About Salman Rushdie: Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s most acclaimed, award-winning contemporary authors. Translated into over forty languages, his sixteen works of fiction include Midnight’s Children – for which he won the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers on the 25th anniversary of the prize and Best of the Booker on the 40th anniversary – Shame, The Satanic Verses, Quichotte and Victory City. His latest book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder was a number one Sunday Times bestseller. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature and was made a Companion of Honour in the Queen's last Birthday Honours list in 2022.

Salman Rushdie

About Salman Khan: Salman Khan is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. His lessons on YouTube have revolutionized learning, garnering billions of views globally. Recognized as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World, Khan is also the founder of schoolhouse.world, Khan Lab School, and Khan World School, and the author of The One World Schoolhouse. He holds three degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Salman Khan

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Joseph Mitchell

'The master of a journalistic style long vanished - urbane, lucid, courteous... A masterpiece of observation and storytelling' Ian McEwan 
 
Mitchell is the laureate of old New York. The hidden corners of the city and the people who lived there are his subject. He captured the waterfront rooming-houses , nickel-a-drink saloons, all-night restaurants, the 'visionaries, obsessives, imposters, fanatics, lost souls, the end-is-near street preachers, old Gypsy Kings and old Gypsy Queens, and out-and-out freak-show freaks.' Mitchell's trademark curiosity, respect and graveyard humour fuel these magical essays. 
 
Written between 1943 and 1965, Up in the Old Hotel is the complete collection of Joseph Mitchell 's New Yorker journalism and includes McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr Flood, The Bottom of the Harbour and Joe Gould's Secret. 
 
 
'Joseph Mitchell is buried treasure' Salman Rushdie

Up in the Old Hotel

Bruce Chatwin

In this collection of profiles, essays and travel stories, Chatwin takes us to Benin, where he is arrested as a mercenary during a coup; to Boston to meet an LSD guru who believes he is Christ; to India with Indira Ghandi when she attempted a political comeback in 1978; and to Nepal where he reminds us that 'Man's real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot'

What Am I Doing Here?

Christopher Isherwood

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY SIMON CALLOW 
 
In 1939, as Europe approaches war, Isherwood, an instinctive pacifist, travels west to California, seeking a new set of beliefs to replace the failed Leftism of the thirties. There he meets Swami Prabhavananda, a Hindu monk, who will become his spiritual guide for the next thirty-seven years. Late-night drinking sessions, free love, and the glamour of writing for the Hollywood studios alternate with meditation, abstinence and the study of religious texts in a compelling tug of war between worldliness and holiness.

My Guru and His Disciple

Laurens Van Der Post

Explorer, novelist, writer and film-maker, Sir Laurens van der Post was one of the most influential figures of our era. Here, in conversation with Jean-Marc Pottiez, he records his ideas and insights into a wide range of issues and personalities, forged by a lifetime of vast experiences and challenges.

A Walk with a White Bushman

Robert Byron

Discover the ultimate in classic 1930s travel writing. 
 
'A writer of breathtaking prose – prose whose sensuous, chiselled beauty has cast its spell on English travel writing ever since' William Dalrymple 
 
 In 1933, the delightfully eccentric, Robert Byron set out on a journey through the Middle East via Beirut, Jerusalem, Baghdad and Tehran to Oxiana – the country of the Oxus, the ancient name for the river Amu Darya which formed part of the border between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. His journey ended in what is now Peshawar, Pakistan. 
While his arrival at his destination, the legendary tower of Qabus, is a wonder, the journey itself is a captivating, quirky record of his adventures and a rare account of the architectural treasures of a region now lost to time and conflict. 
 
‘Funny, didactic and biting, Byron's masterpiece transports us across the world and, better still, across the decades’ Independent

The Road to Oxiana

W.G. Sebald

‘Sebald is the Joyce of the 21st Century’ The Times 
 
What begins as the record of W. G. Sebald’s own journey on foot through coastal East Anglia, from Lowestoft to Bungay, becomes the conductor of evocations of people and cultures past and present. From Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, to fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms, the result is an intricately patterned and haunting book on the transience of all things human. 
 
‘A novel of ideas with a difference: it is nothing but ideas… Formally dexterous, fearlessly written (why shouldn't an essay be a novel?), and unremittingly arcane; by the end I was in tears’ Teju Cole, Guardian

The Rings of Saturn

Colin Thubron

Colin Thurbon’s beautiful prose unfolds along the Silk Road, unearthing a richly layered past on his most ambitious journey. 
 
 On buses, donkey carts, trains, jeeps and camels, Colin Thubron traces the drifts of the first great trade route out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran into Kurdish Turkey. A magnificent account of an ancient world in modern ferment, Thubron covers over 7000 miles in eight months enduring a near-miss with a drunk-driver, incarceration in a Chinese cell, and undergoing root canal treatment without anaesthetic, along the way. 
 
VINTAGE VOYAGES: A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mind

Shadow of the Silk Road

(Vintage Voyages)

W. Somerset Maugham

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY PAUL THEROUX 
 
Somerset Maugham's success as a writer enabled him to indulge his adventurous love of travel, and he recorded the sights and sounds of his wide-ranging journeys with an urbane, wry style all his own. The Gentleman in the Parlour is an account of the author's trip through what was then Burma and Siam, ending in Haiphong, Vietnam. Whether by river to Mandalay, on horse through the mountains and forests of the Shan States to Bangkok, or onwards by sea, Maugham's vivid descriptions bring a lost world to life.

The Gentleman In The Parlour

Maurice Herzog

One of the finest mountaineering books. A phenomenal tale of strength and valour. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JOE SIMPSON 
 
In 1950, no mountain higher than 8,000 meters had ever been climbed. Maurice Herzog and other members of the French Alpine Club resolved to try. This is the enthralling story of the first conquest of Annapurna and the harrowing descent. With breathtaking courage and grit manifest on every page, Annapurna is one of the greatest adventure stories ever told. 
 
As well as an introduction by Joe Simpson, this new edition includes 16 pages of photographs, which provide a remarkable visual record of this legendary expedition. 
 
The distinguished French mountaineer Maurice Herzog was leader of the 1950 expedition to Annapurna. He was one of the two climbers to reach the summit.

Annapurna

The First Conquest of an 8000-Metre Peak

Graham Greene

With superb skill and feeling, Graham Greene retraces the experiences and encounters of his extraordinary life. His restlessness is legendary; as if seeking out danger, Greene travelled to Haiti during the nightmare rule of Papa Doc, Vietnam in the last days of the French, Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion. With ironic delight he recalls his time in the British Secret Service in Africa, and his brief involvement in Hollywood. He writes, as only he can, about people and places, about faith, doubt, fear and, not least, the trials and craft of writing.

Ways Of Escape

Laurens van der Post was fascinated and appalled at the fate of this remarkable people.  Ostracised by all the changing face of African cultural life they retreated deep into the Kalahari desert. His fascinating attempt to capture their way of life and the secrets of their ancient heritage provide captivating reading and a unique insight into a forgotten way of life.

The Lost World of the Kalahari

With 'The Great and the Little Memory'

Werner Herzog

A poetic meditation on life and death, by one of the most renowned and respected film-makers and intellectuals of our time. 
 
In November 1974, when Werner Herzog was told that his mentor Lotte Eisner, the film historian and critic, was dying in Paris, he set off to walk there from Munich, ‘in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot’. Along the way he recorded what he saw, how he felt, and what he experienced, from the physical discomfort of the journey to moments of rapture. It is a remarkable narrative – part pilgrimage, part meditation, and a confrontation between a great German Romantic imagination and the contemporary world. 
 
‘Surely the strangest, strongest walking book I know’ Robert Macfarlane 
 
?????'It hits you with the force of dreams and leaves you with the taste of snow-filled air’ Helen Macdonald

Of Walking In Ice

Munich - Paris: 23 November - 14 December, 1974

Peter Robb

Peter Robb's journey into the dark heart of Sicily uses history, painting, literature and food to shed light on southern Italy's legacy of political corruption and violent crime. Taking the trial of seven-times Prime Minister, Giulio Andreotti, for alleged Mafia involvement as its starting point, Midnight in Sicily combines a searching investigation with an exuberant, sensual appreciation of this beautiful and bewildering island.

Midnight in Sicily

In 1938 Graham Greene was commissioned to visit Mexico to discover the state of the country and its people in the aftermath of the brutal anti-clerical purges of President Calles. His journey took him through the tropical states of Chiapas and Tabasco, where all the churches had been destroyed or closed and the priests driven out or shot. The experiences were the inspiration for his acclaimed novel, The Power and the Glory.

The Lawless Roads

Simone de Beauvoir

In 1947 Simone de Beauvoir took a road trip across America. 
 
She travelled from coast to coast, from New York to Hollywood, taking in New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana and Washington DC. She rode a pony through the Grand Canyon, listened to jazz in New Orleans and visited the nightclubs of Chicago. And she captured the entire experience in her journal. 
 
This captivating book is that journal and an immersive portrait of postwar America. Beauvoir was disturbed by the poverty and segregation she encountered and at the same time delighted by American energy and friendliness. 
 
Intimate, warm, and compulsively readable, this is travel writing from the iconic feminist and thinker, Simone de Beauvoir. 
 
On New York: 'I walk between the steep cliffs at the bottom of a canyon where no sun penetrates: it's permeated by a salt smell. Human history is not inscribed on these carefully calibrated buildings: They are closer to prehistoric caves than to the houses of Paris or Rome.' 
 
On Los Angeles: 'I watch the Mexican dances and eat chilli con carne, which takes the roof off my mouth, I drink the tequila and I'm utterly dazed with pleasure.'

America Day by Day

Russell Page

A fabulous book about designing gardens great and small, packed with wisdom on the abiding principles of gorgeous garden design. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALAN TITCHMARSH 
 
Russell Page was one of the most legendary gardeners and landscapers of the last century. He designed gardens great and small for clients around the world. A rare combination of born plantsman and garden architect, he was a master of colour, form and structure. Page also understood that most tricky dimension of garden design: the passage of time. From Longleat to the Frick Collection, his gardens can be enjoyed to this day. 
 
Packed with wisdom and beautiful writing, this book offers a unique perspective on great garden design and is essential reading for every gardener. 
 
'One of the most thoughtful and civilized gardening books ever written, by a master designer' Daily Telegraph

The Education of a Gardener

The iconic writer's travel log from the uncharted shores of West Africa. 
 
Leaving Europe for the first time in his life, Graham Greene set out in 1935 to discover Liberia, then a virtually unmapped republic on the shores of West Africa. This captivating account of his arduous 350-mile journey on foot - a great adventure which took him from the border with Sierra Leone to the Atlantic coast at Grand Bassa - is as much a record of one young man's self-discovery as it is a striking insight into one of the few areas of Africa untouched by Western colonisation. Journey Without Maps is regarded as a masterclass in travel writing. 
 
WITH A FOREWORD BY TIM BUTCHER AND AN INTRODUCTION BY PAUL THEROUX 
 
'One of the best travel books this century' Independent

Journey Without Maps

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY PICO IYER 
 
In September 1947, long before mass tourism and with no knowledge of Spanish, Christopher Isherwood and William Caskey left for a six-month tour of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina. The Condor and the Cows is Isherwood’s unsentimental and wonderfully rich account of that journey, during which he bumped into a handful of old acquaintances on a brand-new continent.

The Condor and the Cows

Barry Lopez

**AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4** 
 
'A master nature writer' (New York Times) provides the ultimate natural, social and cultural history of the Arctic landscape. 
 
The author of Horizon's classic work explores the Arctic landscape and the hold it continues to exert on our imagination. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT MACFARLANE 
 
Lopez's journey across our frozen planet is a celebration of the Arctic in all its guises. A hostile landscape of ice, freezing oceans and dazzling skyscapes. Home to millions of diverse animals and people. The stage to massive migrations by land, sea and air. The setting of epic exploratory voyages. 
 
In crystalline prose, Lopez captures the magic of the Arctic: the essential mystery and beauty of a continent that has enchanted man's imagination and ambition for centuries. 
 
'The Arctic dreamland seen and described by a writer of rare perception and poetic descriptive power... The pages sparkle with Arctic light' Scotsman

Arctic Dreams

Bruce Chatwin provides a fascinating background to indigenous Australian life. 
 
The songlines are the invisible pathways that criss-cross Australia, tracks connecting communities and following ancient boundaries. Along these lines, Aboriginals passed the songs which revealed the creation of the land and the secrets of its past. In this magical account, Chatwin recalls his travels across the length and breadth of Australia seeking to find the truth about the songs and unravel the mysteries of their stories.

The Songlines

Encountering an eccentric cast of characters along the way, Sebald confronts the frailty of human existence as he voyages along the Suffolk coast on foot. 
 
 What begins as the record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia becomes the great, constellated story of people and cultures past and present: of Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, of fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms. A rich meditation on the past via a melancholy trip along the Suffolk coast, The Rings of Saturn is an intricately patterned and haunting book on the transience of all things human. 
 
VINTAGE VOYAGES: A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mind

Walter Scott

On the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo discover a fascinating primary source: Walter Scott's accounts of his journey to the battlefield 
 
In the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo tourists flocked from Britain to witness the scene of the most important conflict of their generation. Walter Scott was among them, and with a commission from his publisher for a travel book and a long poem. These prose and verse accounts bring to vivid life the carnage, spectacle and excitement of a fascinating period of European history. 
 
 Brilliantly introduced and annotated by Paul O'Keeffe, this edition elucidates and contextualises Scott's first-hand account of his travels, his dashing epic, ‘The Field of Waterloo’ and the eerily chilling 'Dance of Death'.

Scott on Waterloo

Elspeth Huxley

When Elspeth Huxley’s pioneer father buys a remote plot of land in Kenya, the family sets off to discover their new home: five hundred acres of Kenyan scrubland, infested with ticks and white ants, and quavering with heat. What they lack in know-how they make up for in determination: building a grass house, employing local Kikuyu tribe members and painstakingly transforming their patch of wilderness into a working farm. Huxley’s unforgettable childhood memoir is a sensitive account of settler life at the turn of the twentieth century and a love song to the harshness and beauty of East Africa.

The Flame Trees Of Thika

Memories of an African Childhood

José Saramago

José Saramago takes us on a thrilling literary journey through the land, history and culture of his native country. 
 
From the misty mountains of the north to the southern seascape of the Algarve, the travels of Nobel Laureate José Saramago are a passionate rediscovery of his own land. 
 
 Embarking in the autumn of 1979, Saramago resolves to travel to Portugal, as well as through it. As his country emerges from an authoritarian dictatorship, he traverses his beloved homeland, neglecting its grand 'sights' in favour of Romanesque churches and cobweb-ridden chapels, determined to find belonging in the landscape which went on to inform his greatest works of fiction.

Journey to Portugal

A Pursuit of Portugal's History and Culture

Tim Butcher

A compulsively readable account of an African country now virtually inaccessible to the outside world and one journalist's daring and adventurous journey. 
 
When Daily Telegraph correspondent Tim Butcher was sent to cover Africa he quickly became obsessed with the idea of recreating H.M. Stanley's famous expedition - but travelling alone. Despite warnings that his plan was 'suicidal', Butcher set out for the Congo's eastern border with just a rucksack and a few thousand dollars hidden in his boots. Making his way in an assortment of vessels including a motorbike and a dugout canoe, helped along by a cast of characters from UN aid workers to a campaigning pygmy, he followed in the footsteps of the great Victorian adventurers. 
 
VINTAGE VOYAGES: A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mind

Blood River

A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart (Vintage Voyages)

Nik Cohn

Nik Cohn had planned a trip around the world, but when a friend told him that Broadway is 'the world within itself', he started walking up the Great White Way, from Battery Park to Times Square. Escorted by a drum-playing Russian taxi driver, fuelled by duck soup and whiskey and sleeping in crackhouse hotels, Cohn encountered pickpockets, dancers, old  magicians, disgraced politicians, epic storytellers, part-time messiahs, and an unforgettable transvestite called Lush Life. Hallucinogenic history, rogues' gallery, personal odyssey, this extraordinary saga is also an extended love letter to a dream of New York now lost.

The Heart of the World

Maugham spent the winter months of 1919 travelling fifteen hundred miles up the Yangtze river. Always more interested in people than places, he noted down acute and finely crafted sketches of those he met on countless scraps of paper. In the resulting collection we encounter Western missionaries, army officers and company managers who are culturally out of their depth in the immensity of the Chinese civilisation. Maugham keenly observes, and gently ridicules, their dogged and oblivious persistence with the life they know.

On A Chinese Screen

Peter Matthiessen

One of the greatest pieces of travel and nature writing ever written, this is the true story of a journey to the high Himalayas in search of the snow leopard. 
 
In 1973 Matthiessen made the 250-mile trek to the dazzling Tibetan plateau of Dolpo, as part of an expedition to study wild blue sheep. It was an arduous, sometimes dangerous, physical endeavour: exertion, blisters, blizzards, endless negotiations with sherpas, quaking cold. But it was also a 'journey of the heart'. Amongst the beauty and indifference of the mountains Matthiessen was searching for solace. He was also searching for a glimpse of a snow leopard, a creature so rarely spotted as to be almost mythical. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RICHARD MABEY 
 
'A beautiful book, and worthy of the mountains he is among' Paul Theroux

The Snow Leopard

Claudio Magris

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RICHARD FLANAGAN 
 
In this fascinating journey Claudio Magris, whose knowledge is encyclopaedic and whose curiosity limitless, guides his reader from the source of the Danube in the Bavarian hills through Austro-Hungary and the Balkans to the Black Sea. Along the way he raises the ghosts that inhabit the houses and monuments - from Ovid to Kafka and Canetti - and in so doing sets his finger on the pulse of Central Europe, the vital crucible of a culture that draws on influences of East and West, of Christendom and Islam.

Danube

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway's classic portrait of the pageantry of bullfighting. 
 
'I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death' 
 
This is Hemingway's classic portrait of the pageantry of bullfighting. Here are the sights, the sounds, the excitement, and above all, the knowledge, that fuelled Hemingway's passion for Spain and the bullfight. This remarkable book contains some of his finest writing, inspired by the intense life, as well as the inevitable death, of those hot, violent afternoons. 
 
'Hemingway's style, at its best, is a superb vehicle for revealing tenderness of feeling beneath descriptions of brutality' Guardian

Death in the Afternoon

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