John Hatt’s Eland was the first of a wave of travel lists that emerged in the early 1980s, quickly joined by Century Travellers, the Penguin Classic Travel Library, Picador and Virago. It can never define exactly what it’s looking for in a book until it stumbles across it, but it needs to be observant of others, capable of summing up the spirit of a place and catching the moment on the wing … as well as being funny, wry, intelligent, humane, tragic, lyrical, universal, self-deprecating and idiosyncratic. And the whole book must be held together by a page-turning gift for story telling.
After eight years working in Japan, immersing herself in its language and literature, Lesley Chan Downer set off in the footsteps of Matsuo Basho, Japan’s most cherished poet, to explore the country’s...
Joe Roberts stayed for five months with the Trivedi family in Bangalore, while traveling all over southern India. In Pondicherry he found Rita, a melancholic divorcee banished to an ashram. He saw the...
The Sultanate of Muscat and Oman was a hermit state until 1970, preserving in every detail the poverty, personality and picturesque reality of a medieval kingdom. For forty years, Sultan Said bin Taimur...
The Station follows three high-spirited young men as they visit twenty monasteries on Mount Athos in 1927. They examine treasures, photograph frescoes and sketch the courtyards and those who live in...
The Narrow Smile is a portrait of the Pathan and their highland home on either side of the Pakistan-Afghan frontier. Peter Mayne grew up in India, and later spent four years on the Northwest Frontier...
Life at Full Tilt is a whirlwind tour of Dervla Murphy’s travels. It begins in Spain in 1956, before her first book, and follows in her tracks for over fifty years, including descriptions of her beloved...
Caught between these covers is the authentic, forthright voice of Christian Watt, servant girl, lady’s maid and fishwife. Born in 1833, her working life began in domestic service before the age of...
Weldon was mapping the deserts of Egypt when war broke out. Working from out of a steam yacht based on Port Said or Famagusta, he ran a network of spies and confidential agents onto the Levant coast behind Turkish lines. He was a fluent Arabic speaker and could conduct personal interviews on the shore, as well as landing and taking off agents – all
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John Hatt’s Eland was the first of a wave of travel lists that emerged in the early 1980s, quickly joined by Century Travellers, the Penguin Classic Travel Library, Picador and Virago. It can never define exactly what it’s looking for in a book until it stumbles across it, but it needs to be observant of others, capable of summing up the spirit of a place and catching the moment on the wing … as well as being funny, wry, intelligent, humane, tragic, lyrical, universal, self-deprecating and idiosyncratic. And the whole book must be held together by a page-turning gift for story telling. 
