Eland Publishing – serie

James Cameron admired Martha Gellhorn above all other war-reporters 'because she combined a cold eye with a warm heart'. The Chicago Times described her writing as 'wide ranging and provocative, a blend of cool lyricism and fiery emotion, alternately prickly and welcoming, funny and stern'. But make your own judgements, and in the process find yourself plunged straight back into Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, feel the frozen ground of the Finno Russian war, the continent-wide Japanese invasion of China, the massacres in Java, the murderously naive intervention in Vietnam and the USA's dirty little wars in Central America. You will also experience the process of the Second World War by the seat of your pants. It is a tough way to learn history, but also one created in bite-sized chunks, that inspire just as often as they shock.

Winston Churchill wrote this account of the first 25 years of his life in 1930. It reveals him struggling with Latin grammar at prep school, charging the Dervishes at Omdurman and preparing his first political speech for a Conservative fete.

This intensely remembered, partly autobiographical novel, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989, describes the childhood of Billi, a girl growing up in Europe between the wars. When her father dies, she swaps life in a run-down German château for an exhilarating existence with her beautiful, talented and unreliable mother on the French Riviera. Sent away to England for schooling, the gypsy-like Billi ricochets between short-lived tutors and a life of reading, friends and public lectures. Returning to the Mediterranean, her unorthodox education – intellectual, emotional and sexual – continues among the vibrant community of artists, exiles and intellectuals who have colonised the coast, coaxing her towards a life of literature.

This is the first travel book that tested the idea that a five-year-old daughter makes for a useful international travelling companion. Together Dervla Murphy and her daughter Rachel with little money, no taste for luxury and few concrete plans meander their way slowly south from Bombay to the southernmost point of India, Cape Comorin. Interested in everything they see, but only truly enchanted by people, they stay in fisherman's huts and no-star hotels, travelling in packed-out buses, on foot and by local boats. Instead of pressing ever onwards, like so many travellers, they double back to the place they liked most, the hill province of Coorg and settle down to live there for two months. Anchored by her daughter's delight in the company of her Indian neighbours, Dervla Murphy creates an extraordinarily affectionate portrait of these cardamon-scented, spiritually and agriculturally self- sufficient Highlands. If travel is underwritten by an unwitting search for a lost paradise, this is a quest that was achieved - made possible with the right sort of travelling companion.

Saints of Sind is an exploration of the mystical Sufi shrines and hereditary saints of Pakistan s Indus valley. Half anthropological quest, it is also half the pilgrimage of an Englishman determined to immerse himself in the ways of a dervish seeking the ultimate truth. Peter Mayne has an antennae-like ear for language, catching the hidden nuances of a phrase, and a rumbunctious delight in responding to chance encounters. He treats each human with dignity but always delights in the bizarre and the eccentric, now and then catching hold of moments of sublimity. He is an addictively inventive and brilliant writer witty, shrewd and wise.

Dervla Murphy's first epic journey from Ireland to India by bicycle, "Full Tilt", is a complete adventure in itself. It is also the first volume of a trilogy of experience that continues with Tibetan Foothold. For the young Irish woman, once she had got herself to India by July 1963, immersed herself in the life of the sub-continent, working for six months in an orphanage for Tibetan children in the refugee camps of Northern India. Here, she fell in love with the 'Tiblets' - the cheerful, tough, uncomplaining, independent and affectionate children of the new Tibet-in-exile. Dervla vividly describes day-to-day life in the camps where hundreds of children are living in squalor while a handful of dedicated volunteers do their best to feed and care for them, attempting to keep disease at bay with limited resources. She pitches in with a helping hand wherever it is needed and finds time to visit the Dalai Lama and his entourage.Dervla's heart-rending account is interwoven with her own observations on the particular cultural and social problems associated with trying to help a people who have lived in isolation from the rest of the world and she becomes a perceptive witness to the inner realities and sometime inadequacies of aid-work. First published in 1966, "Tibetan Foothold" not only confirmed Dervla's status as a traveller, but also revealed her to be a truly independent voice and an acute observer of politics and society.

One winter, Dervla Murphy, the four-footed Hallam (the mule) and her six-year-old daughter Rachel explored 'Little Tibet' high up in the Karakoram Mountains in the frozen heart of the Western Himalayas - on the Pakistan side of the disputed border with Kashmir. For three months they travelled along the perilous Indus Gorge and into nearby valleys. Even when beset by crumbling tracks over bottomless chasms, an assault by a lascivious dashniri, the unnerving melancholy of the Balts - the heroic highland farmers who inhabit the area - and Rachel's continual probing questions, this formidable traveller retained her enthusiasm for her surroundings and her sense of humour. First published in 1977, "Where the Indus is Young" is pure Murphy. 'The grandeur, weirdness, variety and ferocity of this region cannot be exaggerated,' she writes of the sub-zero temperatures, harsh winds and whipping sands that they faced. However much the region may have changed due to current day political situations her descriptions of the mountain splendour and cultures she explores are appropriately timeless.