the twenty-first century? Author and lifelong travel writing aficionado Tim Hannigan sets out in search of this most venerable of genres, hunting down its legendary practitioners and confronting its greatest controversies. Is it ever okay for travel writers to make things up, and just where does the frontier between fact and fiction lie? What actually is travel writing, and is it just a genre dominated by posh white men? What of travel writing's queasy colonial connections? Travelling from Monaco to Eton, from wintry Scotland to sun-scorched Greek hillsides, Hannigan swills beer with the indomitable Dervla Murphy, sips tea with the doyen of British explorers, delves into the diaries of Wilfred Thesiger and Patrick Leigh Fermor, and gains unexpected insights from Colin Thubron, Samanth Subramanian, Kapka Kassabova, William Dalrymple and many others. But along the way he realises how much is at stake: can his own love of travel writing survive this journey? The Travel Writing Tribe tackles head on the fierce critical debates usually confined to strictly academic discussions of the genre. This highly original book compels readers and travellers of all kinds to think about travel writing in new ways.

Paris is the world capital of memory and desire, concludes one of the writers in this intimate and insightful collection of memoirs of the city. Living in Paris changed these writers forever.
In thirty-two personal essays more than half of which are here published for the first time the writers describe how they were seduced by Paris and then began to see things differently. They came to write, to cook, to find love, to study, to raise children, to escape, or to live the way it s done in French movies; they came from the United States, Canada, and England; from Iran, Iraq, and Cuba; and a few from other parts of France. And they stayed, not as tourists, but for a long time; some are still living there. They were outsiders who became insiders, who here share their observations and revelations. Some are well-known writers: Diane Johnson, David Sedaris, Judith Thurman, Joe Queenan, and Edmund White. Others may be lesser known but are no less passionate on the subject.
Together, their reflections add up to an unusually perceptive and multifaceted portrait of a city that is entrancing, at times exasperating, but always fascinating. They remind us that Paris belongs to everyone it has touched, and to each in a different way."

This work introduced a major modern author to the reading public. Doig's life was formed among the sheepherders and other denizens of small-town saloons and valley ranches as he wandered beside his restless father. New Preface by the Author.

In June 2016, Rodrigo Duterte won the Philippine presidential election by a landslide. Infamous for his bombastic temper and un-PC wisecracks, he is waging a brutal drug war that has killed more than 12,000 people so far. Over the last nine years, British writer Tom Sykes has travelled extensively in the Philippines in order to understand the Duterte phenomenon, interviewing friends and enemies of 'The Punisher' -- as he is known -- in politics, the media, the arts and civil society. Sykes witnesses anti-government demonstrations in the capital Manila and visits the provincial city of Davao, where Duterte began his crusade against crime using police and vigilante death squads. By delving into Duterte's troubled childhood of violent rebellion, Sykes discovers what motivates the man today in his pursuit of a merciless 'war on the poor' -- as Amnesty has described it -- that has no end in sight. The Realm of the Punisher also examines oppressed and marginalized groups in the modern Philippines through encounters with a transgender rights campaigner, an 86-year-old former sex slave to the Japanese in the Second World War, a public artist who must work while under attack from Maoist rebels, and slum-dwellers resisting violent eviction by a real estate company. The past is never far away from these present-day problems and Sykes' travels to festivals, cemeteries, war memorials and a tomb housing an embalmed corpse reveal the ways in which key figures in Philippine history -- from Jose Rizal to Ferdinand Marcos -- have influenced current affairs. Funny, tragic, enlightening and uncompromising -- and infused with the author's strong sense of social justice -- The Realm of the Punisher is the first major travel book by a Westerner to explore Duterte's Philippines.

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR DOES 'I LOVE YOU' EVEN MEAN THE SAME THING AS 'JE T'AIME'? When Lauren Collins met a Frenchman at a party one night in London, she had no idea that she would one day wake up to find herself married to him, living in Geneva. Feeling almost voiceless in French-speaking Switzerland, Lauren was no longer able to order a salad, let alone talk to her husband's parents. But a language barrier was no match for love... A smart, funny and thoughtful look at how language shapes our lives, When in French shows what happens when two languages, and two very different cultures, collide.

In 1986, Charles Nicholl travels through Thailand to learn about the spiritual traditions of forest Buddhism in the north of the country. But interesting things have a habit of getting in the way. When Nicholl meets Harry, an old French Indochina hand, on the night train north with his tales of Kachin jade and Shan opium it leads to a journey along the banks of the Mekong, into the Golden Triangle and then across the border into Burma, in the company of the book s Thai heroine, Kitai.

Morocco has long been a mythic land, firmly rooted in the European colonial imagination. For more than a century it has been appropriated by travellers, explorers, writers and artists. It is just these images and imaginings that are now being reconstructed for nostalgic consumption. In Moroccan Dreams, Claudio Minca examines this aestheticised re-enactment of the colonial, exploring the ways in which Moroccans themselves have become complicit in the re-writing of their homes and lives. Richly illustrated, the book provides a fascinating journey that will engage and delight all those enamoured of Morocco and its extraordinary geographies.

The gripping true story of one man's ten year expedition from a village in West Africa to the Arctic Circle WITH A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR Scorching heat, rich, fertile soil, and treacherous snakes marked the landscape in which Tete-Michel grew up in 1950s Togo, West Africa. When he discovered a book on Greenland as a teen, this distant land became an instant obsession - he was determined to journey to the place these pages had revealed to him and embarked on the adventure of a lifetime. A book of rich and immersive travel writing, Michel the Giant invites the reader to journey alongside an audacious Kpomassie as he makes his way from the equator to the bitter cold of the artic and settles into life with the Inuit peoples, adapting to their foods and customs. Part memoir, part anthropological observation this captivating narrative teems with nuanced observations on community, belonging and the universality of human experience. This title has been previously published as An African in Greenland

Far from the glittering cities of Beijing and Shanghai, China's borderlands are populated by around one hundred million people who are not Han Chinese. For many of these restive minorities, the old Chinese adage 'the mountains are high and the Emperor far away', meaning Beijing's grip on power is tenuous and its influence unwelcome, continues to resonate. Travelling through China's most distant and unknown reaches, David Eimer explores the increasingly tense relationship between the Han Chinese and the ethnic minorities. Deconstructing the myths represented by Beijing, Eimer reveals a shocking and fascinating picture of a China that is more of an empire than a country.

A deeply affecting memoir of a childhood in Africa and the continent's horrendous wars, which Hartley witnessed at first hand as a journalist in the 1990s. Shortlisted for the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction, this is a masterpiece of autobiographical journalism. Aidan Hartley, a foreign correspondent, burned-out from the horror of covering the terrifying micro wars of the 1990s, from Rwanda to Bosnia, seeks solace and solitude in the remote mountains and deserts of southern Arabia and the Yemen, following his father's death. While there, he finds himself on the trail of the tragic story of an old friend of his father's, who fell in love and was murdered in southern Arabia fifty years ago. As the terrible events of the past unfold, Hartley finds his own kind of deliverance. 'The Zanzibar Chest' is a powerful story about a man witnessing and confronting extreme violence and being broken down by it, and of a son trying to come to terms with the death of a father whom he also saw as his best friend. It charts not only a love affair between two people, but also the British love affair with Arabia and the vast emptinesses of the desert, which become a fitting metaphor for the emotional and spiritual condition in which Hartley finds himself.

'An entertaining book, written with Fort's characteristic conversational style... A real pleasure to read' - BBC Countryfile 'A wide-ranging, intelligent and bracingly enjoyable book' - The Literary Review 'Meticulously researched and seasoned with wry humour, this is a perceptive and richly rewarding read' - Mail on Sunday We have lived in villages a long time. The village was the first model for communal living. Towns came much later, then cities. Later still came suburbs, neighbourhoods, townships, communes, kibbutzes. But the village has endured. Across England, modernity creeps up to the boundaries of many, breaking the connection the village has with the land. With others, they can be as quiet as the graveyard as their housing is bought up by city 'weekenders', or commuters. The ideal chocolate box image many holidaying to our Sceptred Isle have in their minds eye may be true in some cases, but across the country the heartbeat of the real English village is still beating strongly - if you can find it. To this mission our intrepid historian and travel writer Tom Fort willingly gets on his trusty bicycle and covers the length and breadth of England to discover the essence of village life. His journeys will travel over six thousand years of communal existence for the peoples that eventually became the English. Littered between the historical analysis, are personal memories from Tom of the village life he remembers and enjoys today in rural Oxfordshire.

Beautiful, empowering and exhilarating: She Explores is a spirited celebration of female bravery and courage, and an inspirational companion for any woman who wants to travel the world on her own terms. Combining breathtaking travel photography with compelling personal narratives, She Explores shares the stories of 40 diverse women on unforgettable journeys in nature: women who live out of vans, trucks, and vintage trailers, hiking the wild, cooking meals over campfires, and sleeping under the stars. Women biking through the countryside, embarking on an unknown road trip, or backpacking through the outdoors with their young children in tow. Complementing the narratives are practical tips and advice for women planning their own trips, including preparing for a solo hike, must-haves for a road-trip kitchen, planning ahead for unknown territory, and telling your own story. A visually stunning and emotionally satisfying collection for any woman craving new landscapes and adventure. Gale Straub is the founder of She-Explores.com, a media platform for curious, creative women who love travel and outdoor adventure. For any woman who has ever been called outdoorsy... or who wants to be. Beautiful, empowering, and exhilarating, She Explores will inspire even the most outdoor-averse woman to connect with the landscape, take a leap of faith and find her community. Makes a wonderful birthday, graduation, or new going away gift for an adventurous woman. Great coffee table book to spark conversation about travel and exploration.

This entertaining and endlessly surprising book takes us on an exploration into every aspect of Japanese society from the most public to the most intimate. A series of meticulous investigations gradually uncovers the multi-faceted nature of a country and people who are even more extraordinary than they seem. Our journey encompasses religion, ritual, martial arts, manners, eating, drinking, hot baths, geishas, family, home, singing, wrestling, dancing, performing, clans, education, aspiration, sexes, generations, race, crime, gangs, terror, war, kindness, cruelty, money, art, imperialism, emperor, countryside, city, politics, government, law and a language that varies according to whom you are speaking. Clear-sighted, persistent, affectionate, unsentimental and honest - Alan Macfarlane shows us Japan as it has never been seen before.

Robert Twigger, poet and travel author, was in search of a new way up England when he stumbled across the Great North Line. From Christchurch on the South Coast to Old Sarum to Stonehenge, to Avebury, to Notgrove barrow, to Meon Hill in the midlands, to Thor's Cave, to Arbor Low stone circle, to Mam Tor, to Ilkley in Yorkshire and its three stone circles and the Swastika Stone, to several forts and camps in Northumberland to Lindisfarne (plus about thirty more sites en route). A single dead straight line following 1 degree 50 West up Britain. No other north-south straight line goes through so many ancient sites of such significance. Was it just a suggestive coincidence or were they built intentionally? Twigger walks the line, which takes him through Birmingham, Halifax and Consett as well as Salisbury Plain, the Peak district, and the Yorkshire moors. With a planning schedule that focused more on reading about shamanism and beat poetry than hardening his feet up, he sets off ever hopeful. He wild-camps along the way, living like a homeless bum, with a heart that starts stifled but ends up soaring with the beauty of life. He sleeps in a prehistoric cave, falls into a river, crosses a 'suicide viaduct' and gets told off by a farmer's wife for trespassing; but in this simple life he finds woven gold. He walks with others and he walks alone, ever alert to the incongruities of the edgelands he is journeying through.

The companion guide to the hysterical television show of the same name, in which Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant force their arrestingly simple pal Karl Pilkington on a global journey ""He'd have been happier in medieval times in a village where you didn't travel beyond the local community." --Stephen Merchant" A cult celebrity due to his role in "The Ricky Gervais Show," the most-downloaded podcast ever, Karl Pilkington has been accused of being a comic creation, so unburdened is he by complex thought--but that is truly just him. The trio's newest project mines Karl massive provinciality: put simply, Karl is not big on traveling. Given the choice, he'll go on vacation to Devon or Wales or, if pushed, eat English food on a package tour of the Mediterranean. So what happened when he was convinced by Gervais and Merchant to go on an epic adventure to see the Seven Wonders of the World? Does travel truly broaden the mind? Find out in Karl Pilkington's hilarious travel diaries.

Born in London to a Turkish mother and British father, Alev Scott moved to Istanbul to discover what it means to be Turkish in a country going through rapid political and social change, with an extraordinary past still linked to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and an ever more surprising present under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. From the European buzz of modern-day Constantinople to the Arabic-speaking towns of the south-east, Turkish Awakening investigates mass migration, urbanisation and economics in a country moving swiftly towards a new position on the world stage. This is the story of discovering a complex country from the outside-in, a candid account of overturned preconceptions and fresh understanding. Relating wide-ranging interviews and colourful personal experience, the author charts the evolving course of a country bursting with surprises - none more dramatic than the unexpected political protests of 2013 in Taksim Square, which have brought to light the emerging demands of a newly awakened Turkish people. Mass migration, urbanisation and a growing awareness of human rights have changed the social, economic and physical landscapes of a powerful country, and the 2013 protests were just one indication of the changes afoot in today's Turkey. Threatened as it is by recent developments in Syria and Iraq and the approaching danger of ISIS. Encompassing topics as varied as Aegean camel wrestling, transgender prostitution, politicised soap operas and riot tourism, this is a revelatory, at times humorous, at times moving, portrait of a country which is coming of age.

Like most travelers in Burma, Norman Lewis fell in love with the land and its people. Although much of the countryside was under the control of insurgent armies--the book was originally published in 1952--he managed, by steamboat, decrepit lorry, and dacoit-besieged train, to travel almost everywhere he wanted. This perseverance enabled him to see brilliant spectacles that are still out of our reach, and to meet all types of Burmese, from District officers to the inmates of Rangoon's jail. All the color, gaiety, and charm of the East spring to life with this master storyteller.

A unique take on modern life in Japan's capital city. A Japan of trains, every day to and fro, carriage scenes and theatre, vistas from the window, advertising posters. Each to be savoured through a specific Tokyo line - the Odakyu. Pitched as creative text and line-graphics, Tokyo Commute: Japanese Customs and Way of Life Viewed from the Odakyu Line offers on-track and off-track observations. A gallery of mirrors, musings, memories. This is less documentary than iconography, a poetics of Japanese routine and etiquette. It offers a wry diary of month-and-weekday observations, a 'map' of Shinjuku as key station and gathering-place, a run of notable Tokyo locations - from the National bunraku theatre to a Kawasaki sludge recycling centre. Other Odakyu travel involves the Hakone open air art gallery, Narita as both airport and temple complex, Yokohama as history and Chinatown. Essential reading for first-time, and second-time visitors, and even regular commuters.

Alive with the mayhem of the present and sparkling with William Dalrymple’s irrepressible wit, 'City of Djinns' is a fascinating portrait of a city.

Watched over and protected by the mischievous, invisible djinns, Delhi has, through their good offices, been saved from destruction many times over the centuries. With an extraordinary array of characters, from elusive eunuchs to the last remnants of the Raj, Dalrymple’s second book is a unique and dazzling feat of research. Over the course of a year he comes to know the bewildering city intimately, and brilliantly conveys its magical nature, peeling back successive layers of history, and interlacing innumerable stories from Delhi’s past and present.

If in 2017, a group of young men had decided to emulate this odyssey, they would probably only have managed a part of the journey. Conflict and bureaucracy would have barred their entry to many of the countries they tried to cross. However, in 1960, three young Cambridge graduates bought themselves an Austin A40 and set off on a marathon trip via Colombo to attend a friend's wedding in Cape Town. They took the long way there. Christopher Fenwick, along with his friends Robin Gaunt and John Maclay, set off across continents on the motoring adventure of their lives through Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa. Their staple diet was Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie, usually eaten at the roadside. They even meet old schoolfriends along the way in Iran and had tea with Mr. Nehru, the Indian Prime Minister, with his daughter Indira Gandhi and grandson Rajiv who were to follow in his footsteps. Their loyal saloon car suffered the ravages of potholed roads and mountains but friendly mechanics always came to their rescue, while the men soon became quite adept themselves at repairing and cannibalising the vehicle as it suffered various breakdowns en route. Eventually they made it to Ceylon from where they embarked for the last leg of their trip by boat via the Yemen, flying from there to Ethiopia and onwards through Africa to raise a glass of champagne in Cape Town.

A luminous exploration of exile - the people who have experienced it, and the places they inhabit - from the award-winning travel writer and author of The Immeasurable World and The Moor. 'Breathtakingly good . . . Exiles is completely sui generis.' EDMUND DE WAAL 'Atkins spins a marvellous tapestry of colourful tales, beautifully weaving history and travel accounts.' ANDREA WULF, author of The Invention of Nature 'A volume for our times.' SARA WHEELER, THE SPECTATOR 'A fascinating study of exile and its effects.' OBSERVER This is the story of three unheralded nineteenth-century dissidents, whose lives were profoundly shaped by the winds of empire, nationalism and autocracy that continue to blow strongly today: Louise Michel, a leader of the radical socialist government known as the Paris Commune; Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo, an enemy of British colonialism in Zululand; and Lev Shternberg, a militant campaigner against Russian tsarism. In Exiles, William Atkins travels to their islands of banishment - Michel's New Caledonia in the South Pacific, Dinuzulu's St Helena in the South Atlantic, and Shternberg's Sakhalin off the Siberian coast - in a bid to understand how exile shaped them and the people among whom they were exiled. In doing so he illuminates the solidarities that emerged between the exiled subject, on the one hand, and the colonised subject, on the other. Rendering these figures and the places they were forced to occupy in shimmering detail, Atkins reveals deeply human truths about displacement, colonialism and what it means to have and to lose a home. Occupying the fertile zone where history, biography and travel writing meet, Exiles is a masterpiece of imaginative empathy. '[Atkins] is humane, humble, and empathetic . . . beautiful and moving.' ILYA KAMINSKY, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa 'An incredible, brilliant act of retrieval.' PHILIP HOARE, author of Albert & the Whale 'A finely crafted and lyrical meditation.' TLS 'Gracefully written . . . Brilliant.' THE ECONOMIST 'Rarely has a book been more timely.' HISTORY TODAY *** Read The Moor and The Immeasureable World for more award-winning writing from William Atkins