The New York Times reports the death yesterday in Warsaw of the journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, a man who spent four decades observing and writing about conflict in the developing world, first for the Polish agency PAP, then in a series of books that won him international acclaim.
Next week Penguin is to publish a taster of his reportage on Africa as The Cobra’s Heart – one of 20 mini-books in a new series of historic travel writing entitled Great Journeys. If you’ve watched The Last King of Scotland, and wondered how Idi Amin rose to power, you can find out from Kapuscinski. In a few pages, he explains how Uganda became “a tragic bloody stage on which a single actor strutted”.

The same series includes an extract from a report by Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, a member of a Spanish expedition dispatched in 1527 to explore Florida. Shipwreck, battles with Indians and illness reduced a force of 600 men to a mere four survivors, who staggered naked and barefoot into Mexico City having unintentionally become the first Europeans to cross the American Southwest. It’s artlessly written, but you keep turning the pages to see what horror is going to befall them next.
Cabeza de Vaca’s account inspired Richard Grant to write Ghost Riders, the winner of the 2004 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. Grant’s book is an exploration of the nomadic tendency among immigrants to the American West — and it makes your feet itch to join them.