The nervous passenger who became one of our great travel writers

Sybille Bedford all her life was a keen and courageous traveller. Restless, curious, intellectually alert, she was always ready to explore new territories, her experiences recounted in a sophisticated style that Jan Morris in her introduction refers to as ‘a kind of apotheosised reportage’. Bedford’s first book, A Visit to Don Otavio, describing an expedition to Mexico, was to become a classic of travel literature, and the essays in Pleasures and Landscapes show many of the same exceptional qualities.

Over three decades, from 1948 to 1978, Bedford journeyed through Italy, Switzerland, France, Denmark, Portugal and Yugoslavia. Vivid, acutely observed and intensely personal, her accounts of these voyages of discovery provide a fascinating record of Europe’s gradual evolution from postwar destitution to the prosperity enhanced by a rapidly expanding tourist industry. As one who spent much of her youth in the relative tranquillity of coastal Italy and the south of France, Bedford understandably regards much of this with distaste, and yet she never distances herself. Instead she examines this changing world with unfailing curiosity, focusing with her novelist’s eye not only on buildings and landscape but upon the characters encountered en route.

The first piece, ‘The Homecoming’, reads like a mesmerising short story. German by birth and part Jewish, Bedford had had to leave France in 1940, spending the war years in exile in the United States. Deeply rooted in her European past, it is with profound relief that in 1948 she finally returns, settling first in Rome, where at a friend’s apartment she meets the glamorous war correspondent Martha Gellhorn. Dazzled by the brave and beautiful American (‘Meeting Martha Gellhorn… was like being exposed to a 1500-watt chandelier’), Sybille eagerly agrees to her suggestion that she should drive Martha’s car down to Naples and from there join her on Capri.