Routledge £16.99

There is no doubt that holidays lie near the heart of our emotional life, enjoyed for a fortnight, sustained in the imagination for 11 months of the year. Which is why, when you have a bad one, it is so disappointing. There is no going back.

As the nights draw in and memories begin to fade, here is a book that attempts to explain it all. It is an enjoyable - and scholarly - read, tracing the history of the hols from the Grand Tour, through Thomas Cook's first ventures with temperance tours, the industrialisation of mobility leading to mass tourism, and the coming of the hippie trail to Kathmandu.

And so now there are half a billion of us around the world taking a holiday abroad each year and Fred Inglis, professor of cultural studies at Sheffield University, points out that for the first time "this vast movement of people is impelled neither by terror nor greed, not by starvation nor imperial longings . . . they have come, casually and always temporarily, for fun, from curiosity, for a rest . . . they have come peaceably and in search of that catchall, pleasure; even, it may be, fulfilment."

The book is full of insights. Inglis is able to articulate thoughts that in the rest of most of us do not quite get there. Here is his description of the "Big Apple": "A holiday in New York is formally the same as anywhere else, especially in the simplified machinery of modern tourism: see the selected sight; walk the famous streets; eat the local food; revere the house art; purchase the local speciality. Keep moving, keep spending. But the city will have its way with you, like all great cities; and you will find your own way through it, for as long as you can shake off your blessed guides and their schedules. That is why we all keep going back, why the cities hold up and out their ineffable promise. Modernity has not yet done for wonder."