Classic Travel Writing

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY TARAN KHAN, author of Shadow CityTRANSLATED FROM BENGALI BY NAZES AFROZAn intrepid traveller and true cosmopolitan, lege...

Uncovering the hidden love triangle between novelist Elizabeth Bowen and the author's grandparents the critically acclaimed biography with never-b...

Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) was a war hero whose exploits in Crete are legendary, and above all he is widely acclaimed as the greatest travel ...

INTRODUCED BY MONISHA RAJESH, award-winning author of Around the World in 80 Trains'If I were asked to enumerate the pleasures of travel, this woul...

In the spring of 1871, Ralph Waldo Emerson boarded a train in Concord, Massachusetts, bound for a month-and-a-half-long tour of Californiaan interl...

INTRODUCED BY CAROLINE EDEN, award-winning author of Black Sea, Red Sands and Samarkand'Medieval pomp, splendour, and picturesqueness... a life tha...

INTRODUCED BY WILLIAM ATKINS, author of The Immeasurable World 'I am merely an eccentric, a dreamer who wishes to live far from the civilized world...

Mungo Park set off from his home in the Scottish borders in May 1795 at the age of 23 to discover the course of the River Niger in West Africa. Whe...

Isabella Bird, an Englishwoman whose extensive travels and writings earned her the first female membership of the Royal Geographical Society, visit...

Mark Twain enjoyed immense public popularity during his lifetime, and was already one the best-known authors in America when, in 1895, he set out o...

Henry Walter Bates and his co-naturalist Alfred Russet Wallace embarked together in 1848 on an expedition to the forests of the Amazon in search of...

This summer holiday vintage crime classic exploring the mystery of a buried Cornish hotel invites us to solve the puzzle as detectives: perfect for...

In the summer of 1844, taking a break from novel-writing, the thirty-two-year-old Charles Dickens embarked on a journey to Italy with his wife, his...

From Tripoli to the ancient ruins of Leptis Magna, from the slave markets to the farthest reaches of the Sahara: here is a mosaic of unknown places...

A typically brilliant, ironic and moving travelogue by one of the twentieth century's greatest writersIn August 1936 a Hungarian writer in his mid-...

Robert Louis Stevenson was not only a gifted writer, he was also an indefatigable traveller. His thirst for adventure was formed by his boyhood vis...

To travel with James in these pages is to take an unhurried vacation with a thoroughly seasoned, supremely cultivated, acutely intelligent companio...

Robert Louis Stevenson was not only a gifted writer, he was also an indefatigable traveller. His thirst for adventure was formed by his boyhood vis...

'it appeared to me that the greatest and best feelings of the human heart were paralyzed by the relative positions of slave and owner' In Domestic...

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

'After all that - how, you might wonder, could one not become a fatalist?' Lermontov's hero, Pechorin, is a young army officer posted to the Cauca...

For centuries following its reestablishment as Constantinople in AD 330, Istanbul served as the capital of three great empires: Roman, Byzantine, a...

A peasant in peaked hat and blue shirt, with trousers rolled up high above his bare knees, crossed the road and silently examined the tricycle. You...

The stretch of the longest river in the world that nurtured the world's first great civilization has drawn and impressed visitors since ancient tim...

This is a lavish pictorial record produced in collaboration with the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). It features 200 unique photographs take...

'Spring was already in the air, in the town; there was no rain but there was still less sun - one wondered what had become of it, on this side of t...

An anthology of 17th and 18th century travel writing that inspired the hugely popular Aubrey/Maturin series, collected and introduced by Patrick OB...

A reissue of a truly classic title on the Batsford backlist. First published in 1935, it is a wonderful snapshot of our capital before the Second W...

Nobel Prize-winning author Canetti spent only a few weeks in Marrakesh, but it was a visit that would remain with him for the rest of his life. In ...

From the grand tour to the global village, novelists and poets have made particularly observant travellers. Many writers have been prone to wanderl...

This posthumous volume of essays, first published in 1901, reveals Burton in the aspect in which he was known best to the world - as a traveler and...

In 1763, Tobias Smollett set sail from Folkestone to Boulogne. He would not return to England for two years, during which time he travelled extensi...

In mid to late March 1913, as the storm clouds of the Great War which was to claim his life gathered, Edward Thomas took a bicycle ride from Clapha...

Alfred Russel Wallace's The Malay Archipelago is a work of astounding breadth and originality that chronicles the British naturalist's scientific e...

William Henry Hudson was born in Argentina, the son of American settlers from New England. He spent his youth studying the local flora and fauna, a...