The Traveller's Daybook: A Tour of the World in 366 Quotations

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The Traveller's Daybook invites you to cross ocean, desert, mountain and ice-cap in the company of the world's greatest explorers, wanderers and writers - Fergus Fleming's day-by-day anthology of travel writing ranges widely across time as well as place: from Christopher Columbus's 'discovery' of the West Indies in 1492 via the trans-American expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in 1804 - 6, and on to Wilfred Thesiger's wanderings in Arabia's 'empty quarter' in the 1940s. Each quoted extract is accompanied by a brief commentary that introduces the writer and brings the context to life. Fleming's itinerary offers both a wealth of exotic and extraordinary destinations, and a many-hued patchwork of moods and surprising serendipities: the delight of the seventeenth-century diarist John Evelyn at the spring mildness of Naples in February; the stoic courage of Captain Scott facing death at forty degrees below zero; and the exasperation of the poet Dylan Thomas at finding himself in a 'stifflipped, liverish, British Guest House in puking Abadan'. Whether undertaken on foot, on horseback, by sail or by dog-sled, or across arid desert, rugged mountain, stormy sea, or polar wasteland, these 366 journeys will spur the reader's wanderlust and tempt him to explore further the work of the writers quoted. But, most of all, they will transport the soul and liberate the imagination.