Read A Walk in the Woods

Bryson's farewell tour of Britain before moving back to America; the Britons' favourite book about themselves.

Bill Bryson explains the universe, the atom and the dinosaurs as if to a friend in a pub.

Trevor Noah on being the mixed-race child of an illegal union in apartheid South Africa.

Anthony Bourdain on what really happens in restaurant kitchens; do not order fish on Monday.

Anne Lamott on shitty first drafts and taking writing one bird at a time.

Kapuscinski's forty years reporting Africa, from Ghana's independence to Rwanda.

Fragments about travel, anatomy and a Chopin's heart smuggled to Warsaw; Tokarczuk's Booker International.

Kapuscinski's first assignments abroad with the first historian in his pocket.