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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.

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.

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.

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.

Peter Clutterbuck, now a professional yachtsman and sailing instructor, looks back to the 1960s and youthful adventures in his Wayfarer dinghy Calypso. He learned to sail it in coastal waters, then ventured out to sea – across the Channel and the Bay of Biscay, and eventually the North Sea and the Baltic. For anyone with a love of sailing and the sea, Clutterbuck’s book is both an engrossing read and a mine of information and advice.

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.

John Higgs takes his readers on a journey from Dover, up through London and the Midlands to North Wales on a route that was once a pathway through forest, then a meandering trackway, then a road, made straight by the Romans. For Higgs, ‘there is no road anywhere in the world that has produced so many stories’, and travelling along Watling Street, he explores how it has been shaping our history, culture and personal identities for thousands of years.

The author and TV presenter Nicholas Crane traces the journeys of eight adventurers whose travels across Britain provided a valuable written narrative of the country’s landscapes and treasures. Adopting their original mode of transport where possible, he follows parts of Celia Fiennes’s 17th-century tour of England on horseback, takes to a boat on the Wye as William Gilpin did in 1770, and recreates HV Morton’s trip around Scotland in 1929 in a bull-nosed Morris.

This wry account of a rail tour of the USA ranges from New York to LA, from Niagara Falls to New Orleans. The author meets card-playing Amish, traces his Irish roots with the Mormons, and visits a number of microbreweries along the way.

On foot and by canoe, from Carlingford Lough to Derry/Londonderry, Lough Foyle and Magilligan Point on the northern coast, Garrett Carr follows the twisted border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Travelling along rivers and through divided towns, villages and farms in borderlands with a troubled past and an uncertain future, Carr aims to examine ‘how the land and its people have reacted to the border, and the ways in which the line is made manifest’.

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.

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.

Part travel book, part musings on life from the deck of a yacht, this is Larsson’s homage to Celtic lands and waters, from the westernmost point of Spain (Finisterre) to the north of Scotland (Cape Wrath). Admitting to ‘rootlessness and impermanence’, Larsson reflects on the difficulties of an alternative way of life, but also the opportunities it presents.

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.

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.

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 included in this set are: Lap of the Gods (Read more...) Holy Smoke! (Read more...) Gods in Britain (Read more...) Ye Gods! (Read more...)

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.

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.

After meeting the Patriarch in Istanbul, Dudley journeys down Anatolia to Egypt, with its temples of ancient gods, and the monastery at Sinai, where she reflects on connections and conflicts between Islam, Judaism and Christianity.

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.

Beginning in Athens, this itinerary takes in sites across Greece, including Apollo’s birthplace on Delos, the ancient gods’ home atop Mount Olympus and the island of Patmos, where St John wrote the Book of Revelation. Slightly off-mint.

This quest to discover Britain’s ancient beliefs and legends takes the reader from Stonehenge and Glastonbury to Canterbury Cathedral, encountering Celtic and Roman gods, the Knights Templar, St Columba and the giants Gog and Magog.

The Stanfords Travel Classics series reprints the finest historical travel writing, including this trio of remarkable books: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879); Edith Wharton’s In Morocco (1920), an account of her journey from Rabat, via Fez to Marrakech at the end of the First World War; and Sailing Alone around the World (1900), in which Joshua Slocum tells the story of his 1895 circumnavigation in a 100-year-old rebuilt sloop.

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.

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.

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.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.

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.

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.

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.