Alexander von Humboldt: Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, translated by Jason Wilson (Penguin, £799 in UK)

Humboldt, a Prussian savant, was one of the great, encyclopaedic minds of the 19th century - scientist, statesman, writer, world traveller, and the friend and correspondent of many great men including Goethe. This (much abridged) account of his travels in Spanish America between 1799 and 1804 is still remarkably readable, with few of the prejudices and inane moralising which dogged most of his fellow Europeans abroad. Humboldt wrote primarily as a natural scientist (Darwin was greatly influenced by him), but his descriptions are often vivid and his social analysis is consistently shrewd.