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Byline: James Owen Hide and Seek By Stephen Walker COLLINS, £18.99, 352 pp Judging by our appetite for books about it, the Second World War has become the modern Iliad. [...]

Bredovsky Dvur (Politickych veznu 13, 00420 224 215 428, www.bredovskydvur.unas.cz) The prospect of traditional Czech fare can be daunting, but Bredovsky Dvur makes it palatable by cleverly tempering ancient with […]

Tourists and Romans alike are being urged to join a new bicycle-sharing scheme in an attempt to reduce congestion and smog in Italy's capital. About 200 distinctive red bicycles have […]

After almost a decade of work, the restoration of Villa La Pietra, one of the great gardens of Italy and with celebrated views over Florence, is nearing completion. Formerly the […]

In childhood, my most tangible contact with the past was the contents of the dressing-up box. Looking back now, perhaps its jumble of moth-eaten coats and outmoded picture hats was [...]

92 Acharnon Street by John Lucas (Eland, pounds 12.99) Greece has been well served by British travel writers over the years, not least because it has been largely spared the […]

Lost Oasis by Robert Twigger (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, pounds 16.99) Traversa by Fran Sandham (Duckworth, pounds 16.99) As far as I know, no one has ever determined what it is […]

Paris - city of lovers. Well, that's how it has sold itself, as the amorous capital of the world. But ask yourself how passionate a place it really is: that […]

The Way of the World by Nicolas Bouvier Translated by Robyn Marsack (Eland, pounds 12.99) Travel writing can still demonstrate how little we know of the world. It is not […]

That I am talking to Tahir Shah (right) while I am in London and he in Casablanca - using our laptops as video-phones - ought to be proof of how […]

Why Nassau? I've been a regular visitor over the past five years. I've been writing a book about a high society murder that happened when the Duke of Windsor was […]

The elderly train from Tirana to the coast hooted self-importantly, as if trying to justify taking an hour to make a journey that can be driven in half the time. […]

Find more on Continental tripstelegraph.co.uk/traveleurope'We are a people without hope,' said the taxi driver, fixing his eyes on the road that leads from Mother Teresa International Airport. The tarmac ended […]

Silverland: A Winter Journey Beyond the Urals By Dervla Murphy (John Murray, pounds 20) It is almost 60 years since Dervla Murphy undertook her first journey of discovery, bicycling through […]

'I think I'm very English,' Colin Thubron tells me. 'People believe that I want to live abroad, but I never have, not really.' Certainly, there's little in his London flat […]

Between 1980 and the mid-1990s, Peter Hopkirk published half a dozen books whose theme was one of the most romantic in history: the 19th-century struggle for mastery of Central Asia. […]

DINNER TANTRA Tantra has been open for nine years, which is something of a record in fickle Miami. For all its hip decor (Indian statuary, boudoir mirrors, grass in place […]

For the past 10 years, since its re-emergence as America's favourite winter hot spot, Miami Beach has been habitually compared to a brash adolescent or a starlet, long on the […]

Foreigners think that the British are still imperialists at heart. As an Englishman, I know this to be an exaggeration, but I will confess to wondering if there is some […]

Why go? The grey city of Eurosceptic fantasy is actually the easy-paced home of fine food and a lively fashion scene, as well as art nouveau architecture. All this and […]

What motives, I wondered, looking up at the white walls of Split, decide the retirement destinations of the high and mighty? Will George W. Bush settle down in Dunroamin', Texas? […]

Why go? Post-Olympic Athens finally has the infrastructure, lodging and cuisine to match the sophistication of its classical heritage. The journey British Airways (0870 8509850, www.ba.com) flies daily from Heathrow […]

As I begin dialling Yemen to talk to Tim Mackintosh-Smith about his new book, The Hall of a Thousand Columns, I reflect that there are two types of travel writer. […]

Last September, I found myself beside a rocky burn on a sporting estate in the Perthshire Highlands. I was midway through a stalking holiday and hoping to catch a few […]

In the Middle Ages, they believed that St Valentine's Day was the day when birds chose their mates for life. Romantic tosh, of course. Infidelity and divorce is rife among […]

Bonnie tells me her house has a ghost. She thinks it is that of a French priest who lost the love of his life, an Indian princess, to yellow fever […]

Poor old Darwin. If only he'd known about Britain's evolutionary wonder fish, he might have spared himself a five-year voyage and the tropical disease that eventually killed him. And instead […]

On an autumn morning, 60 years ago, across the field from where I am sitting, the young men of two nations began to kill one another. As British troops advanced […]

The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool: A Syrian Journey By Marius Kociejowski (Sutton, pounds 20) There's something about Syria that brings out the psychotherapist in travel writers. The last […]

I put it down for only a moment. As the airport bus arrived at Rome station, just before Christmas, I stood up to wrestle my suitcase off the luggage rack. […]

No, the lunatics haven't taken over the chalk streams of southern England. Even if you may see men in fishing vests and waders floating about in giant plastic swans this […]

It would be easy, I thought, as I laboured up to the castle, to dismiss Slovenia as a kind of comical Ruritania , and Ljubljana - with its red tiles […]

Why go? Because Copenhagen is having its moment, when it can hold its own with the world in design, cuisine and fashion - think Helena Christensen not Hans Christian Andersen […]

Hold the Enlightenment by Tim Cahill (Black Swan, pounds 7.99) When measured against the banquet that is great literature, journalism, one has to admit, is only so much chewing-gum. It […]

Name a film set in New York. Easy, you're spoiled for choice. Now name one set in Boston. That's rather harder, and it is curious that America's historically most important […]

The first thing you notice about the Alamo is how modestly-sized it is. This being Texas, everything else is enormous. San Antonio, the site of the Alamo, is one of […]

The English have many sterling qualities, but a romantic imagination is not one of them. In between my toes is some of the softest, whitest sand on the planet, curving […]

An anthology of the work of a living writer is usually a bad sign. Like the 'Best of' pop album, it announces that the spark is gone, the well is […]