Michael Palin

Michael Palin brings to life one of the greatest adventures of all time. The Sunday Times Bestseller - the remarkable true story of the exploration ship featured in The Terror In the early years of Queen Victoria's reign, HMS Erebus undertook two of the most ambitious naval expeditions of all time. On the first, she ventured further south than any...

Michael Palin recreates the extraordinary life and tragic death of a First World War soldier - his great-uncle Harry. I cannot remember the last time I read a book so immediately absorbing and affecting. Michael Palin has never been better - which is, of course, saying a great deal. BILL BRYSON From the time, many years ago, when Michael Palin...

Michael Palin recreates the extraordinary life and tragic death of a First World War soldier - his great-uncle Harry. From the time, many years ago, when Michael Palin first heard that his grandfather had a brother, Harry, who died in tragic circumstances, he was determined to find out more about him. The quest that followed involved hundreds of hours of...

"The reason why the 80-day journey retains its appeal is that it is still the minimum time needed to go round the world and notice it. To see it, smell it and touch it at the same time . . ." More than a century on from Phileas Fogg's fictional adventure around the world, Michael Palin sets out from the...

It was a journey of dazzling extremes. Beauty and ugliness, sophistication and squalor, unceasing urban noise and monastic tranquillity. This is a record of a year of wonder. Full Circle is the diary of Michael Palin's epic 245-day, 50,000-mile adventure around the rim of the Pacific Ocean. It's a journey that takes him through eighteen different countries, including some of...

"Hemingway's world was close and uncomfortable and itchy and sweaty and frequently exhausting... This stuff was too good to be wasted on school exams. I must be bold and fearless and go out there and do it myself." Join Michael Palin as he journeys from the forests of North Michigan to the bars of Cuba in a quest to unravel...

The Sahara embodies scale and mystery, the thin line between survival and destruction, the power to take life or to transform it... Of all Michael Palin's epic voyages, this may be his greatest ever challenge: crossing the vast and unforgiving Sahara Desert. From the westernmost point of Senegal to Libya's Mediterranean beaches, Sahara is a journey full of beauty, excitement,...

A fascinating and rare insight into the history and culture of Iraq, by Britain's best-loved travel writer. In March 2022, former Monty Python stalwart and intrepid globetrotter Michael Palin journeyed along the River Tigris and into Iraq to gain a glimpse of life in an area of the world that can claim to be the cradle of civilisation, that has...

A richly illustrated account of Michael Palin's latest travel adventure. In February 2025, Michael Palin travelled to Venezuela to get a sense of what life is like in one of South America's most culturally rich, vibrant but also troubled nations. In the journal he kept during his trip, he gives a vivid account of the towns and cities he visited,...

'A social history of Britain spanning four decades, told with unflagging empathy and wit' Jonathan Coe, Observer The fourth volume of Michael Palin's bestselling diaries There and Back is a new window into the world of Michael Palin, following him as he comes and goes through the filming of four blockbuster travel documentaries and begins to publish his personal diaries...

The second volume of diaries from one of Britain's best-loved national treasures. After a live performance at the Hollywood Bowl, The Pythons made their last performance together in 1983 in the hugely successful Monty Python's Meaning of Life. Writing and acting in films and television then took over much of Michael Palin's life, culminating in the smash hit A Fish...

The funny, warm and moving diaries of a man at the centre of one of the world's most influential comedy troupes. Michael Palin's diaries begin when he was newly married and struggling to make a name for himself in the world of television comedy. But Monty Python was just around the corner... The Python Years is an engaging volume that...

A rollercoaster ride driven by the Palin hallmarks of humour, curiosity and a sense of adventure. Michael Palin was not the BBC's first choice for the travel series Around the World in 80 Days, but after its success, the public naturally wanted more. Palin, however, had other plans. There was his film American Friends, a role in Alan Bleasdale's award-winning...

'Once a traveller, always a traveller, and as long as there were maps and guide books and airline schedules I was still fatally susceptible to the lure of the open road . . .' Brazil: a growing global superpower, the size of half a continent, home to some of the world's most astonishing natural habitats. But despite having journeyed around...

A battleground of immense geological forces that is a centre of human tectonics as well, with sacred and secular, tradition and technology, all pushing up against each other... In Himalaya, Michael Palin travels the length of the world's most astonishing mountain range from its origins in the Khyber Pass to its final descent to the sea in the Bay of...

For most of my lifetime, half of my own continent had been chilled by a Cold War and concealed behind an Iron Curtain. Now there was the prospect of being able to travel through once-forbidden lands; of making a voyage of discovery on my very own doorstep... In New Europe, Michael Palin embarks on a very different kind of adventure:...

'Home seems impossibly far away as we step out onto a rough base of ice and snow. The temperature is -25°C. This is considered warm . . .' Michael Palin's journey from North to South Pole sees him tackling Arctic ice floes, scaling Sudanese sand dunes, and white-water rafting on the Zambezi. Pole to Pole chronicles this awe-inspiring overland adventure...

A richly illustrated account of Michael Palin's latest travel adventure. With his eightieth birthday looming, it crossed Michael Palin's mind that now might be the time to hang up his boots, to lounge about at home, to take things easy. Then the opportunity to visit Africa's most populous nation arose. A few weeks later, he was at Lagos airport, camera...

Over thirty years ago, a group of six Englishmen—well, one was Welsh and another an interloping American—rewrote the rules of comedy. Monty Python's Flying Circus, an unheralded, previously unseen half-hour show of sketches, hilarities, inanities and animations, first appeared on the BBC late one night in 1969. Its impact has been felt the world over ever since. From its humble...

A richly illustrated account of Michael Palin's latest travel adventure. Michael Palin in the Philippines sees him exploring one of the most fascinatingly complex and contradictory countries on earth – the Philippines. It's a popular tourist destination, but also a place of extreme poverty for many. It's a nation where religious beliefs are strongly held and divorce is illegal, yet...

THE FOURTH VOLUME OF MICHAEL PALIN'S BESTSELLING DIARIES A new millennium, and a new chapter for Michael Palin unfolds. With a Hemingway travel project testing his confidence, doubts creeping in about his abilities as a writer, the death of his great friend George Harrison, and the last of his children leaving home, the dawn of the twenty-first century sees Michael...