Ibn Battutah – ethnographer, bigrapher, anecdotal historian and occasional botanist – was just twenty-one when he set out in 1325 from his native Tangier on a pilgrimage to Mecca . . .

He did not return to Morocco for another twenty-nine years, travelling instead through more than forty countries on the modern map, covering seventy-five thousand miles and getting as far north as the Volga, as far east as China and as far south as Tanzania. He wrote of his travels, and comes across as a superb ethnographer, biographer, anecdotal historian and occasional botanist and gastronome.

With this edition by Mackintosh-Smith, Battuta's Travels takes its place alongside other indestructible masterpieces of the travel-writing genre.