The Road to Muckle Flugga by Phil Llewellin (Haynes Publishing, £19.99).

YOU don't have to be a car - or truck - enthusiast to appreciate these drives across five continents.

You just relax in the comfy seat, let Llewellin take the controls and enjoy the journeys.

And what journeys! Through Europe, the Middle and Far East, America, Canada, Africa, the Caribbean, South America and yes, even to the northern-most outpost of Britain, Muckle Flugga on the Shetland island of Unst - which is as far from London, as London is from Prague.

Llewellin is never anything but an entertaining companion, though at times, just a little over-enthusiastic about the mode of transport... "riding on a 250-inch wheelbase, the truck gets its prodigious performance from a 450bhp Caterpiller V8 driving through Fuller's 13-speed, double-overdrive gearbox".

You see what I mean? To be fair, there isn't so very much of the "spec" rhetoric but it is to be expected. After all, Llewellin has been a prodigious writer about the combustable engine for very nearly half the time that there have been engines to combust.

The 63-year-old has written stories for many of the top motoring magazines and he was also a hugely entertaining contributor to the much missed Great Drives column in the Saturday Daily Telegraph.

All but one of these journeys has been published before and appear here in a revised form. The one that has been locked in the boot, as it were, until now, is a little nugget entitled China with western half-devil Clarkson.

It was written in 1988 when Llewellin was invited by Citroen to drive through China, then the 197th favourite destination for journalistic freebies.

"My convivial comrade," he says "a young motoring writer from Yorkshire, was looking forward to being screen-tested for BBC-TV's Top Gear programme when he got home. His name was Jeremy Clarkson."

The latter is memorable for drinking to deaden the pain of the non-stop Paris to Peking flight, discovering how to switch off the source of "ying-tong music" and waving at the seething masses through the car's sunroof.

It is Clarkson who writes the foreward to the book in which he blames Llewellin for travelling drunk all the way to Peking.

He also adds: "I came back from China not really knowing where I'd been or what had happened there, whereas he came back and wrote a piece that was crammed full of detail and fact."

And that is just what makes these 40-plus journeys so memorable. They are all painted by Llewellin's vividly descriptive passages and his trick is always being able to winkle out something interesting from the mundane.

David Chapman