Summertime: We cluck over old memories and hatch new ones - so historia (memento, observation, inquiry and myth), the broad-minded Greek forerunner of history - is a happy companion.

All good summers should infantilise (paddling through rivers, eating too many buns), so cosy up with E. H. Gombrich's A Little History of the World . (Yale, £6.99/offer £6.64) Written in only six weeks by a young Gombrich, this is a sensitive, sweeping account of what it is to be human.

You might also feel justified in re-reading the juvenile favourites Rose Macaulay's They Were Defeated (available second-hand from abebooks.co.uk) and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (Vintage, £7.99/£7.59). Two titles that carry us back to our golden summers.

From the Times Archive: 1960 review of To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

In northern Greece recently I stumbled on the Petralona Caves. Here (possibly) is a human skull that precedes African Lucy by hundreds of thousands of years. The Greek authorities don't quite know what to do with this revisionist anthropological bombshell, and the cave's isolated archaeologist, now in his eighties, sits hermit-like at its mouth determined to draw in all who pass.

He has christened the inner chambers Pythagoras, Empedocles, et al. This is a region that like so many holiday destinations - Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Italy, India - witnessed the birth of mankind's idea of itself. Crawling through those dark, decorated early lodgings of Homo erectus and Homo sapiens inspired me to re-read the jaunty, upbeat Consolation of Philosophy (OUP, £8.99/£8.54), written around AD524 by Boethius from death row in Pavia. Uplifting to remember what light and humanity can shine from such dark places.

From the Times Archive: 1924 article on the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius

Probably the best history - and, indeed, philosophy - book of all time is Norman Cohn's nomadic The Pursuit of the Millennium (OUP, £12.99/£11.69). Cohn's acute survey of the crazed brilliance of millennial cults, where choreomaniacs and flagellants danced and whipped themselves across medieval Europe, is compelling and original.

From the Times Archive: 1970 review of The Pursuit of the Millenium by Norman Cohn

At 300 pages of close-print this is hardly a beach book - a gaudier choice might be Frank Miller's 300 (Dark Horse Comics, £16.99/£15.29). This graphic novel re-tells the suicidal stand of Spartans v Persians in the Battle of Thermopylae, raising big questions about desire and duty, and our sense of East and West. Your teenage kids will be quietly impressed.

Follow up with Zack Snyder's 300 movie, plus Ryszard Kapuscinski's Travels with Herodotus (Penguin, £8.99/£8.54) for a rich, past-into-present experience.

From the Times Archive: 1985 review of Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski, author of Travels with Herodotus

Achilles by Elizabeth Cook (Methuen, £6.99/£6.64) takes you farther back in a short story to the opium-poppy, honey-sweet society of the Age of Heroes. Achilles' real-life contemporaries paid great respect to that forger of liquid gold - the bee. The princesses of the Bronze Age world wore earrings moulded into queen bees; their skin gleamed with honeyed olive oil; one of the words written down in the first Western script, Linear B, was ME-RI: honey. Dionysus is also worshipped on many a vacation, so indulge in Andrew Dalby's Bacchus: A Biography (available second-hand from abebooks.co.uk) and Under the Volcano (Harper Perennial, £9.99/£9.49) by Malcolm Lowry. The first explains our fascination with debauchery, the second its fallout.

From the Times Archive: 1967 article on Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry

For a bit of erotic spice in the suitcase I will be packing Sarah Waters's The Night Watch (Virago, £7.99/£7.59). The wartime London setting is spot-on, but I felt a bit guilty reading a steamy page-turner on the Tube. Also in to the case goes James Allan Evans's account of The Empress Theodora (University of Texas Press, £15.50/£13.95), who rose from back-street prostitute to commander of the Byzantine world.

Two picture books to immerse yourself in before you travel. One is the perfect accompaniment to any souk-spree or perfumier. The Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilisation has produced a beautiful catalogue 1001 Inventions: How Muslim Civilisation Shaped The World (FSTC, £29.50/£26.55). It reminds us just how the Middle East, North Africa and Al Andalus catalysed many of the trappings of modern life.

The vigorous, epoch-spanning artist Nicholas Egon is commemorated in Nicholas Egon (Oldcastle, available from amazon.co.uk). Egon ran away from the family castle in Czechoslovakia with seven English pounds and a silk dressing-gown, to the killing fields of the Middle East and Europe, into the salons of princes. He lived alfresco in Oxford as a lettuce-fed, penniless student and cycled the streets of wartime London painting cinema posters for nine pence a pop.

Wherever he travelled there was a pen or paintbrush to hand. So we see the famine in Athens in 1950; a Greek civil war that left children's bodies floating downstream through Arcadian landscapes; the blank despair of Europe's refugees. But we also meet a 16-year-old Helen Mirren studying her own portrait in swinging London; and the seductive gauntlet of Arabian deserts.

Image-rich publications such as these lay out a delightful route to the past. There is an argument that word-books on holiday should be banned - that it is our mind's eye, not our cerebral cortex, that needs stimulating. Freya Stark in her Baghdad Sketches (Marlboro Travel, £12.50/£11.25) may have got it right: “You are surrounded by adventure...sally forth with a leisurely and blank mind and there is no knowing what may not happen to you.”

From the Times Archive: 1937 review of Baghdad Sketches by Freya Stark

Bettany Hughes is a writer, broadcaster and author of the biography Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore.

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