Over the summer of 2011, in her eightieth year, Dervla Murphy spent a month in the Gaza Strip. She met liberals and Islamists, Hamas and Fatah supporters, rich and poor. Used t...more

With dry, laconic wit, Norman Lewis remembers his transformation from stammering Welsh schoolboy to worldly wise, multilingual sergeant in the Intelligence Corps, on the cusp of...more

The Missionaries is a searing examination of attempts by North American fundamentalist Christian missionaries to convert indigenous tribes around the globe, and the genoc...more

In the late 1940s, Norman Lewis settled in a remote fishing village on what is now the Costa Brava in Spain, relishing a society where men regulated their lives by the sardine s...more

DOREEN INGRAMS and her husband were the first Europeans ever to live in the Hadhramaut, an extraordinary, isolated region of southern Arabia. Married to an Arabic-speaking Brit...more

In a ruined temple along the Nile, Anthony Sattin sees a woman praying to the gods of ancient Egypt to bless her with a child. Or does he? Later that day, a policeman stops his...more

With a new introduction from her acclaimed biographer, Caroline Moorehead

These four interlinked stories encapsulate Martha Gellhorn's first-hand observation of the Great...more

With the help of a Maratha nobleman, Mark Shand bought an elephant named Tara and rode her over six hundred miles across India to the Sonepur Mela, the world's oldest elephant m...more

Two middle-aged ladies, one Penelope Chetwode, the other her 12-year old mare La Marquesa, explored the high sierra north of Granada in 1961. Together the travellers brought ou...more

Before Thesiger, T.E.Lawrence and Richard Burton, there was an even greater traveller in the heroic British tradition of the recklessly adventurous, amateur scholar - Alexander...more