This stout little blue hardback fits in a jacket pocket and is the right size and weight to prop open on a café table. This series might look slightly alarmingly academic in a bookshop, but I have roadtested this one, which turned out to be rollicking good fun and total entertainment from start to finish.

All learned aunts and literate godfathers should make themselves aware of this series, Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers”. It is the ideal gift to bestow, as you wave off the next generation onto adventures of their own. There are more than a dozen titles, so pretty much something for everyone, including *How to Eat, How to Talk about Love and Virtue in Sport.

The books appear to have been designed to look as learned and literate as the Loeb classic series, with the original Greek or Latin text on the left-hand page, which makes you feel airily competent whatever your actual level of linguistic skill. But unlike the Loeb series (which is backed by Harvard), this is a Princeton University Press project.

I was sent a copy of How to Travel and delighted in stumbling on all my favourite bits in five page-long, bitesized chunks, like a perfectly curated box of chocolates. So we have the delight of Alexander the Great being lectured on the greatest test of a hero, which is the subjugation of the ego and not the conquest of the known world. We also get to sample early-Christian pilgrim Egeria as she goes into excited raptures at her journey to the holy places of the Middle East, riddled with pious hermits and hospitable desert fathers.

We will get ourselves plunged into that truly bizarre journey of Punic exploration that witnesses the Chariot of the Gods (somewhere in West Africa) like some ancient episode from Heart of Darkness, equalled in chill factor by Herodotus’s account of routine savagery (mingled with proud homespun morality) of the Scythians.

We read about the noble retirement of Scipio Africanus, back on his home-farm, contentedly working the land and behaving just as modestly as Dwight Eisenhower, as well as Tacitus’s chilling praise for the virtues of pagan German tribes.

I was further won over by the introduction, ‘We’re All Tourists Now’, in which Professor Usher, having pointed out all the many electronic pitfalls prepared for our would-be modern traveller, has the guts to identify the rare exceptions. In five eloquent pages, which should be engraved in every airport departure lounge, he describes how it is possible to escape the packaged boredom of corporate tourism and become a real traveller, like the late Dervla Murphy (1931–2022), who offers us “a master class in manners, tact, generosity, wit and intercultural interpretation”.

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Issue 70, Summer 2026 Outpost of Peace
£15.00 / $19.86 / €17.38

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