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.

'A true masterpiece.' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'Simply beautiful.' STEPHEN MOSS 'Quietly courageous.' PATRICK BARKHAM 'Lyrical, wholehearted and wise.' LEE SCHOFIELD 'A knockout. I loved it.' MELISSA HARRISON 'Honest, raw and moving.' SOPHIE PAVELLE 'An extraordinary book by an extraordinary author.' CHRIS JONES 'A book of wit, wonder and of wisdom.' NICK ACHESON 'Beautiful.' NICOLA CHESTER - A visit to the rapid where she lost a cherished friend unexpectedly reignites Amy-Jane Beer’s love of rivers setting her on a journey of natural, cultural and emotional discovery. On New Year’s Day 2012, Amy-Jane Beer’s beloved friend Kate set out with a group of others to kayak the River Rawthey in Cumbria. Kate never came home, and her death left her devoted family and friends bereft and unmoored. Returning to visit the Rawthey years later, Amy realises how much she misses the connection to the natural world she always felt when on or close to rivers, and so begins a new phase of exploration. The Flow is a book about water, and, like water, it meanders, cascades and percolates through many lives, landscapes and stories. From West Country torrents to Levels and Fens, rocky Welsh canyons, the salmon highways of Scotland and the chalk rivers of the Yorkshire Wolds, Amy-Jane follows springs, streams and rivers to explore tributary themes of wildness and wonder, loss and healing, mythology and history, cyclicity and transformation. Threading together places and voices from across Britain, The Flow is a profound, immersive exploration of our personal and ecological place in nature.

A brilliantly witty and intelligent memoir of the adventures, discoveries, rescues, and narrow escapes of Martha Gellhorn, one of America's most important war correspondents and the third wife of Ernest Hemingway. "Gellhorn is incapable of writing a dull sentence". The Times (London) "Martha Gellhorn was so fearless in a male way, and yet utterly capable of making men melt", writes New Yorker literary editor Bill Buford. As a journalist, Gellhorn covered every military conflict from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam and Nicaragua. She also bewitched Eleanor Roosevelt's secret love and enraptured Ernest Hemingway with her courage as they dodged shell fire together. Hemingway is, of course, the unnamed "other" in the title of this tart memoir, first published in 1979, in which Gellhorn describes her globe-spanning adventures, both accompanied and alone. With razor-sharp humor and exceptional insight into place and character, she tells of a tense week spent among dissidents in Moscow; long days whiled away in a disused water tank with hippies clustered at Eilat on the Red Sea; and her journeys by sampan and horse to the interior of China during the Sino-Japanese War. Now including a foreward by Bill Buford and photographs of Gellhorn with Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Gary Cooper, and others, this new edition rediscovers the voice of an extraordinary woman and brings back into print an irresistibly entertaining classic.

Read the powerful account of one woman's struggle to reshape her identity when all normality has fallen away. When lifelong bird-lover Hannah Bourne-Taylor moved with her husband to Ghana seven years ago she couldn't have anticipated how her life would be forever changed by her unexpected encounters with nature and the subsequent bonds she formed. Plucked from the comfort and predictability of her life before, Hannah struggled to establish herself in her new environment, striving to belong in the rural grasslands far away from home. In this challenging situation, she was forced to turn inwards and interrogate her own sense of identity, however in the animal life around her, and in two wild birds in particular, Hannah found a source of solace and a way to reconnect with the world in which she was living. Fledgling is a portrayal of adaptability, resilience and self-discovery in the face of isolation and change, fuelled by the quiet power of nature and the unexpected bonds with animals she encounters. Hannah encourages us to reconsider the conventional boundaries of the relationships people have with animals through her inspiring and very beautiful glimpse ofwhat is possible when we allow ourselves to connect to the natural world. Full of determination and compassion, Fledgling is apowerful meditation on our instinctive connection to nature. It shows that even the tiniest of birds can teach us what is important in life and how to embrace every day.

On May 6, 2014 Ryan Waters accomplished something that has not been replicated since. He and fellow explorer Eric Larsen stood atop the geographic North Pole, after 53 grueling days battling their way over an ever-melting sheet of ice that fought against them the entire way. By reaching the pole the two adventurers became the last persons to date to complete an unsupported trip to the North Pole from land. The ice sheet that used to link the Pole to land in Canada, once so thick and sturdy, has so degraded over the last few decades that explorers have had to abandon any attempts to cross it. While reaching the North Pole was monumental for Waters it also was the final piece needed to complete a project that he had been persistently working on for over a decade, the True Adventurers Grand Slam-standing atop the Seven Summits and skiing full length, unsupported and unassisted, expeditions to both the North and South Poles. His accomplishment that day made him just the 9th person and first American to gain entry into this exclusive club. Never one to embrace the easy path, Waters seemed to thrive in battling through whatever the fates threw at him, sometimes even deliberately seeking out struggles. Despite having little experience cross-country skiing, he decided to go to the South Pole. Eschewing the more typical route, he and partner Cecilie Skog completed the first traverse of Antarctica without the use of resupplies or kites. Skiing from Berkner Island in the Weddell Sea, via the South Pole, to the Ross Ice Shelf, the pair skied for 70 days and covered 1200 miles, 9 years prior to the much publicized 2019 "race" across Antarctica. To this day the two hold the record for the longest unsupported crossing of the continent without the use of kites. How Waters ended up standing atop the North Pole on that fateful day is a story of hope, perseverance, faith, and a fair share of dumb luck. From his youth traipsing around the Georgia hills to his time leading expeditions around the Himalayas, including five summits of Everest, Waters has always seemed to stumble into the next fortuitous step of his journey, often ending up in the most unlikely places. This is tempered by the fact that early in Waters' outdoor career, he learned to live by a simple credo: "you have to make things happen for yourself." At the beginning of his climbing career, he was consumed by passion for the mountains, every decision was leading to the next mountaineering challenge. Eventually giving up a stable career as a geologist, he had a self-described "mid 20's crisis," left his 401K and comfortable salary for living out of his truck and 40 dollars a day as a part-time climbing instructor. Following his dream of a life of adventure in exchange for a life of obeying societal norms, he set out to build a mountain resume that would enable him to circle the Earth and work as a mountain guide in the Himalayas and beyond. After almost two decades of hard expeditions around the planet, his experiences include being on a hijacked airplane in Russia, rescue of injured climbers in the Karakoram Himalaya of Pakistan, the Everest Base Camp earthquake disaster, narrowly missing out on the K2 2008 tragedy, near misses with avalanches, the deaths of close climbing partners, close encounters with Polar Bears on the Arctic Ocean, relationships with fellow adventurers, and much more.

The Oxus in Afghanistan's High Pamir is one of the greatest rivers of the world, and also one of the least known. Running through the core of Central Asia, it is unusual in a myriad of ways--the most surprising of which is that it never reaches the sea. Through the centuries, the majestic Oxus has been the source of legends. For explorers and travelers in Central Asia, the Oxus provided an enduring mystery--where exactly was its source? In 2008 Bill Colegrave and two colleagues set out to find the true source and settle the argument for once and all. No easy task, but they succeeded. This is a vivid account of this quest, and also tells of the author's previous precarious visits to one of the most unstable regions of the world. Bill Colegrave brings to life an extraordinary cast of characters--including those Victorian adventurers, soldiers, and statesmen who traveled before him, as well as his fellow explorers and guides on his own extraordinary adventure.

Seven years after her mother's death, Leonie Charlton is still gripped by memories of their fraught relationship. In May 2017, Leonie trekked through the Outer Hebrides in the company of a friend and their Highland Ponies in search of closure. When Leonie's pony has a serious accident, she begins to realise that finding peace with her mother is less important than letting go. Leonie Charlton blends travel and nature writing with intimate memoir in this beautifully written account of grief and acceptance.

With his sixtieth birthday looming, Colin Renton decides that it’s time to escape office life and focus on achieving some of his unfulfilled goals.  He embarks on a year-long adventure that takes him from the busy streets of Edinburgh to the traffic-free roads, sodden fields and dusty paths of Europe’s winemaking regions. He laces up his running shoes and joins thousands of fellow athletes in races that test him over various distances, degrees of difficulty and levels of seriousness. His schedule, which culminates with a marathon debut, takes him to places he would otherwise not have visited. On his travels, he seeks out local wines that deserve a place in a carefully chosen twelve-bottle case, a process that throws up some fascinating insights and introduces him to a vintage crop of engaging characters. The crossover between running and wine uncorks a tale of endurance, curiosity and discovery, told in an accessible style and served up with a splash of local colour and a drop of wry humour.

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.

In this book, written in 1966, Bulpin writes about the hunters, settlers, the Bushmen, Dingane, Shaka, Cetshwayo, the colonial days, the Voortrekkers and the Republic of Natal. A very readable book where the characters and legends come to life as Bulpin tells more stories about the personalities and their adventures in the early days of the region.