Read The Songlines

Chatwin follows a piece of brontosaurus skin to the end of South America; the modern travel book.

Why Eurasia conquered the rest: geography, crops and animals rather than people; Diamond's Pulitzer.

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.

Bill Bryson attempts the Appalachian Trail with an unfit friend and a fear of bears.

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

Peter Matthiessen walks to Dolpo with a zoologist looking for a cat he never sees.