Six centuries ago, the Islamic world was the pinnacle of civilization. What was it really like? The answer is in the twelfth-century diaries of Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan traveler who spent thirty years journeying some 73,000 miles. Here, in this short-form book from acclaimed writer and bestselling author Jan Morris, in the little-known story of perhaps the greatest traveler of all time.

For six centuries the Republic of Venice was a maritime empire, its sovereign power extending throughout much of the eastern Mediterranean – an empire of coasts, islands and isolated fortresses by which, as Wordsworth wrote, the mercantile Venetians 'held the gorgeous east in fee'.Jan Morris reconstructs the whole of this glittering dominion in the form of a sea-voyage, travelling along the historic Venetian trade routes from Venice itself to Greece, Crete and Cyprus. It is a trave...

In 1955 the winds of change were beginning to blow across the Sultanate of Oman, a hitherto truly medieval state. Rumours of subversion mingled with the unsettling smell of oil to propel the Sultan on a royal progress across the desert hinterland, from his southern capital of Salala to the northern capital of Muscat. It was an historic journey – the first crossing of the Omani desert by motorcar. Jan Morris accompanied His Highness Sultan Said bin Taimur as a professional observer, and was...

Lonely Planet: The world's leading travel guide publisherHumorous tales of travel and misadventure.Lonely Planet knows that some of life's funniest experiences happen on the road. Whether they take the form of unexpected detours, unintended adventures, unidentifiable dinners or unforgettable encounters, they can give birth to our most found travel lessons, and our most memorable - and hilarious - travel stories.These 31 globegirdling tales that run the gamu...

In its last days under British rule, the Crown Colony of Hong Kong is the world's most exciting city, at once fascinating and exasperating, a tangle of contradictions. It is a dazzling amalgam of conspicuous consumption and primitive poverty, the most architecturally incongruous yet undeniably beautiful urban panorama of all. World-renowned travel writer Jan Morris offers the most insightful and comprehensive study of the enigma of Hong Kong thus far.

'Few cities,' Jan Morris observes, 'have been much more loved, loathed, and celebrated.' This book has become a classic account of the character, history, mores, buildings, climate, and people of one of Britain's most fascinating cities. 'A book of outstanding excellence, with a sweep of knowledge and a distinction of style such as I have never before encountered in a work of this sort ... Brilliant alike in observation and imagination ... brings the very stones of Oxford to life' Sunday T...

In 1912, a young D.H. Lawrence left England for the first time and travelled to northern Italy. He spent nearly a year on the shores of Lake Garda, lodged in elegantly decaying houses set amid lemon groves and surrounded by the fading life of traditional Italy. This is a travel book unlike any other, where landscapes and people are backdrops to Lawrence's deeper wanderings - into philosophy, opinion, life, nature, religion and the fate of man. With sensuous descriptions of late harvests, d...

"The travel book of the season."—Craig Seligman, New York Times Book ReviewThe first book to distill Jan Morris's entire body of work into one volume, The World is a magnum opus by the most-celebrated travel writer in the world. To read it is to take an epic armchair journey through the last half of twentieth-century history. A breathtakingly vivid guide to our greatest cosmopolitan cities and cultures from Manhattan to Venice and from Baghdad to ...

Jan Morris, one of “Britain’s greatest living writers” (Times, UK), returns with this whimsical yet deeply affecting volume on life as a redoubtable nonagenarian.The irrepressible Jan Morris—author of such classics as Venice and Trieste—is at it again: offering a vibrant set of reminiscences that remind us “what a good, wise and witty companion Jan Morris has been for so many readers for so long” (Alexander McCall Smith, New York Time...

Jan Morris returns to Venice in this loving tribute to one of the great Renaissance masters.In the course of writing Venice, her 1961 classic, Jan Morris became fascinated by the historical presence of a sometimes-overlooked Venetian painter. Nowadays the name of Vittore Carpaccio (1460–1520) suggests raw beef, but to Morris it conveyed far more profound meanings. Thus began a lifelong infatuation, reaching across the centuries, between a renowned Welsh wr...

This autobiographical coming of age classic offers a "visceral, comic and tragic" portrait of rural life in Wales during the Great War ( The Guardian, UK).Named the greatest Welsh novel by the Wales Arts Review, this beautifully rendered novel tells of a boy's hardscrabble life in rural Wales and his challenging—yet at times transcendent—journey into adulthood. In the 1910s, the village of Bethesda is a place of poverty and religion; illn...

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice SelectionRiffing on cats and Brexit, the Royals and the annoyances of aging, the nonagenarian Jan Morris delights with her wickedly hilarious first-ever diary collection.Celebrated as the “greatest descriptive writer of her time” (Rebecca West), Jan Morris has been dazzling readers since she burst on the scene with her on-the-spot reportage of the first ascent of Everest in 1953. Now, th...