'There and Back' review: A history of famous travellers and their sojourns

Stewart Gordon has made skilful use of his protagonists' memoirs, letters and travelogues

In There And Back, Steward Gordon has written about twelve vital routes in human history that over the centuries have seen the movement of goods, books, scrolls, art, armies, ambassadorial delegations, slaves and pilgrims, and which in turn generated innovations in ideas, religions, technology and cuisine. Gordon has divided the twelve into four groups — rivers (the Rhine, the Nile, the Mississippi), pilgrimages (the Silk Road, Santiago de Compostela in Spain, the Haj), “tribute” routes (the Appian Way in Italy, the Grand Canal in China, the Inca route in South America — so called because they were used for transporting