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Here are the vanished days of the unfettered Sultanate in all their dark, melodramatic splendor.

The Sultanate of Muscat and Oman was a hermit state until 1970, preserving in every detail the poverty, personality and picturesque reality of a medieval kingdom. For forty years, Sultan Said bin Taimur personally controlled everything that happened, deliberately cutting the nation off from the headlong development of the rest of the world. Fortunately for Oman this would change, and fortunately for us, we have a first-hand witness to this complex society before that watershed. Ian Skeet traveled across the vast sand deserts and arid highlands of Muscat and Oman in 1966-68, preparing the wary inhabitants for the coming of oil, visiting its isolated walled cities, fortified oasis communities and independent-minded Bedouin tribes. The sultan's motives may have been pure - to preserve his people from the sin of usury and the slavery of foreign debt - but Ian Skeet's portrait is a devastating study of the dead hand of autocracy.

Puka-Puka is a triangular coral reef, some seven miles in circumference with three islands. It frames a lagoon so clear that one can see the coral forests some ten fathoms below. It is the most remote, and probably the most beautiful, of all the Cook Islands.

With both a native s intimacy and the fresh-eye of an outsider, Simeti celebrates the Mediterranean island she and the Greek goddess of the harvest call home.

The author has travelled up the Indus to Lahore and to the Khanates of Afghanistan and Central Asia in the 1830s, spying on behalf of the British Government in what was to become known as the Great Game. This title provides an account his travels.

Offers an introduction to the life of a social anthropologist.

A selection of writing by the most unknown great traveller.

A chronicle of the lives of several British lighthouse keepers and their families, revealing the reason for their solitary career.

Winston Churchill wrote this account of the first 25 years of his life in 1930. It reveals him struggling with Latin grammar at prep school, charging the Dervishes at Omdurman and preparing his first political speech for a Conservative fete.

Originally published in 1951, it is said that A Dragon Apparent inspired Graham Greene to go to Vietnam and write The Quiet American.

This is the best example of the East-meets-West genre to come my way in ages. Written mainly as the diary extracts of an innocent Scottish girl who sails out just after the turn of the century for her proper marriage to a British military attache in China, the novel tells of her subsequent scandalous love affair with a Japanese aristocrat. Wynd's tight control of high passion supports one of my theories: the isles of Japan are the true antipodes to the British isles and their funny ways have much in commong with ours. Irma Kurtz latest book is 'Dear London'. (Kirkus UK)

A story of Irfan Orga's family's survival.

Welcome to Paradise opens a window into the hearts of a small group of African would-be emigrants, waiting on the beach in Morocco for a boat that will take them to a new life in Europe. As we shelter with them in the darkness, we hear of the cruelty, misfortune and grinding poverty which has compelled them here, to pit themselves against the dangers of the sea and the coastguards who patrol it.

The Station follows three high-spirited young men as they visit twenty monasteries on Mount Athos in 1927. They examine treasures, photograph frescoes and sketch the courtyards and those who live in them. They swim ecstatically off the sparkling, deserted beaches, climb mountains, talk and share meals with monks and transcribe these conversations with relish. For life is very different for a celibate hermit on Mount Athos. Time has no meaning: the Son of God, His Virgin Mother, the Angels and the Saints are all living creatures of flesh and blood, and the Pope is a heretic. This slim book was little short of revolutionary in its fearless championing of Greek Orthodoxy and Byzantine civilization, reversing centuries of western prejudice. It was the first of Robert Byron's travel books, revealing the flashing wit, bravery, passion and astonishing powers of visual observation which made him such a brilliant writer. The playfully obscure title is only finally explained in his last sentence: 'This is the holy Mountain Athos, station of a faith where all the years have stopped.'

Caught between these covers is the authentic, forthright voice of Christian Watt, servant girl, lady's maid and fishwife. Born in 1833, her working life began in domestic service before the age of nine and ended with her selling her husband's catch from door to door. The tragic death of most of her close male family - her husband, four brothers and her favorite child - drowned by a sudden squall that sunk their boat, robbed her of her sanity. But cared for in the remarkable Cornhill Asylum in Aberdeen, a kindly doctor encouraged her to write her memoirs in pencil. In 1983 this bundle of papers, which included other family documents, was turned into a book by the historian David Fraser, and has been saluted as the Montaillou of Scotland.

The Narrow Smile is a portrait of the Pathan and their highland home on either side of the Pakistan-Afghan frontier. Peter Mayne grew up in India, and later spent four years on the Northwest Frontier during the Second World War. Mayne delighted in the company of these fierce but hospitable highlanders, who were as hard as the mountains that assured their independence but democratic to the point that no man admitted the right of another to lead him. In 1953, Mayne took a long journey to see what had become of his old friends in the high, flower-filled valleys on the roof of the world. But peace had always been a relative concept on this frontier, where Afghanistan was now eyeing Pashtun lands in a new iteration of the Great Game. Mayne's misadventures are sometimes serious, often very funny, and at all times compassionate.

Life at Full Tilt is a whirlwind tour of Dervla Murphy's travels. It begins in Spain in 1956, before her first book, and follows in her tracks for over fifty years, including descriptions of her beloved Afghanistan in 1963, of the Peruvian Andes, of South, West and East Africa and most recently of the troubled territories of Palestine and Israel. Dervla's style of travel, to go somewhere that interested her and see who she met, made for fresh encounters every day, recorded faithfully each evening in her journal. She read hungrily to prepare for her journeys and folded her learning seamlessly into her books. Finally, between these covers, we are able to catch up with her work in its entirety. What shines through is her passionate engagement with the world and its injustices, and her utter independence of mind. Ethel Crowley, an Irish sociologist, has for the first time looked at all Dervla's writing - her journalism and her twenty-four books - selecting half-a-dozen extracts from each. She introduces us to a complex character, hard to pin down, but a role model for women and environmentalists, Irish to her fingertips and a crucial part of the larger English tradition of travel writing.

First published in 1933, Brazilian Adventure is Peter Fleming's account of his expeditionary search for the lost Colonel. Peter Fleming was the brother of Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond series and was literary editor of The Times.

Weldon was mapping the deserts of Egypt when war broke out. Working from out of a steam yacht based on Port Said or Famagusta, he ran a network of spies and confidential agents onto the Levant coast behind Turkish lines. He was a fluent Arabic speaker and could conduct personal interviews on the shore, as well as landing and taking off agents - all

An inspiring adventure, that throws down a gauntlet about what can be achieved in a family holiday, a 300 mile walk through the Lebanese mountains.

This collection On Travel is clever, funny, provoking and confrontational by turn. In a pyrotechnic display of cracking one- liners, cynical word play and comic observation, it mines three thousand years of wit and wisdom: from Martha Gellhorn to Confucius and from Pliny to Paul Theroux.

Veronica was not a casual traveller but a young musician married to a scholar. She was determined to make use of her time in Afghanistan and break out of the charmed circle of the expatriate academic and make real friendships with local women.

The Hill of Devi chronicles Forster s infatuation and exasperation, fascination and amusement at this idiosyncratic court, leading us with him to its heart and the eight- day festival of Gokul Ashtami, marking the birth of Krishna, where we see His Highness Maharajah Sir Tukoji Rao III dancing before the altar like David before the Ark .

Guy Kennaway s novel about Jamaican life and culture is set in the fictional village of Angel Beach. It is an affectionate and hilarious description of a small community where everyone knows everyone s business, poverty is a way of life and dreams of escape trickle through fingers.

The memoir of a young cavalry officer in India in the British Empire and his search for spiritual fulfilment.

Unique eyewitness account from 1917 of Morocco as a French protectorate.