Classic Travel Writing

In the summer of 1936, W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice visited Iceland on commission to write a travel book, but found themselves capturing concer...

Written before the Jacobite rebellions irrevocably changed the face of Highland society, Martin Martin's A Description of the Western Islands of Sc...

Throughout the two years of a grand tour as far as Australia and New Zealand (1852-4), Rev Thomas Bowles kept a daily journal, ultimately filling o...

The early seventeenth-century traveler Thomas Coryates five-month tour of Western Europe culminated in Coryats Crudities, one of the strangest trav...

In 1909, while dreaming of the Himalaya, Norwegian mountaineer Alf Bonnevie Bryn and a fellow young climber, the Australian George Ingle Finch, set...

the proverb says that whoever sees the world from the back of an elephant learns the secrets of the jungle and becomes a seer. I had to be content ...

In mid-career, Michael Frayn took up his old trade of journalism, and wrote a series of occasional articles for the Observer about some of the plac...

Leaving behind Thailand after the 2004 Tsunami, Ben, aged 19, made a life challenging journey without GPS or mobile phone to cross 11 countries in ...

In his perfectly crafted haiku poems, Basho described the natural world with great simplicity and delicacy of feeling. When he composed The Narrow ...

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...

The vast and expanding Russian empire of the eighteenth century was inhabited by a great number of peoples. This book, part anthology, part comment...

A facsimile edition of Bradshaw's Handbook of 1863, the book that inspired the BBC television series 'Great British Railway Journeys'. When Michae...

At the dawn of the 19th-century, the Prussian explorer Alexander von Humboldt was granted permission to charter an expedition to Spains colonies in...

The finest book ever written about England and the English Stuart Maconie J. B. Priestley is one of ...

A facsimile edition of Bradshaws fascinating guide to Europes rail network. Bradshaws descriptive railway handbook of Europe was originally publis...

'Out of the sea, as if Homer himself had arranged it for me, the islands bobbed up, lonely, deserted, mysterious in the fading light'Enraptured by ...

In the eighteenth century, the academic scholar Ibn al-Tayyib made a rihla (journey) from Morocco to the Hijaz, in modern day Saudi Arabia, documen...