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...