Is this the end of travel writing?

Thirty years ago, in the days when friendships were sustained not by email but by air mail, a friend of mine was spending time in some exotic faraway place. He would send me beautiful, florid accounts of his travels and I would read out the most hilarious passages to the flatmates I was living with at the time. When I next replied to him, I sent him their regards and let him know how much they had enjoyed hearing about his adventures. The next letter was angry. Although part of me understood why (I suppose I had rather naively and stupidly shared something that was supposed to be private), another part of me struggled with an expression that was new to me. I had apparently committed what he called an act of ‘cultural appropriation’.

I didn’t hear that phrase anywhere else for a long time. But from that moment on, I realised it was only a matter of time before any recounting of anything that happened anywhere, whether real or imagined, directly experienced or told secondhand, could be judged by someone somewhere to be a betrayal of trust, and a form of stealing: ‘This is not your story to tell.’ The first casualty of this idea? Travel writing. As Sara Wheeler, now in her sixties, and whose first book, on Greece, was published in 1992, notes: ‘The form might be going extinct. If I were starting out now, I would not be able to make the same choices.’

Known for her travel writing (especially of the polar variety) as well as for biography, Wheeler fuses both those genres in this magnificent and unusual book. Glowing Still is a thoughtful and entertaining meditation on identity, geography and the position of the self in the world.