The Traveller's Daybook

The Travellers Daybook invites you to cross ocean, desert, mountain and ice-cap in the company of the worlds greatest explorers, wanderers and writers...

Fergus Flemings day-by-day anthology of travel writing ranges widely across time as well as place: from Christopher Columbuss discovery of the West Indies in 1492 to Anton Chekhovs journey through Siberia in the nineteenth century and on to Wilfred Thesigers wanderings in Arabias empty quarter in the 1940s. Each quoted extract is accompanied by a brief commentary that intro­duces the writer and establishes the context of the excerpt.

Flemings itinerary offers both a wealth of exotic destinations, and a many-hued patchwork of moods: the astonishment of the seventeenth-century diarist John Evelyn on beholding the size of womens shoes in Venice; the stoic courage of Captain Scott facing death at forty degrees below zero; the exasperation of Dylan Thomas at find­ing himself in a stifflipped, liverish, British Guest House in puking Abadan; and the philosophical introspection of Fridtjof Nansen as he drifts in an interminable and rigid world of Arctic ice. Here you will find Napoleons travel tips to his niece, a flight over Germany with Hitler, and an ex-pat dinner in Morocco where human blood is served from the fridge by the pint.

Covering the whole calendar, including leap years, these 366 journeys are by turn lyrical, witty, tragic and bizarre - but always entertaining.