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The academic, TV personality and foreign correspondent Roger Willemsen admits more often than not his quest is driven by 'a predilection for unlovely things.' He traverses five continents in a series of 22 engaging essays reflecting on a lifetime of travel to the far and forgotten corners of our planet. He offers remarkable encounters and mysterious entanglements in locations as diverse as a Kamchatkan volcano, a Burmese railway station, an Arctic icebreaker, the dimly lit corridor of a Mumbai brothel, a hospital ward in Minsk, a fresco of the Judgement Day in Orvieto. From this remarkable series of psychogeographic sketches, there emerges another kind of end, cathartic and healing, an end to love and lust, to illusions, to order and understanding as he traces unexpected connections among places, times and peoples. Chapter headings include Eiffel, Gibraltar, the Himalayas, Isafjördur, Patagonia, Timbuktu, Mandalay, Hong Kong, Tonga and the North Pole among them. 490pp in glamorous heavyweight hardback.