I love long plane journeys, even though I know I should feel guilty about the damage to the planet. It’s the free hours of reading time that I really like. But there’s also the fun of assembling that little tailor-made library to take with you: some books about where you’re going, some that you’ve been meaning to read for ages, some that you feel very guilty that you never have. Of course, you wont finish them on the plane, but that’s fine – because you need something left over for late nights in the hotel.

I’ve just been to Sudan for the first time, and this was the reading matter I packed:

Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih, trans. by D. Johnson-Davis

This is the one novel that everyone insisted I took with me. Set in a Sudanese village by the Nile, it is a brilliant exploration of African encounters with the West, and the corrupting power of colonialism. The narrator is a man returned to his native village, after university in England, and he gradually unpicks the horrifying story of a newcomer he finds in his old home. This man had been a brilliant Sudanese student and had also gone to England – with terrible consequences. I never got this book out to read without someone coming up to tell me how brilliant it was.

Darfur: A New History of a Long War by Julie Flint and Alex de Waal

I was looking for a basic guide to the recent history of Sudan that saw through the celebrity hype around Darfur, and did more than retell the horror stories. This is the second edition of their Short History of a Long War?and at over 300 pages it’s no longer called Short. There is plenty of horror here, but it’s also a book which doesn’t try to pretend that this is a simple story of goodies and baddies.

Emma’s War by Deborah Scroggins

The Western press find Darfur an easier conflict to report than the more devastating?and even more complicated?civil war between North and South. Emma’s War is (if anything could be) a relatively ‘light’ introduction to that conflict. It’s the story of a young British aid worker who married one of the southern rebel leaders and ended up dead aged 29 (not in civil war, but in a traffic accident in Nairobi).

Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt by Joyce Tyldesley

This went into the suitcase as I was due to review it. I usually have little time for biographies of famous men and women from the classical world. For a start, there’s never enough evidence to tell a good life story in the modern sense, so they are bound to end up as fiction pretending to be fact. That’s even the case for a character as well known as Cleopatra. All the same, I was slightly won over by this one. It was nicely written and Tyldesley is an Egyptologist by training, so doesn’t get bogged down in the love affair with Mark Antony, but has interesting things to say about the Egyptian background to Cleopatra’s life.

A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain

This one fell into the ‘guilt at not having read’ category. Twain’s Innocents Abroad counts as one of my favourite books ever, but?embarrassingly?I’m not well up in the rest of his writing. This is a tremendous time-travel satire. A nineteenth-century American wakes up in sixth-century Britain, at King Arthur’s Camelot. The real joke is when the yankee starts trying to teach the Brits democracy, American style.

The Roman Empire: a Very Short Introduction by Christopher Kelly

I have a soft spot for Oxford University Press’s ‘Very Short Introduction’ series. Years ago, I wrote the Very Short Introduction to Classics and had enormous fun working out how to convey something interesting and useful about the whole of Classics in 100 pages. I now buy a new one from time to time to see how other writers have managed that miracle of compression! My Cambridge colleague, Kelly, took on the Roman Empire. He steers clear of the standard litany of battles, and thinks more in terms of shared cultural values, religion and the image of the Roman empire in the modern imagination.

Sudan (The Bradt Travel Guide) by Paul Clammer

Finally, the necessary guidebook. Unsurprisingly, there’s not a vast choice for Sudan, but there are generally good, and written by people who really do know the country. A lot of modern guidebooks seem simply to copy their information from one another: there’s no possibility of that with Sudan! The first of the pack was the Bradt Guide. It’s reliable when you are on the ground, but is also good in the armchair sense too. It gives a good flavour of the place, a foretaste of what a visit would be like.

Mary Beard is a Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge. She is Classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement, author of the blog, A Don’s Life, and several books including The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found.