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An expert on Britain’s architectural heritage and founder of the Railway Heritage Trust, Simon Jenkins presents an introductory history of the railway station and a personal selection of 100 buildings, chosen for their ‘architectural beauty, eccentricity or setting’. Beginning with the great London termini and ending at Wemyss Bay (‘a coherent work of art’), this richly illustrated volume is an erudite and engrossing survey of stations throughout England, Wales and Scotland, and the architects, engineers and railway companies that built them.

Slightly off-mint.

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.

For more than 20 years, readers turned to AA Gill’s columns every Sunday for his wit, perception and outrageously funny one-liners. Drawn from a range of publications including The Sunday Times, Vanity Fair and Tatler, this compilation presents some of the best of his restaurant reviews, travel journalism, TV criticism and feature articles. Among the collection are his excoriation of vegetarians, provocative reportage from Sudan and Haiti, and reflections on his father’s Alzheimer's and his own impending death from pancreatic cancer.

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.

Venice has inspired writers since the sixth century, when Cassiodorus described the lagoon-dwellers as living ‘like sea-birds in huts’. Selected by John Julius Norwich, this anthology includes the impressions of both inhabitants and visitors over the centuries. In letters, diaries, travelogues and verse, Byron, Casanova, Goethe, Wagner, Dickens, Ruskin, Henry James, Jan Morris and others reflect on the island city’s architecture, its atmosphere, music, ceremonies and people.

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, sultry portrait of Latin America, a tequila-soaked chronicle of boredom, 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.

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. Off-mint.

In this unconventional travelogue, Nick Hunt is blown along by four of Europe’s fiercest winds: the Helm, which blasts the Pennines; the Bora, that scours the valleys of Slovenia; the ‘snow-eating’ Föhn of the Alps; and the Mistral of Provence. Along the way, he meets meteorologists, mountain men, sailors and shepherds, and learns how each of these named winds has its special characteristics, shaping lives, landscapes and communities.

For six months, Wood and his guides trekked along the foothills of the Himalayas, through Afghanistan, Kashmir and Nepal. His account of the 1,700-mile journey explores the region’s history, politics and the lives of its people, including yak-herders, separatist fighters, Buddhist monks and blood-drinking shamans. Off-mint.

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.

In April 1925 an unassuming schoolteacher left Buenos Aires with two horses, to ride to New York. When he arrived two years later, he was greeted by a ticker-tape parade. His account of the journey, first published in 1933, tells how he traversed the Pampas, scaled the Andes, swam crocodile-infested rivers and escaped capture by revolutionaries. It has inspired generations of adventurers, including Robin Hanbury-Tenison, who provides the introduction to this new edition.

Michael Foreman dreamed of seeing the world as a boy, but never imagined his artistic talents would enable him to travel, first through a scholarship to visit America and subsequently with commissions to document North Sea oil rigs and the World Fair in Japan. Including a football game in the Andes and pony-trekking in Kashmir, Foreman’s travelogue, which spans the 1960s to the 1990s, is illustrated with his line drawings and watercolours.

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 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.

A writer and activist involved in issues including land reform, globalization and non-violence, 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. Illustrated with more then 300 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.