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Covering an eclectic range of categories – the smallest island (Teän in the Scilly’s, at just 40 acres), the shortest long-distance footpath (Maelor Way in Northeast Wales, a mere 24 miles) – this illustrated compendium celebrates the history and allure of places that have been outshone by larger rivals. To encourage readers to appreciate each location for themselves, each entry concludes with practical advice on admission and travel.

The bestselling author of I Used to Know That, Caroline Taggart presents an accessible overview of Britain’s history through 100 locations associated with the royal family. From King Arthur’s alleged birthplace at Tintagel; through palaces, castles and some less grand examples, such as the Royal Oak at Boscobel; to Prince Charles’s organic garden at Highgrove, she recounts their significance in the lives of the kings and queens.

Mountaineer John Harding recalls the ski journeys that took him along the mountain range dividing France from Spain, dogged by accident and bad weather. Illustrated with maps and photographs, his account tells of exhilaration and endurance, of friendships made along the way, of tragedy when a companion is killed by an avalanche, and the overwhelming power of nature.

Adrift in New York in 2013 after a film project fell through, Sayarer decided to hitchhike to San Francisco. Along the road, he met people the American Dream has failed: the homeless, anarchists, and blue-collar workers stranded in rust-belt towns. His journey reveals a divided nation, and foreshadows the election of Donald Trump. Off-mint.

From the excitement of the night the Wall came down, Peter Millar looks back over his eight years as a foreign correspondent in East Berlin. He revisits his life and work in the communist state – the conversations in bars, visits to people’s homes, walks in the country – with humour and sympathy for those living under a totalitarian regime.

When grumpy millennial Ben found that he could enjoy a catered four-day holiday for £100 in the company of his elders, he went ahead and booked six. During the resultant adventures he made friends across the generation gap, and these memoirs are full of tales of the wisdom, eccentricity and abandon of his elders. Off-mint.

An intrepid explorer and the first woman to be made a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Isabella Bird (1831–1904) made her journey to the Golden Chersonese (the ancient name of the Malay Peninsula) in 1879. This epistolary account describes her journey, from arriving in Hong Kong to find the city ablaze, to leaving Pinang and the Malacca Straits the following year. First published in 1883 and reprinted in the Stanford Travel Classics series.

The military installations on the Spratlys in the South China sea, tourists’ playgrounds in Dubai, trash islands of plastic waste ... A great many new islands are rising up today while old ones are going under as sea levels rise. Travelling the globe to investigate new islands both man-made and natural, visiting disappearing islands such as the San Blas archipelago, Panama, and contemplating ideas for the future, including ‘seasteading’ on floating cities, Alastair Bonnett ponders ‘our vexed love affair’ with islands.

Among Chicago's celebrated constructions whose stories are told in this edition are the famous Wrigley Field baseball stadium and Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House, which the owner was forced to sell within two years of completion to pay his father’s gambling debts.

In 1976 James Crowden left his career in the British Army to live among the Zangskari people of the northern Himalaya for the best part of a year. He recounts how he immersed himself in a community almost untouched by the outside world, with monasteries, meditation and week-long mountain festivals set amid a frozen landscape where silence and solitude are part of the fabric of existence.

Malachy Tallack grew up on Shetland, which lies on the sixtieth parallel, where the sub-Arctic North begins. From his home island, he travels west along this line of latitude to engage with the landscapes and lives it touches in Greenland, Canada, Alaska, Russia and Scandinavia, exploring themes of wildness and community, isolation and engagement, exile and memory.

With no experience of sailing or rowing, former flatmates James Adair and Ben Stenning decided to row the 1,500 miles from Western Australia to Mauritius in 2011. This account of their 116-day voyage tells of sleeping under the moon and stars, encounters with whales and sharks, and how, within sight of their destination, they capsized and had to swim to shore.

Starting his journey on the ‘Western Isles Walk’ across the moors of Lewis, Robin Crawford explores the Scottish peatlands, the wildlife they support, their folklore and the importance of the peat to human inhabitants, whether as fuel or for whisky-making, from the ancient transhumance culture, moving with the seasons, to today’s peatland communities.

The essays in Brian Phillips’ eclectic debut collection take the reader to eight regions of the contemporary world. Among the topics covered are the Russian animator Yuri Norstein, the man-eating tigers of the Indian jungle and a tour of the Yukon territory by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, which prompts more general reflections on the royal family.

British music scenes have often been rooted in the industries and culture of specific cities, including Manchester’s post-punk and baggy, Sheffield’s synth-pop, Coventry’s ska music, and Bristol’s trip-hop. Karl Whitney tours the country, visiting key locations including venues, factories and studios, exploring why such movements took hold and how they relate to the specific local conditions.

When Luca Spaghetti was asked to show American writer Elizabeth Gilbert around his home city, he had little idea that he would become a character in her bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love. Here, he gives his side of the story, alongside many anecdotes about the food, language and life of Rome, and his own adventures in the USA. Slightly off-mint

As a young trainee anthropologist in the 1990s, Will Buckingham travelled to the remote Tanimbar Islands in Indonesia. Looking back two decades later, he recalls his friendship with three sculptors, and how their art embodied the islanders’ history, philosophy and myth. His experiences of magic and sickness would lead him to question, and eventually abandon, his anthropological studies.

In 2003 the Bulgarian-born German writer Ilija Trojanow donned the garb of a pilgrim and set out from his home in Mumbai for Mecca. Here, he recounts his experience of the Hajj – the pilgrimage to Islam’s most sacred site – ‘through the eye of a Westerner, but with the heart of a Muslim’.

How much do we really know about China? The journalist Kai Strittmatter lived there for ten years before writing this ‘A–Z’ (but using Chinese characters) of entertaining articles and anecdotes, each one revealing something about the country and its people.

Throughout history, many travellers have seen deserts as hostile, desolate places; but William Atkins was drawn to them. Travelling to five continents over three years, he visited Oman’s Empty Quarter, Australia’s nuclear test grounds, China’s Gobi Desert, the dried-out Aral Sea, and the arid regions of the American West. Illustrated with maps of each area, his travelogue explores the history, the people, the cultures, the folklore and the symbolism of these forbidding places.

Foreign correspondent Peter Hessler lived in Cairo through the tumultuous years following the Arab Spring of 2011. Here, he draws parallels between the rise and fall of Mohammed Morsi and the coup that brought Sisi to power and the long timeline of Egypt’s history. The people he encounters – archaeologists, politicians, a teacher and a gay translator – all struggle with the chaos, corruption and repression that ensued.

Married to a Dutch woman and living in Rotterdam, Ben Coates sets out to understand his adopted homeland, exploring the history that created a prosperous, peaceful state and how its citizens are beginning to question the future of its liberal culture.

After a six-month journey, cycling around the world, Julian Sayarer returned to London and started working as a bicycle courier, ‘making deliveries that don’t mean anything’, although one of them was flowers for an incoming prime minister. His stories of cycling the city streets reveal a community of riders and give a kerb-side perspective on everyday life in London.

This introduction to Sardinia’s landscape, people and history explores some of its rich and varied archaeological sites: the prehistoric megaliths known as nuraghe, Bronze-Age towers, Roman ruins and medieval castles. Geographically arranged, and with 16 pages of colour photographs, it also celebrates the island’s distinctive cultural events such as Barbagia’s ghoulish carnival and Sedilo’s terrifying S’Ardia horse race.

Written during the same Italian sojourn as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, these six essays on the ancient Etruscans share several of the novel’s themes. As Lawrence describes his visits to Etruscan painted tombs, he meditates on this enigmatic civilization’s uninhibited self-expression, which he contrasts with the darker, more oppressive Italy of Mussolini. This edition features a new foreword by Michael Squires.

Shackleton's 1914–17 Antarctic expedition is best remembered for its legendary escape after his ship Endurance was crushed by ice. Less well known are the exploits of the 'Mount Hope Party', dispatched aboard the Aurora to lay food depots across the Great Ice Barrier, without which the planned crossing of the frozen continent would have been impossible. Drawing on the diaries of six expedition members, this book records their story of hardship, heroism and camaraderie – and their tragic fate.

The artist David Bellamy has long been attracted to the Arctic. He tells the story of his expeditions to northern Scandinavia, Iceland, Greenland and Svalbard, while his watercolours capture the grandeur of their mountains, glaciers and icebergs. He sketches wildlife such as Arctic terns, polar bears, seals and walrus, and explains the difficulties of painting in freezing conditions.

This anthology offers a selection of writing by past visitors and residents about the life and customs of Moscow, its history, art and architecture, and includes an introduction and a map. Beginning with the Kremlin, it tours the city's districts through the eyes of English visitors from Richard Chancellor in the 16th century to Maurice Baring in the 20th, alongside Russian writers including Tolstoy, Kropotkin and Gorky.

When Dan Boothby became warden on Kyleakin Lighthouse Island off Scotland’s west coast, it seemed that fate had played a part; this was the last home of the naturalist Gavin Maxwell, whose books had fascinated him since childhood. His own account explores the island’s people and their stories, its landscape and wildlife, and the elusive traces of his hero.

The award-winning foreign correspondent Peter Millar journeys through Cuba aboard a decaying railway system that was once the pride of Latin America. From the capital Havana, he travels with ordinary Cubans to the US naval base and detention camp at Guantanamo, sharing anecdotes, life stories and political opinions. Slightly off-mint and felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge.

In September 2017, against the backdrop of the conflict in Syria and the occupation of Iraq by ISIS, Wood set out on a 5,000-mile walking expedition around the Arabian peninsula. In his account of this six-month journey he shares the stories of people he met and uses their perspectives on the Middle East’s history and politics to challenge stereotypes and provide more nuanced insights into an often-misrepresented region.

Encouraged by his adventure-loving wife Wendy, philosophy buff Gary Hayden sets out to walk to 850 miles from John o’Groats to Land’s End. The landscapes they encounter evoke Plato’s love of beauty, Epicurus’ joy in the simple life and Rousseau’s reverie. On the Pennine Way, Hayden experiences Schopenhauer’s ‘state of elevation’, and by the end of the journey has come to understand, with Bertrand Russell, that real happiness derives from contact with the life of the Earth.

Starting with quiz night in the Prince of Wales on Highgate Hill, Mark Mason sets off in search of the perfect quiz question. In venues as far-flung as a hotel bar in Edinburgh and a village pub in Suffolk, he meets the aficionados of the quiz world and a veritable deluge of facts, figures and trivia.

For decades, Pico Iyer has spent part of each year in Japan with his wife Hiroko. Called back by her father’s sudden death, he embarks on a cycle of rituals honouring the departed. In this meditation on human nature and mortality, he introduces his ailing mother-in-law; his estranged brother-in-law; and the elderly men and women of the ping-pong club, traversing the autumn of their years in different ways.

Slightly off-mint.

Spanning five continents and several centuries, the journeys in this book are united by their feats of endurance and lasting impact. Some, such as Columbus’s 1492 landfall in the Americas, changed the course of history; others, such as Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle, altered the way we see the world. Illustrated with historical and modern maps and photographs, they include Amelia Earhart’s transatlantic flight, the voyages of Zheng He, and the travels of Ibn Battuta.

Levison Wood was just 22 in 2004 when he decided to hitchhike from England to Goa, via Russia, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Looking back on his adventure, he recalls how, fascinated by the ancient cultures that flourished along the Silk Road and following the footsteps of explorers such as Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo, he made his way through mountains and war zones, meeting shepherds and priests, Russian Mafiosi and mujahideen fighters.

In the late 1970s Nick and Ros sold their Welsh farm and took their three children to the Greek island of Ikaria, with just a few hundred drachmas and no knowledge of the language. Soon their lives were entwined with those of the islanders. Looking back after 40 years, Nick recalls night fishing, work on building sites, a kindly nun, and an enigmatic visitor called Artemis. Slightly off-mint.

Throughout history, many travellers have seen deserts as hostile, desolate places; but William Atkins was drawn to them. Travelling to five continents over three years, he visited Oman’s Empty Quarter, Australia’s nuclear test grounds, China’s Gobi Desert, the dried-out Aral Sea, and the arid regions of the American West. Illustrated with maps of each area, his travelogue explores the history, the people, the cultures, the folklore and the symbolism of these forbidding places.

Billy Connelly recounts with customary humour his ten-week journey through the North West Passage, piloting an aeroplane over Iceberg Valley, trekking through mountains and kayaking through ice floes. Although in awe of the landscape, illustrated here with hundreds of photographs, it was his encounters with ordinary people that made the greatest impression, introducing him to traditions that were essential for survival in this challenging environment. Slightly off-mint.

Taking the meaning of home as their theme, each of the titles in the Hometown Tales series features two stories, one by an established author and one by an emerging voice. Using their local knowledge, the writers champion regional diversity, with a narrative set in a place they are most familiar with. This volume opens with Silver in the Quarter, a coming-of-age story in which a boy is caught up in the 1974 pub bombings. In the second contribution, In the Ape’s Shadow, comedian Stewart Lee, born in Solihull in 1968, explores the post-punk music scene that encouraged him to take to the stage.

Adrian Flanagan’s solo expedition took him down to Cape Horn and the Southern Ocean, then all the way north to cross the ice-filled waters of the Russian Arctic. This account of his adventure includes maps charting his progress on the 30,000-mile journey and diary entries recording challenges that included capsizing, a tropical cyclone, encounters with whales and polar bears and a brush with pirates.

When Mendelsohn was preparing to teach an undergraduate seminar on Homer’s Odyssey his 81-year-old father asked to join the classes. In this combination of memoir and literary criticism, the two men explore the epic together and take a Mediterranean cruise to follow in Odysseus’ footsteps. Through the ancient poem’s timeless themes the classicist and retired research scientist come to know each other better and gradually uncover long-buried secrets about their own family relationships.

The first Europeans to see the islands of the South Pacific thought they had found Paradise, but the disruption and disease they brought devastated their ecology and indigenous cultures. Sailing to Vanuatu, Fiji and the Cook Islands, Hans-Christof Wächter discovers what has survived.

The remote South Atlantic island of St Helena is famous as the site of Napoleon’s 68-month incarceration as ‘Europe’s prisoner’. Willms draws insights from his own visit as he investigates what life was like there and dispels legends that the Emperor himself helped to create.

First published as a trilogy, this travelogue explores the three great maritime cities of the eastern Mediterranean. Delving into their cosmopolitan histories and culture, shaped by Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, Jews and many others, it reveals these ancient ports to be rooted in – and linked by – not the landmasses of Europe, Asia and Africa on which they stand, but a ‘continent’ of their own: the sea itself.

People think they know what it means to be English, but the reality is harder to define. These gently humorous sketches take their Anglophile German author from Westminster to provincial towns, exploring the land, its people and its institutions, from Fleet Street to The Archers.

Off-mint.

In 1867 Mark Twain joined a six-month tour of the Middle East amid a company of Presbyterians committed to bringing Christianity to the Ottoman Empire. Following in his footsteps, Ian Strathcarron travels through Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank to Jerusalem. He finds many parallels between the troubled region then and now, and rich ironies to match Twain’s observations of his travelling companions.

Thirty years after his first 64,000-mile journey, Ted Simon took to the road again, this time on a modified BMW R80GS, retracing his earlier travels, meeting up with old friends and acquaintances, revisiting landmarks and locations and rediscovering himself along the way. Read by Rupert Degas. Unabridged.

Having been raised in an Irish family in South Africa, the poet-novelist Christopher Hope grew up with a deep insight into apartheid. He returned to the country, after twelve years’ absence, during the 1987 whites-only election. Recalling a childhood road trip (as a white boy running through the landscape) he gives an objective account of the historic grievances of both Afrikaners and the black townships.

A quarter of a century after the end of apartheid, Christopher Hope embarks on a road trip through his homeland from Cape Town to the Zimbabwean border, meeting exploited black miners and embittered white nationalists. In the face of persisting economic inequality and interracial bitterness, he concludes that Nelson Mandela’s dream of a ‘rainbow nation’ is fading, and it might be the turn of the whites to hear what anti-apartheid politician Oliver Tambo called ‘the Move-on Blues’.

An Anzac veteran, Sydney Loch (1888–1955) and his wife Joyce settled in Thessalonika, in the last village where women were allowed before the wall of the male-only Athos peninsula. Drawing on 25 years of living there and exploring the Holy Mountain, this is Loch’s account of the autonomous region inhabited only by Orthodox monks, living in monasteries on the flanks of the mountain and keeping Byzantine time, in which the day begins at sunset. First published in 1957. Small print

In these lively accounts of journeys with her more reluctant husband, agnostic Jill Dudley seeks ‘answers to impossibly difficult questions’ through encounters with the sites, people, festivals and beliefs associated with different religious traditions, both ancient and modern. The four titles in this collection are: Lap of the God, Holy Smoke, Gods in Britain, Ye Gods!

Spanning half the globe, from Britain and Europe, eastward to the coast of California, the map reproduced in shades of cream and grey on these textured cards dates from the era when Australia was ‘New Holland’ and India was ‘Hindoostan’. The map also lines the envelopes and covers the rigid, lidded box. Twelve cards with ungummed envelopes.

For over a century, National Geographic teams have been travelling the globe and describing exotic sites in words and photographs. For this book, 50 places have been chosen as the most desired, but often challenging, places to visit. Arranged by continent, from Cappadocia in Asia to the Marquesas Islands in Oceania, the description and photographs of each place are accompanied by travel tips and a ‘Nat Geo Flashback’ to an early expedition or a ‘Classic Shot’ by one of the magazine’s photographers.

In 2002, shortly after the fall of the Taliban, Rory Stewart walked 300 miles through the remote highlands of Afghanistan. His account describes the landscape, society and his encounters with opium growers and mujahedin fighters. An afterword to this new edition reflects how more than a decade of foreign engagement has failed through a fundamental misunderstanding of the country’s traditions.

Walking a thousand miles or more along tracks and holloways, drove roads and seaways in England, Scotland and abroad, Macfarlane goes in search of ‘the ghosts and voices that haunt ancient paths’, but encounters both past and present in the landscape. A journey of the imagination as well as over land and sea, the book ranges across topics including sailing to the Shiants, the Calzada Romana in Spain and another walker of old roads, the poet Edward Thomas.

Jill Dudley once again hauls her long-suffering husband Harry through the ancient temples and Byzantine churches of Athens, Corinth and Corfu, and the hilltop monasteries of the Meteora, to discover what Greek Christianity inherited and adapted from paganism.

Alex Capus traces Robert Louis Stevenson's last years, focusing on his seemingly inexplicable decision to settle on Samoa. He concludes that Stevenson had discovered a real-life ‘Treasure Island’ nearby – and that it was this discovery that inspired his most famous work. Literary Traveller series.

With 180 images by 17 photographers, this catalogue of an exhibition at the Berlinische Galerie explores how photography has shaped perceptions of the world since staged tourist images were created in the late nineteenth century. From the photojournalism of Erich Salomon and Thomas Hoepker to the more abstract work of modern artists such as Wolfgang Tillmans, it explores how photographers have engaged with the debate about how social reality is depicted.

Although John Mandeville probably never existed and his adventures in the Holy Land, Egypt, India and China are almost certainly fictitious, this travelogue was hugely influential in the development of English literature. Abridged with a new introduction and many original woodcuts. Off-mint.

In October 1973 Ted Simon loaded up his 500cc Triumph Tiger motorbike and said goodbye to London. Over the next four years he was to travel 64,000 miles around the world on ‘Jupiter’, experiencing breakdowns, revolutions, war, a spell in prison and a Californian commune. His account of that journey is read here by Rupert Degas, with an introduction read by Simon himself. Unabridged.

In his popular TV travel series, Michael Portillo followed 19th-century railway guides, tracing the history and development of each destination since their original publication. This historical companion to the BBC series focuses on the railways of America, telling the story of the first pioneers, engineering mavericks and tycoons and how the railroad helped to shape the country before and after the Civil War, and into the 20th century.

Against a backdrop of shattered monuments, neglected villas and ghostly backstreets, a daydreaming boy seeks refuge from family discord in the imagination. In this highly original memoir, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk interweaves his own life, and the lives of his glamorous, unhappy parents, with that of his home city. The result is a blend of family reminiscence, history, philosophy, literature, art criticism and urban myth. This edition contains a new introduction and more than 200 additional photographs.

Struggling to write a novel set in South America, John Hopkins decided to revisit the continent, travelling slowly by train, bus and river boat from Mexico City to Argentina, via Brazil, Peru, Bolivia and Paraguay, savouring every experience along the way. The diary he kept is a vivid portrait of Latin America, a tequila-soaked chronicle of solitude and writer’s block, and an angst-ridden account of his troubled love for his travelling companion Madeleine.

Who were the Apostles and what was their relationship to Jesus? Was James the Less really his brother? This synthesis of travelogue and biblical history ranges from Rome and Jerusalem, Turkey and Russia to India and Kyrgyzstan to seek answers to these ancient enigmas. Exploring the way the identities of the Apostles have evolved over two millennia, Tom Bissell charts the growth of Christianity from an obscure sect to the global faith we know today.

Nick Hunt narrates a journey on foot, watching the weather and listening to local lore, as he goes in search of Europe’s fiercest winds. He starts in the Pennines, walking to Cross Fell, to meet the demonic Helm, before travelling to Croatia and the Bora, the Föehn in the Alps and the Mistral in Provence.

Alastair Sawday’s love of adventure began as a teenager and led to a career as a bestselling author of travel guides. These personal sketches are infused with his passion for authenticity, for the quirks of humanity, culture and landscape. Peopled with eccentric guests and peculiar hoteliers, the stories range from the majesty of Venice to the lush valleys of Wales, and from a chaotic Spanish farmhouse to a Parisian café where the elderly waitresses perform the can-can.

Over the course of the last century, the English village has often been declared dead or dying. In this volume, ex-BBC journalist Tom Fort sets out to discover how these communities are really faring. Fort approaches 6,000 years of history and his own experiences of rural life with wit and entertaining observations, and concludes that ‘the village as a model for communal living is simply too strong to fail’.

In this collection of nocturnal rambles, travel writer Dixe Wills explores Britain’s dark side, from Dartmoor, where the Devil is said to ride out at midnight, to seabird-haunted Skomer Island. Wills witnesses the stars in all their glory at the UK’s first Dark Sky Park in Scotland, takes an overnight sleeper train, cycles from London to Suffolk by night and tramps the streets of the capital in the footsteps of the insomniac Charles Dickens.

In this book lover’s tour of Britain, the Mail on Sunday’s travel editor embarks on a series of literary rambles through the towns and countryside immortalized by great writers, featuring Jane Austen’s Bath, Hardy’s Wessex, Wordsworth’s Lake District, Bram Stoker’s Whitby and Robert Burns’s birthplace in Alloway. Frank Barrett’s adventures, recounted with self-deprecating humour, include satnav errors, truculent tour guides and, of course, the British weather.

For five centuries Europeans sought a sea route to the Pacific through the Canadian Arctic, losing many ships and lives before Amundsen completed the crossing in 1906. Now global warming has thinned the sea ice, it is possible for tourists to make the trip. This illustrated guide provides both a history of the region and a valuable practical resource for visitors.

A former resident, Schürer explores the juxtaposition of Berlin’s past and present in history, architecture, the arts and entertainment, and religion, with a final chapter on the suburbs and Potsdam.This guide is part of the Innercities series, which takes the visitor beyond the tourist sights of the world’s great cities to explore their cultural and political life. Each book features chapters on history, architecture, literature, music and the performing arts, and a selection of colour photographs.

In chapters on the island’s physical, human and spiritual landscapes, and its history and culture, Arthur Cotterell explains why Bali is truly a unique ‘landscape of the imagination’.

Forced to give up her Irish adventure after the tragic death of her beloved pony Mollie, Bradt returns a few weeks later determined to complete her journey. After a rocky start with Peggy, the new pony, the pair bond and the adventure continues with new faces and beautiful landscapes.

Hilary Bradt, travel writer and co-founder of Bradt Travel Guides, fulfils a childhood dream by heading to Ireland, buying a horse and trotting round the country. This book, written 30 years later, tells the first part of her 1,000-mile journey with the help of her original diaries.

Paris, the City of Lights, has always had its dark side: a city of the poor, the outcast, the criminal, the eccentric and the nonconformist. Illustrated with more than 300 historic images, this journey through its dance halls and whorehouses, its absinthe bars and hobo shelters, finds their traces in the bricks and stones of the modern city, revealing lives that were a far cry from those of the haute bourgeoisie.

What is it about snow that leaves us spellbound? What draws us to play with it, sledge over it, and even risk our lives in it? In this finely woven blend of memoir, history and travelogue, self-confessed snow obsessive Charlie English wraps up warm and goes in search of the answers to these questions, from the Cairngorms to Vermont, from Chamonix to the Canadian Arctic.

In 1925 the young American architect Barry Dierks and his lover Eric Sawyer built Le Trident, a Modernist home at Miramar on the Côte d’Azur. Word of Barry’s talent spread, and the commissions that followed propelled them into the heart of Riviera society, with clients including Somerset Maugham and the Marquess of Cholmondeley. This biography recalls Barry and Eric’s time with their glamorous circle of friends, contrasting the lifestyle of the Jazz Age with the hardships that were to come under German occupation.

(Off-mint) May smell slightly musty due to long storage.

After selecting 16 peaks which are among Britain’s wildest and emptiest places, Ingram devoted more than a year to exploring them. Here he records what happened on his expedition, following a circuitous route from Beinn Dearg to Ben Nevis via the Brecon Beacons, Pennines and Lake District. As well as discussing the practicalities of the climbs, he describes each mountain’s unique atmosphere and delves into its history and folklore. Slightly off-mint.

Top of the Lonely Planet's list of the world's unsung places, Trieste is almost cut off from Italy, by geography and history. This Omaggio a.. volume shows the city in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when it was a great cosmopolitan centre for art and literature. The book contains around 80 sepia tone photographs with captions, and a short introduction. Texts are in Italian and English.

The prizewinning novelist Erik Orsenna grew up on an island off the coast of Brittany, giving thanks to the Atlantic current that brings warmth to the shores of Europe. In this remarkable book, he follows the Gulf Stream from Cape Hatteras to the legendary Norwegian Maelstrom, meeting scientists and scholars in an attempt to understand the phenomenon, its influence on culture and climate and whether global warming will stop its flow.

Travel writer Paul Raffaele has journeyed to remote corners of the earth in search of native peoples and sects who practised or are still practising 'this deep and terrible perversity of human nature': cannibalism. This account of his adventures records encounters with man-eaters including the Korowai tribe in New Guinea; holy men of a Hindu sect in Benares; and the warriors of Tonga, who until recently ate their slain enemies. Felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge.