Michael Palin

'The reason why the 80-day journey retains its appeal is that it is still the minimum time needed to go round the world and notice it. To see it, smell...

'Once a traveller, always a traveller, and as long as there were maps and guide books and airline schedules I was still fatally susceptible to the lure of the open...

'It was a journey of dazzling extremes. Beauty and ugliness, sophistication and squalor, unceasing urban noise and monastic tranquillity . . . This is a record of a year of...

'A battleground of immense geological forces that is a centre of human tectonics as well, with sacred and secular, tradition and technology, all pushing up against each other . ....

'Hemingway's world was close and uncomfortable and itchy and sweaty and frequently exhausting . . . This stuff was too good to be wasted on school exams. I must be...

'For most of my lifetime, half of my own continent had been chilled by a Cold War and concealed behind an Iron Curtain. Now there was the prospect of being...

'Home seems impossibly far away as we step out onto a rough base of ice and snow. The temperature is -25 DegreesC. This is considered warm . . .'Michael Palin's...

'The Sahara embodies scale and mystery, the thin line between survival and destruction, the power to take life or to transform it . . .'Of all Michael Palin's epic voyages,...

'A social history of Britain spanning four decades, told with unflagging empathy and wit ' Jonathan Coe, ObserverTHE FOURTH VOLUME OF MICHAEL PALIN'S BESTSELLING DIARIESThere and Back is a new...