Travelling Hopefully: A Golden Age of Travel Writing

£16.99

Nowadays, while the impulse to travel remains as strong as ever, travel has changed out of all recognition. It is difficult, not to say almost impossible, to be a traveller in this age of airplanes and terrorism. It is even becoming difficult to be a tourist. The pieces in this anthology all bear witness to man's (and woman's) desire to travel, rather than to be a tourist.

Some of the best writers of our time are included and all have in common energy, curiosity, wit and courage. They also know how to use the English language to its best advantage. The landscape is wonderfully diverse: here is John Ryle journeying to Zanzibar; Norman Lewis with the bull-fighters of Andalusia; Colin Thubron and James Fenton in China (separately); Martin Amis in St. Lucia; Christopher Hitchens revisiting his childhood home in Malta and Amy Wilentz among the gleaming spires of Burma.

This collection shows travel writing at its most fluent and its most elegant. As Marcel Proust said: "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes".

Edited and introduced by Lucretia Stewart.
Contributors: Martin Amis, Alexander Cockburn, James Fenton, Xan Fielding, Christopher Hitchens, Janet Hobhouse, Ian Jack, Jonathan Keates, Norman Lewis, Charles Maclean, Patrick Marnham, John David Morley, Chris Mosey, Redmond O'Hanlon, John Ryle, Nicholas Shakespeare, Robin Smyth, Colin Thubron, Edmund White, Amy Wilentz, Hugo Williams and Gavin Young.