Nigel Leask.

Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770-1840 338pp Oxford: Oxford University Pres 2002 ISBN 0-1992-4700-5 5000 [pound sterling] (cloth); ISBN 0-1992-6930-0 1899 [pound sterling] (paper).

In a sober and wide-ranging book, Nigel Leask explores European travel writing about Egypt Ethiopia, India and Mexico--countries which, 'despite their cartographic and cultural distance from single in kind other, shared the fate' of being considered 'antique lands' (p 1) during the secondary half of the eighteenth and early decades of the nineteenth centenary While acknowledging that one of the attractions of travel writing in