Foreigners who spend time in Russia soon discover two distinct worlds: the public Russia, often perceived as cold and shadowed, cautious and traditional; and the private Russia, where warmth and hospitality flourish over tea at a friend's kitchen table or saut ed mushrooms in a village dacha.
To the armchair fan, the life of the sports writer is one of unalloyed joy: all-expenses-paid trips to the most exciting events in the world, the best seats in the house, and one-on-one interviews with Anna Kournikova.
Catching all the fascination and humour of travel in out-of-the-way places, One's Company is Peter Fleming's account of his journey through Russia and Manchuria to China when he was Special Correspondent to The Times in the 1930s.
* WINNER OF THE SCOTTISH BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2013 **Shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Biography Prize** Shortlisted for the 2013 RSL Ondaatje Prize ** Shortlisted for Banff Adventure Travel Prize ** Shortlisted for Saltire Book of the Year Award * Gavin Francis fulfilled a lifetime's ambition when he spent fourteen months as the base-camp doctor at Halley, a profoundly isolated British research station on the Caird Coast of Antarctica.
In 1991 Mariusz Wilk, a Polish journalist long fascinated by the mysteries of the Russian soul, decided to take up residence in the Solovki islands, a lonely archipelago lost amid the far northern reaches of Russia's White Sea.
In a memoir as vivid and unpredictable as any novel we follow Roger Garfitt on his journey from stable boy to jazz dancer, from Oxford dandy to Sixties drop-out.
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY SIMON CALLOWIn 1939, as Europe approaches war, Isherwood, an instinctive pacifist, travels west to California, seeking a new set of beliefs to replace the failed Leftism of the thirties.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY PICO IYERIn September 1947, long before mass tourism and with no knowledge of Spanish, Christopher Isherwood and William Caskey left for a six-month tour of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina.
At seventy-five, Terry and Monica Darlington had done everything they could think of doing, including starting a business and becoming athletes and running a literary society.
**TOP TEN BESTSELLER**'I would rather read Colin Thubron than any other travel writer alive' John Simpson Mount Kailas is the most sacred of the world's mountains - holy to one fifth of humanity.
Leslie Thomas's odyssey is a vivid, personal account of the most fascinating islands at the furthest reaches of the globe: to islands as distant and diverse as Saint-Pierre et Miquelon off Newfoundland and Great Barrier Island off New Zealand, and to places more familiar by name, including Nantucket, Fair Isle, Tahiti, and Capri, this journey voyages to the world's smaller places.
Freddy, Phil and Don are three grumpy old men, travelling at various speeds in the slow lane of retirement, at a loss to understand the mad modern world around them.
Joseph O'Connor's love affair with all things American led to an extraordinary tour of the United States to visit the nine different towns called Dublin, as well as some of the great cities and tiny hamlets in between.
In years gone by, the traveller in France could rely on coming across a restaurant where the tables were ready-laid with heavy cotton napkins, a carafe of wine and a basket of freshly baked bread, and where the ensuing meal would encompass recipes of remarkable local dishes handed down from generation to generation.
'Neither a travel book, nor a vast prose poem, nor a history, nor philosophy, nor voyage of discovery, but often all at once' Independent on SundayWITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RICHARD FLANAGAN In this fascinating journey Claudio Magris, whose knowledge is encyclopaedic and whose curiosity limitless, guides his reader from the source of the Danube in the Bavarian hills through Austro-Hungary and the Balkans to the Black Sea.
STEP INTO THE DREAMLIKE CITY OF MARRAKECHWhere passionate music, magic potions and the drama of Africa are cooled by the intuitive genius of Arabic culture.
One day in late summer, Michael Wright gave up his comfortable South London existence and, with only his long-suffering cat for company, set out to begin a new life.
**THE NUMBER ONE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER**A compulsively readable account of an African country now virtually inaccessible to the outside world and one journalist's daring and adventurous journey.
A diary of adventure in picturesque Sand Bay, The Great Escape: Adventures on the Wild West Coast takes readers on an extraordinary journey as writer and explorer Monty Halls follows his dream of becoming a crofter.
Self-confessed loafer Time Moore, seduced by the speed and glamour of the biggest annual sporting even in the world, sets out to cycle the course of the Tour de France.
"e;A deeply thoughtful, gripping and scrupulous book told in Sayarer's trademark style from the saddle and the roadside"e; CAROLINE EDENBy a winner of the Stanford Dolman Award for Travel Writing"e;The best travelogues should make you question your preconceptions of a place and force you to engage with what the author is saying.
He's master of the PlayStation, he listens to rap music, he writes poetry and, in his eighteen-year-old hands, may hold the future of the Tibetan people.
What it s really like on the frontline of humanitarian aid It's the early 1990s and three young people are looking to change their lives, and perhaps also the world.
Mohammed Dar and his three brothers were born in a boat on a lake in Kashmir, a place of exquisite beauty that was to become a war zone and nuclear flashpoint.
