Hugh Thomson

Can’t anyone travel for fun any more?

Nowadays travel writers seem to be escaping mental illness, eviction, loss or heartbreak, treating their journeys as therapeuticpaths to recovery

issue 24 August 2019

  • To the Island of Tides: A Journey to Lindisfarne

    Alistair Moffat

    Canongate, pp. 317

There was a time when travel writers would set off with a spring in their step: Coleridge knocking the bristles from a broom in his impatience to make it into a stick; Laurie Lee walking out one midsummer morning; Patrick Leigh Fermor singing as he headed down the lane. To travel was an expression of freedom and exploration; to step out of the front door the beginning of a grand  adventure.

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