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.
Ludicrous, heart-warming and improbably inspirational, Spanish Steps is the story of what happens when a rather silly man tries to walk all the way across a very large country, with a very large animal who doesn't really want to.
A magnet for trade and travellers from all over the world, stylish, cosmopolitan Amsterdam is a city of dreams and nightmares, of grand civic architecture and legendary beauty, but also of civil wars, bloody religious purges, and the tragedy of Anne Frank.
The second volume of exuberant, lively letters from legendary travel writer Patrick Leigh FermorThe first collection of letters from Patrick Leigh Fermor, Dashing for the Post, delighted critics and public alike.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ONDAATJE PRIZESHORTLISTED FOR THE STANFORD DOLMAN TRAVEL WRITING PRIZE'Witty, polished, honest and insightful, The Epic City is likely to become for Calcutta what Suketu Mehta's classic Maximum City is for Mumbai' William Dalrymple, ObserverWhen Kushanava Choudhury arrived in New Jersey at the age of twelve, he had already migrated halfway around the world four times.
A heady celebration of the beauty and history of the wild orchid species of the British Isles, embraced in one glorious and kaleidoscopic summer-long hunt by naturalist Jon DunnFrom the chalk downs of the south coast of England to the heathery moorland of the Shetland Isles, and from the holy island of Lindisfarne in the east to the Atlantic frontier of western Ireland, Orchid Summer is a journey into Britain and Ireland's most beautiful corners.
________________'This anthology will help turn your intellectual understanding of oppression into an emotional one' - New Statesman'Thanks for being who you are and for giving us such exposure to wonderful people.
______________ 'A stylish, deftly erudite and enormously diverting book' - Sunday Telegraph 'An artfully aimless pleasure cruise around Paris' - Guardian 'White's genius as a fl neur is revealed in his affinity for unexpected pleasures, and he includes many for our delectation' - New Yorker______________ A unique and eclectic view of Paris through the eyes of a fierce and witty intellect.
The first of its kind: an exploration of one of the most mysterious countries in the world, as told by one of the first outsiders to access the country in its entiretyFor almost fifty years Burma was ruled by a paranoid military dictatorship and isolated from the outside world.
'Bracingly original' Kathryn Hughes, Guardian'A mixture of travelogue, local history and reportage, Swamp Songs brims with evocative word sketches' Times Literary SupplementFrom Romney Marsh to the Danube Delta, from Cyprus to the bayous of Louisiana and on to the Bay of Bengal, Tom Blass crosses swamps, marshes and wetlands to meet the people who have made these in-between worlds their homes.
'All those interested in South Asia and its complex politics and culture should read this book' - Pankaj MishraThe demise of Pakistan a country with a reputation for volatility, brutality and radical Islam is regularly predicted.
At the age of 45 Miles Morland resigned from his highly paid job as head of the UK division of a major American bank and went for a walk with his wife in France.
_______________'A wonderful writer An adventure hard to beat in terms of sheer exotic allure' - Guardian'Mexico will not have been portrayed more vividly since Graham Greene's The Lawless Roads .
This is the true story of two twenty-year old Australians who travelled for fourteen months on recumbent bicycles from Russia, across Siberia and Mongolia, to Beijing.
Will Self and Ralph Steadman join forces once again in a further post-millennial meditation on the vexed relationship of psyche and place in a globalised world; Psycho Too brings together a second helping of their very best words and pictures from 'Psychogeography', the columns they contributed to the Independent for half a decade.
Delving into Brazil's baroque past, Peter Robb writes about its history of slavery and the richly multicultural but disturbed society that was left in its wake when the practice was abolished in the late nineteenth century.
Walking to Hollywood is a dazzling triptych - obsessive, satirical, elegiac - in which Will Self burrows down through the intersections of time, place and psyche to explore some of our deepest fears and anxieties with characteristic fearlessness and jagged humour.
Provocateurs Will Self and Ralph Steadman join forces in this post-millennial meditation on the vexed relationship between psyche and place in a globalised world, bringing together for the first time the very best of their 'Psychogeography' columns for the Independent.
