The joy of book collecting is the freedom to form a library exactly as one wants. There are no constraints, it is entirely a personal decision as to what you put on your shelves. There are traditions but these can be ignored or followed according to one’s choice.

Seen in the light of the past forty years, since the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty and the rise of the present day theocracy, relations between Britain and Iran look dismal. Hopefully this will now turn out to be a historical blip and the two countries will once more enjoy a more fruitful relationship.

Nowadays India is one of the largest and most important centres of printing and publishing, the culmination of a tradition that started in the mid-sixteenth century with the Jesuits in Goa.

The first thing that needs saying is that not everybody that sets out for Timbuctoo gets there. In my case, driving down from Algiers in the 1970’s, much to my regret now, I got side tracked in Tamanrasset. In earlier times it was sickness and hostile locals that often proved fatal.

Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890), although born almost 200 years ago, seems very much a man of our times.

Today marks the 150^th anniversary of one of those moments that schoolchildren remember all their lives, for a single phrase.

As book lovers we all owe a debt of gratitude to the Sumerians, the early inhabitants of the land now called Iraq, who invented writing 5000 years ago.

Thinking of the British and Africa, I suppose the things that comes to mind are the Quest for the Source of the Nile, Brits in East Africa and South Africa, and the exploration of the Niger. Before most of these however, there was English relations with the Barbary States, in particular Morocco.

The Tibetan plateau, situated at some 15,000 feet (4500 metres), surrounded by great mountain ranges which include the two tallest mountains in the world, Everest and K2, was one of the last areas of the globe to be explored by Western travellers.

On the boggy delta of the Neva, Peter the Great founded his ‘window to the West’ in 1703. Through sheer determination and at the cost of thousands of lives, European architecture was imported to this marshland and Russia had a new capital.

Some of the greatest feats of British exploration have occurred in my lifetime – Hilary’s ascent of Everest, Fuchs traversing the Antarctic, and Francis Chichester’s solo circumnavigation.

The other day I received an e-mail offering me a copy of Brand’s History of Newcastle (1789). Or at least some of it, it was an odd volume lacking most plates and binding, quite stained, but as the seller put it: ‘in good condition considering its age’.