This is the first issue of the Writer and Their Work series to present an appreciation of a group, as opposed to a single writer. Great Britain has, for at least three centuries, sent a notable series of travellers to the Near East. Their work is critically examined in this essay by Mr Robin Fedden, who writes: 'The Near east is an area indeterminate and not easily defined. For my purposes it includes Arabia; it is bounded on the west by the Nile Valley, and on the east by the deserts that separate Damascus from the Euphrates. Others might set different limits. What, again, constitutes a 'traveller'? Those found here are chosen for literary talent rather than the extent of their peregrinations. I thus include an invalid in Egypt, an ambassador's wife in Constantinople, and (though war is hardly travel) T. E. Lawrence could not be left out.' Robin Fedden's sections on Kinglake and Doughty are particularly valuable, and he has much of interest to say on the work of contemporary writers such as Freya Stark and St. John Philby.