The novelist and travel writer reflects on the resilience of the human spirit in countries whose staggering beauty has largely been trashed

It was a year packed with drama – from the transatlantic crossing of the SS Great Britain to the start of the Irish potato blight that would leave millions starving

The biographer and journalist was always reluctant to write about herself, and this posthumously published memoir is hemmed in by what she kept locked away

The learning on display in this latest Collected Non-Fiction is as astonishing as ever – though ‘B-sides and Rarities’ might describe the more marginal pieces

Exploring stretches of the country’s Roman road, Tom Bullough notes how climate change and environmental degradation are seriously threatening the landscape

Even the serious abuse she suffered as a small child and a teenager is described without a trace of self-pity

When a rich farmer goes missing and his young wife seeks the protection of an impoverished labourer, the consequences are disastrous

A surgeon from Kashmir is tormented by the penal operations he once performed under Sharia law, such as amputations for robbery

Any mention of imperialism’s benefits is now considered morally reprehensible, as the furore over Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism shows

The vast majority of musicians who adopted 1960s rock and roll were later reviled by the Khmer Rouge and consigned to the Killing Fields, says Dee Payok