'Bags of fish for cats - 50 pence'. So it was written, on a chalkboard sign outside a fresh fishmonger's, under the arches of the raised promenade along the beachfront of England's newly super trendy and booming seaside City of Brighton and Hove. In Brighton Babylon, PK Heights is a Grade II listed maisonette flat in one of the City's up and coming Regency Squares that provides the elegant base for a series of interlocking true stories about the city's people and their lives. Newly relocated from London, Brighton resident Peter Jarrette combines and intertwines his stories, using a colourful palette that is one part Brokeback Beach and three parts seawater. He vividly portrays a selection of suspect characters and shocking episodes; much like the curious bits and pieces that might be on offer in one of those bags of fish for cats. To the author's consternation, the residents and visitors are a thoroughly peculiar and motley crew. This former string of south coast fishing villages with a royal and decadent past may now be a thoroughly cosmopolitan City and even aspire to being an international hub, but it has not yet lost its renowned and celebrated dark side, far from it. Brighton Babylon is populated by a cast of unsavoury hobos and bother boys; Yardie obsessed golden shower webmasters from nearby Crawley; mistakenly racist London hairdressers; strangely scripted market researchers; extemporised short-haul cabin crew; pushy airline First Officers; politically incorrect new food emporia; a vengeful, crumbling resort Pier and a locally obsessed, cat-mad press pack.

As Suid-Afrikaner wat in Engeland woon, het André Pretorius die geleentheid om plekke te besoek wat vir die meeste van ons net drome bly. Maar met sy uitstekende skryfwerk bring hy in hierdie boek talle van die eksotiese plekke naby sy lesers.

Hy laat ons deel in die soektog na ’n kelim in die mark van Marrakesj, in die nostalgie van Nobelpryswenner Orhan Pamuk se Istanboel, in die verhewe skoonheid van die St. Pieterskerk in Rome en in ’n bootrit op die magtige Irrawaddy-rivier in Birma gedurende die reënseisoen wanneer dit voel asof die waters van hemel en aarde versmelt.

Daar is ook vermaaklike oomblikke, soos wanneer hy aan ’n wynproe-cum-marathon in die Medoc-vallei deelneem (met voorspelbare gevolge) en wanneer hy met net ’n klein lappie as bedekking dit na ’n openbare bad in Boedapest waag.

In English Explorers in the East (1738-1745). The Travels of Thomas Shaw, Charles Perry and Richard Pococke, Rachel Finnegan offers an account of the influential travel writings of three rival explorers, whose eastern travel books were printed within a decade of each other. Making use of historical records, Finnegan examines the personal and professional motives of the three authors for producing their eastern travels; their methods of researching, drafting, and publicising their works while still abroad; their relationships with each other, both while travelling and on their return to England; and the legacy of their combined works. She also provides a survey of the main features (both textual and visual) of the travel books themselves.

Following on from Jeffrey Benson's first volume of travel diaries, One More for the Road, comes a second instalment, as one of the food and drink world's intrepid voyagers continues on his way. No Half Measures whisks the reader to the luxury resorts of the Indian Ocean, tasting cutting-edge cuisine and fine wines on five continents, and celebrates all the cultural diversity the world still has to offer.As before, Benson gives us both barrels of modern travel experience, the vintage and the vin ordinaire, the sublime and the ridiculous, in generous and richly evocative accounts of journeys among family and friends, wine students and superstar chefs. There are glorious gastronomic moments and glimpses of the splendour of the natural world, as well as comic interludes and the odd despairing grumble, all in the company of our witty and humane chaperone.Fasten your seat-belts: it's going to be a thoroughly enjoyable ride.

This collection On Travel is clever, funny, provoking and confrontational by turn. In a pyrotechnic display of cracking one- liners, cynical word play and comic observation, it mines three thousand years of wit and wisdom: from Martha Gellhorn to Confucius and from Pliny to Paul Theroux.