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Handsome, spirited and erudite, Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915–2011) was a war hero and one of the greatest travel writers of his generation. He was also a spectacularly entertaining letter writer. This judiciously edited selection of his correspondence spans almost 70 years, and includes letters to Nancy Mitford, Diana Cooper, Lawrence Durrell and his lifelong companion Joan Rayner. They sparkle with his humour, zest for life, unending curiosity, lyrical descriptive powers – and his tendency to get into scrapes.

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 whether these communities really are on their last legs. Fort approaches 6,000 years of history and his own experiences of rural life with wit, humour 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.

This scurrilous and thoroughly entertaining travelogue describes a young journalist’s adventures in the explosive Middle East during the 1990s. Ironically, it was in London that the author was murdered the day he completed the manuscript.

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. Here is 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 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.

Tom Rodwell, Chairman of the Lord's Taverners, spent six years running charity cricket tours to help disadvantaged young people in some of the world's poorest districts. This book recounts his amusing adventures, from playing in cricket-mad cultures in Sri Lanka and Jamaica to unlikely locations such as Cuba and Israel.

Martin Garrett traces Oxford’s history from Anglo-Saxon ‘oxen-ford’ to the present, with chapters on its architecture, ‘town and gown’, and writers and religion; and goes beyond the city to surrounding places of interest including Blenheim Palace and White Horse Hill.

From Stone Age tombs to Damien Hirst’s plans for Toddington Manor, Jane Bingham explores this Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, plus two noteworthy houses: Blenheim and William Morris’s Kelmscott Manor.

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.

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.

Written while he was in prison in Genoa in 1298, Marco Polo’s Travels recounts his journey across the vast Mongol empire to the domain of Khubilai Khan, his 16-year sojourn there, and his fantastic adventures on the homeward journey to Venice. The book, one of the first great works of travel literature, is presented here in the Yule-Cordier translation, with an introduction and a wealth of captioned illustrations, including manuscript illuminations, maps and photographs, on vellum-coloured pages.

A writer and activist involved in issues including land reform, globalization and nonviolence, Alastair McIntosh returned to the islands of the Outer Hebrides – Harris and his native Lewis – on a twelve-day, 60-mile journey of pilgrimage in 2009. This book is an account of the rigours of his journey; the people, landscape and ancient relics he encountered; stories from the islands’ history and lore; and thoughts of his own past and present.

Hay-on-Wye is world famous as ‘the town of books’. But when the travel writer Oliver Balch moved there, it was its people he was keen to read. With empathy and humour, he joins in the daily routines of his fellow residents; young farmers, elderly widows, mayors, hippies and publicans. What emerges is a captivating personal picture of country life in the 21st century.

Beginning with the natural formation of the landscape and brief surveys of its flora and fauna, Beattie's cultural history traces the history of the Scottish Highlands as ‘characterized by a struggle against grinding poverty and savage political repression’ rather than the romantic glosses of Victorian ‘mythologizers’. He goes on to discuss the novels set in this ‘elemental landscape’, the poetry that the Highlands and its people have inspired, and the responses of visitors from Samuel Johnson to Paul Theroux.

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. Richly illustrated with more then 300 haunting historic images, this poetic essay takes the reader on a journey through its dance halls and whorehouses, its absinthe bars and hobo shelters, finding their traces in the bricks and stones of the modern city, reclaiming it from the haute bourgeoisie and the property speculators.

The Himalayas beckon…and we go. Following a meandering path across the mountains, Robert Twigger explores a landscape of pilgrimage and revelation, of massacre and invasion, and of unutterable calm. Unravelling real and invented journeys, and the unexpected links between them, he encounters incredible stories from a unique cast of mountaineers and mystics, pundits and prophets. The result is a sweeping, enthralling and surprising journey through the dramatic history of the world’s greatest mountain range.

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, Barry Dierks, a young American architect, and his lover Eric Sawyer bought land at Miramar on the Côte d’Azur and built Le Trident, their home and a spectacular showcase for Barry’s architecture. A year later, Somerset Maugham’s La Mauresque became the first of some 70 houses designed by Dierks for the Riviera’s rich and famous. This biography of Barry and Eric also tells of the glamorous inhabitants of the villas and the lifestyle of Jazz Age Côte d’Azur.

The late AA Gill was widely acclaimed as one of the finest journalists of our time. This selection of recent pieces, made by Gill himself before his untimely death, shows him at his most perceptive, brilliant and funny. He tackles life-drawing, designs his own tweed, spends a day at Donald Trump’s university, and contemplates his cancer diagnosis. Above all, he addresses that most urgent of contemporary issues, the refugee crisis, reporting from Lampedusa, Lebanon and Calais with anger and compassion.

In 1960 John Steinbeck and his dog Charley set out in their green pickup truck, travelling from New York to New Orleans to ‘see how the country looks and smells and sounds’. Half a century on, Dutch journalist and historian Geert Mak and his wife travel from Steinbeck’s home, retracing his journey through glistening suburbs, Midwestern prairies and rust-belt towns to see how Main Street, USA has changed, and what has become of the American Dream.

In 1989, the Scottish artist and author Mairi Hedderwick came across John T Reid’s Art Rambles in the Highlands and Islands, which records his sketching tours of 1876. In 1990, she set off to retrace Reid’s journey and record the same scenes that he sketched 114 years earlier. The eight rambles around Scotland are described in Hedderwick’s intensely personal and very entertaining commentary, but also in excerpts from Reid’s writings, and his engravings sit alongside her watercolours. New edition.

Silbury Hill in Wiltshire has inspired and perplexed people for generations. Poets and artists have tried to fathom its meaning, archaeologists have tunnelled through it, yet the largest man-made mound in Europe remains an enigma. In this haunting memoir, the novelist Adam Thorpe recalls his childhood on the Wiltshire Downs, skilfully weaving his life and experiences into the long history of that ancient landscape and the people who shaped and were shaped by it.

Simon Gandolfi first visited India in the 1960s, driving a VW to Goa, where he met and fell in love with Vanessa. Forty years later, fury at the terrorist attacks on the Taj Hotel in Mumbai leads him to return, this time on a Honda 125. Gandolfi’s unique and charming travelogue interweaves the two trips, combining bittersweet memories of the past with a window on the India of today.

This volume contains the Journal of Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra (1775); the Journal of Commander Pringle Stokes on HMS Beagle in the Strait of Magellan (1827), the Journal of Midshipman Joseph Henry Kay on HMS Chanticleer, 1828–31, and Jacob Wainwright’s Diary of the Transportation of Dr Livingstone’s Body to the Coast (1873–4).

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.

Handsome, spirited and erudite, Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011)was a war hero and one of the greatest travel writers of his generation. He was also a spectacularly entertaining letter writer. This judiciously edited selection of his correspondence spans almost 70 years, and includes letters to Nancy Mitford, Diana Cooper, Lawrence Durrell and his lifelong companion Joan Rayner. They sparkle with his humour, zest for life, unending curiosity, lyrical descriptive powers – and his tendency to get into scrapes.

In the aftermath of a personal crisis Sebald, the celebrated German author, sets out on foot through the eerie, liminal landscape of coastal East Anglia. Deftly skirting the porous border between memoir, travelogue and fiction, the result is a haunting meditation on people and cultures past and present, on writers from Thomas Browne to Joseph Conrad, on fishing fleets, silkworms, a town that vanished beneath the sea, and the transience of human existence.

In the late 1990s, Mairi Hedderwick embarked on a six-week voyage through the Caledonian Canal to the western fjords, aboard the antique yacht Anassa. Filled with frank and fresh observations on everything from the history of landscape painting in Scotland to the shipping forecast and fish farming, and illustrated with her own drawings and watercolours, this is an enthralling account of another remarkable journey. New edition.

Though famously a resident of Hackney and known for his writings on the 'psychogeography' of London, Iain Sinclair was born in Cardiff. This monograph sees him rediscover the blue-grey roads and cliff-top paths of his childhood in South Wales, on a journey through place, memory and his responses to the poetry of Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins, plus the artwork of Ceri Richards, who created the strange series of paintings that gives the book its name.