I know that this is none of a reviewer's business but I was immediately drawn to this book before I had even opened it by the name of the author. With a name like Hatt I was sure, I can't even begin to explain why, that I was about to read a book by what used to be called a 'globetrotter'. There must I feel have been a Hatt among the entrants to the Great Peking–Paris Automobile Race of 1907, except that he was probably a member of a cadet branch of the family, an American, Cyrus B Hatt, not a true-blue Englishman which, I am almost sure my Hatt is.

Whatever his antecedents, and mad as a hatter, or not, Mr Hatt has written a marvellously useful book. I only wish that he had produced it twenty-five years earlier, when I was setting off on my travels. Then about the only work of a similar nature that I could lay