Over the Rim of the World: Selected Letters of Freya Stark

This is a selection of letters, which include several previously unpublished, written by Freya Stark, first to her mother and later to friends, during her famous travels. She became a traveller when she was not quite four. She soon developed a taste for it and journeyed through the Near East and on her own through Persia as no European woman had done before, depicting the history, landscape and people. During the First World War she nursed in Caporetto, in the 1920s she was in Italy and saw the rise of Mussolini, in the 1930s she explored the Near East, and was Information Officer in Aden, Cairo, Baghdad, India and the United States for the duration of the Second World War. She describes her experiences during events which are now of historical interest.