WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY PAUL THEROUXSomerset Maugham's success as a writer enabled him to indulge his adventurous love of travel, and he recorded the sights and sounds of his wide-ranging journeys with an urbane, wry style all his own.
Bill Bryson goes to Kenya at the invitation of CARE International, the charity dedicated to working with local communities to eradicate poverty around the world.
It is the driest, flattest, hottest, most desiccated, infertile and climatically aggressive of all the inhabited continents and still Australia teems with life a large portion of it quite deadly.
Funny, wise, learned and compulsive - GQ Bill Bryson turns away from travelling the highways and byways of middle America, so hilariously depicted in his bestselling The Lost Continent, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid and Notes from a Big Country, for a fast, exhilarating ride along the Route 66 of American language and popular culture.
In 1995, before leaving his much-loved home in North Yorkshire to move back to the States for a few years with his family, Bill Bryson insisted on taking one last trip around Britain, a sort of valedictory tour of the green and kindly island that had so long been his home.
When Polly Evans read a survey claiming that the last bastion of masculinity, the real Kiwi bloke, was about to breathe his last, she was seized by a sense of foreboding.
After working for four years at a leading London book publisher, Polly Evans moved to Hong Kong where she spent many happy hours as a senior editor on the city's biggest entertainment weekly.
When she learnt that the Chinese had built enough new roads to circle the equator sixteen times, Polly Evans decided to go and witness for herself the way this vast nation was hurtling into the technological age.
In the dead of winter, Polly Evans ventures to the remote Yukon Territory in Canada's far northwest, where temperatures plunge to minus forty and the sun rises for just a few hours each day.
From the slums of Cape Town to the palaces of Algiers, through Pygmy villages where pineapples grow wild, to the Gulf of Guinea where the sea blazes with oil flares, across two continents and fourteen countries - this epic journey is nothing to swallows, they do it twice a year.
Along our shores, towering cliffs from the age of the dinosaurs rise beside wide estuaries teeming with wildlife, while Victorian ports share waterfronts with imposing fortifications.
Winston Churchill famously described Russia as 'a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma' and even today it remains a country little understood by the West.
Having survived their voyage to Carcassonne, you might expect pensioners Terry and Monica Darlington and their whippet, Jim, to retire to a comfortable corner of their favourite pub.
The real-life stories of the novice monks in Little Angels reflect the lives of many youths in rural Thailand who are trapped in the vicious cycle of poverty, broken homes, illiteracy and drug abuse.
**A SOURCE FOR MARCO POLO, A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES**Marco Polo's journey from Venice, through Europe and most of Asia, to the court of Kublai Khan in China is one of the most audacious in history.
It s hard to imagine a world where anything you could possibly want to know about and everything you don t even know you want to know about isn't accessible 24-hours a day, seven days a week, with just a few taps of our fingers.
Granite, a tough composite of quartz, feldspar and mica, is the stuff of Dartmoor, the most formidable of the five granite bosses punctuating Britain s southwest peninsula.
'Magnificent' Robert MacfarlaneWinner of the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the YearOur lives depend on shipping but it is a world which is largely hidden from us.
I am taking a few months off to travel and wander, drinking my way across the Islamic world to see whether I can dry myself out, cure myself of a bout of alcoholic excess.
This gripping nineteenth-century adventure stars Jorgen Jorgenson, who ran away to sea at fourteen and began a brilliant career by sailing to establish the first colony in Tasmania.
In 1938 Graham Greene was commissioned to visit Mexico to discover the state of the country and its people in the aftermath of the brutal anti-clerical purges of President Calles.
In-Flight Entertainment is a classic humour book, an air steward's account of fourteen years' worth of airline incidents, reminding us of the absurdities of flying.
American journalist Alice Steinbach took a year off to live in five cities - Paris, Venice, Milan, London and Oxford - when she realized she had entered a new phase of life.
