Snickelways may offer welcome short cuts when navigating the back streets of York. But sometimes the best part of a journey is the detour. When the Russian poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky turned up in Stockholm to collect his Nobel Prize for Literature in December 1987, he commented that the shortest distance between two points had long since lost any attraction for him. The best elements of many journeys are the detours.

The Guidebook Revolution: Transforming Dreams into Reality since 1969
Guidebooks gather your dreams and help turn them into reality. And that's just what the English publisher Cicerone has been doing for half a century. From modest beginnings, providing guides to walks, scrambles and climbs in the hill country of ...