Showing titles in Travel Writing & Commentary

Eddy Merckx. Fausto Coppi. Jacques Anquetil. Bernard Hinault. Beryl Burton. Marianne Vos. A sole cyclist battling over a pass high in the mountains is one of the most romantic of sporting images. In the past 150 years road cycling has been dominated by a series of iconic people who have...

Goethe was probably the greatest universal genius who ever lived. Although known primarily as a poet, playright, and novelist, he was also known for his work in anatomy, botany, color, art criticism, and jurisprudence. Many people are deterred from attempting to read anything by Goethe because of his extremely penetrating intelligence and dense prose. But his travel diary, Italian Journey, is by far easier to digest than anything else by him.

Elise was spending a lot of time crying on buses. She had just graduated from university; had a shiny new flat, her first proper job and a budding relationship - and they were making her miserable. Sitting at work one day, she hit upon the obvious solution. Run 5,000 miles around the coast of Britain, carrying her kit on her back. Six months later Elise set off, with absolutely no ultra-running experience, unable to read a map and having never pitched a tent before.  

In The Sea Inside, Philip Hoare sets out to rediscover the sea, its islands, birds and beasts. He begins on the south coast where he grew up, a place of almost monastic escape. From there he travels to the other side of the world - the Azores, Sri Lanka, New Zealand - in search of encounters with animals and people. Navigating between human and natural history, he asks what these stories mean for us now.

When our hero, Victor, needs a pseudonym to avoid embarrassing his wife after deciding to pen a book about up-sticking to Greece, he dusts off his original name of V.D. Bucket, the name he was stuck with after being abandoned in a bucket as a baby. As Victor adapts to his adopted homeland, he battles an obsession with the exacting hygiene standards he demanded during his illustrious career as a public health inspector against the rather less exacting standards of rural Greece. His attempts to master the complexities of the language lead to a number of embarrassing misunderstandings.

Different Natures takes you on three journeys. Each gives an honest and passionate insight into the evolution of a compulsive traveler. Looking for direction with the wrong eyes spawned Graham’s lust for wandering. The miles cleared his vision, and the hunger for longer distance grows with an insatiable appetite for new experiences.

On the Road with Penguin Classics is a podcast that takes a stroll around the world's favourite books. In each episode, author and editor Henry Eliot travels to a different literary location to explore a brilliant book in the company of a remarkable reader. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The story of a man’s obsession with whales, which takes him on a personal, historical and biographical journey – from his childhood to his fascination with Moby-Dick and his excursions whale-watching. All his life, Philip Hoare has been obsessed by whales, from the gigantic skeletons in...

Learn Welsh with Fexingo — the easy way to learn Welsh through warm stories, natural conversations, and slow news. A friendly Welsh-learning podcast hosted by Lucas and Luna. Every episode is a short, digestible lesson built around real-world Welsh you can use right away — perfect for absolute beginners who want to start speaking Welsh with confidence. Expect: beginner Welsh lessons, slow Welsh stories, everyday Welsh conversations, slow news in Welsh, travel phrases, and tons of repetition so it sticks. New episodes added regularly. Follow Fexingo to keep learning Welsh. #LearnWelsh #...

A journey in the hidden corners of England and its folklore with writer/actors Tim Downie and Justin Chubb. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Few books have captured the haunting world of music and rivers and of the sport they provide as well as A River Never Sleeps. Roderick L. Haig-Brown writes of fishing not just as a sport, but also as an art. He knows moving water and the life within it - its subtlest mysteries and perpetual delights. He is a man who knows fish lore as few people ever will, and the legends and history of a great sport. Month by month, he takes you from river to river, down at last to the saltwater and the sea.

Book three in the series is filled with more madcap escapades and humour. This true-life story tells of travel in an era long gone, when we read paper maps like pirates on the high seas, and friends were made and lost along roads less travelled. For folks who like their travels with a twist of disaster, Andy's misguided misadventures deliver the usual laughs on the highway to hell. It's a cautionary tale told by one of the most hapless wanderers.

Ever since I cycled down the west coast of Canada and the United States as a means of saving the bus fare on a round-the-world trip, I dreamed of cycling the whole length of that landmass, from the southern tip of South America all the way up to the Arctic Ocean. Returning home to a job I didn’t enjoy, that dream burned at my mind until, as a mature student in 1999, I was given the opportunity to take a year out and decided now was my time.

Holidays in Hell follows P. J. O’Rourke on a global fun-finding mission to the most desperate places on the planet, from the bombed-out streets of Beirut to the stultifying blandness of Heritage USA. P.J.’s unforgettable adventures abroad include storming student protesters’ barricades in South Korea, interviewing Communist insurrectionists in the Philippines, and going undercover in Arab garb at Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock Mosque. Packed with P.J.’s classic riffs on everything from Polish nightlife under communism to Third World driving tips....

Why do people love trains so much? Tom Chesshyre is on a mission to find the answer by experiencing the world through train travel - on both epic and everyday rail routes, aboard every type of ride, from steam locomotives to bullet trains, meeting a cast of memorable characters who share a passion for train travel. Join him on the rails and off the beaten track as he embarks on an exhilarating whistle-stop tour around the globe, on journeys on celebrated trains and railways.

Brought to you by Penguin. Beautifully written and full of wonderful descriptions and intriguing tales, In Patagonia is an account of Bruce Chatwin's travels to a remote country in search of a strange beast and his encounters with the people whose fascinating stories delay him on the road. 

Now Then is a biographical mosaic of Yorkshire. Rick Broadbent, an award-wining author and exiled Yorkshireman, goes in search of the soul of England's biggest county and produces an all-encompassing portrait of a place that has been victimised and stereotyped since the days of Williams the Conqueror. Incorporating social history, memoir, reportage and author interviews, Now Then paints a picture of what it means to be from Yorkshire - both now and back then.

Jake Castle is a 30 year old EASA ATPL and CAA PPL holder from Essex England but currently residing in Malaga Spain. Self described as “not the smartest bloke” they have created a guide to all the exercises in the PPL syllabus to help break down into easy to understand chunks, helping you to maximise your time in your costly flying lessons learning to fly, not remembering how to fly. As an auditory and kinaesthetic learner, they are someone that when driving to the airfields would have a roughly hour long drive to and from, and so would often need something to listen to, and they just ...