The "go-fever" of the late Victorian period was sponsored by new transport technologies, increased wealth and the Pax Britannica which meant no country was closed to the inquisitive traveller.

Here stepped Rudyard Kipling, the Herodotus of the British empire, a travel writer who is truly interested in everything: the buildings, the roads, the food and, of course, the people. His more coarse sense of racial superiority is omitted from this selection, though it still shows in his contempt for the Chinese, compared with his respect for the Japanese, whom he saw as able imitators of the west. Similarly, he hated the "swaggering self-consciousness of freedom" shown by American counter-clerks, and was disgusted by the liberal use of spittoons in the US.

There is a wonderfully vivid description of the killing pens in the Chicago stockyards: "There was no place for hand or foot that was not coated with thicknesses of dried blood, and the stench of it in the nostrils bred fear." But further to this, he feels he must describe, in a very Kiplingesque way, the well-dressed women who had come to view the slaughter, standing amid the carcasses: "She looked curiously with hard, bold eyes, and was not ashamed."

Kipling was truly a world citizen; he had made homes in England, the US, India and Africa and travelled widely from infancy to old age. Yet it is increasingly clear from this excellent selection of travel writing across five continents that he is at his strongest in India and Egypt, as if the east were not a place that he must describe, but part of his very being that he must express.

Burma makes him yearn for "twenty yards of real King's silk, that has been made in Mandalay, about my body and a succession of cigarettes between my lips . . . with a pretty almond-coloured girl who shall laugh and jest too, as a young maiden should". He is most at home in the cities of the east where the "narrow gullies are polished to shoulder-height by the mere flux of people", and languid stallholders sit in their alcove-like shops displaying the splendour of the orient: "Jewellery, bats and stumps, kites, cheap lithographs of the gods, tinsel-stuck shoes and slippers, necklaces, beads, mirror-rings and a hundred other toys."

With his long experience in India, Kipling treated England too as a foreign country, so this selection includes his delight in "the four packed miles of seething vice" of London with its fog, "a fiendish darkness darker than any dust storm, I had to light my reading lamp before lunch".

Kipling is now out of copyright, which means a wealth of his work, previously too expensive to reproduce, can be made available. He was one of the great travel writers, though he was too prolific  he filled newspaper column upon column with prose, as only he could. But despite his wonderful fluency, quality inevitably suffers with volume, making a selection such as this particularly valuable. However, there is still so much Kipling travel writing that a second or third selection could be made from the same material and it would be as good.

Some of the most evocative writing is of smells in their relation to the traveller: "The smell of All Asia boards the ship miles off shore, and holds the passenger's nose till he is clear of Asia again." Close to, he gives us olfactory recollections: the smell of burning ­turmeric; of butter-lamps before a ­Tibetan shrine; the flavour of drying fish in Burma; a handful of dried cowdung used as fuel; chips of creosoted wood; and the big, guttering pipe, after dinner eaten with the hands from a shared plate. For all his sins (which were many), this excellent selection shows us once again, if we were in any doubt, that this man really could write.

Jad Adams's Kipling is published by Haus.