Travel

This is a delightful book, nostalgic, slyly witty, perceptive and at times flirting — deliberately — with old fogeyism. Tom Fort, a BBC radio journalist, starts from the assumption that ‘many of us have a road that reaches back into our past’. For him, this is the 92 miles of the A303 — as he subtitles his book, the ‘Highway to the Sun’. At first glance I imagined there might a be a sort of literary suicide in store; but I quickly discovered that Fort had much more in mind than an anorak’s guide to a road. By looking closely at the history of the A303, the surrounding villages and

We are all tourists now, and there is no escape. The first thing we see as we jet round the world is a filth of our own making. Resort hotel seepage. Takeaway detritus. Travel, in its pre-package sense, can no longer be said to exist. Airports even have ‘comfort zones’ with dental clinics, cinemas and (at New York’s JFK) funeral parlours. Some travel writers, desperate to simulate the hardship of Victorian travel, have imposed artificial difficulties on themselves. The late Eighties saw a glut of such daft titles as Hang-Gliding to Borneo and To Bognor on a Rhinoceros. In every case, however, it would have been quicker to take the

Nigeria is not exactly a tourist destination. A colleague chortles over the memory of trying to wangle his way in — without a journalist’s visa — during Sani Abacha’s military regime. ‘Purpose of visit?’ barked the immigration man. ‘Tourism,’ he lied. ‘No one comes to Nigeria for tourism,’ said the official. He was promptly expelled. The official was voicing a truism. Even seasoned Western adventurers avoid Nigeria — ‘is Lagos airport as terrifying as they say?’ you are often asked — while the country’s oil-fattened elite, oscillating between the national superiority complex and hardened self-loathing, regard an international flight as the obligatory start to any holiday. Writing a travel book

This book is a mess. Simon Mann may have been brought up on John Buchan, educated at Eton and Sandhurst, and taken Conrad and the Iliad with him on his African travels, but his style is appalling — a sort of demotic militarese. Short sharp sentences. Few verbs. Acronyms sprinkled like confetti. The third sentence reads: ‘Rock-crag fingers claw my arse.’ And we skip all over the place, between Angola, Equatorial Guinea, South Africa and Sierra Leone, with flashbacks and fast-forwards and no index. The publisher’s boast that identities would be revealed and the mighty shaken on their thrones turns out to be empty. ‘The Boss’ goes unnamed, as does

Christopher Ondaatje is best known as a member of the great and the good and a generous patron of the arts, notably the National Portrait Gallery. The pieces collected in this book give glimpses of another, quite different life as a traveller and writer. Ondaatje’s family were long-established Dutch tea planters in Ceylon. In 1947 Christopher was sent to Blundell’s School in the West Country, a ‘sallow, thin, frightened’ 13-year-old; transplanted from the ‘carefree wilderness life’ of his father’s tea plantation, he was lonely and bullied. He had been banished from the Garden of Eden. Independence for Ceylon came in 1948, and his father’s descent into alcoholism and debt followed

In the early 20th century, explorers were goaded and galvanised by the blanks on the maps — the North and South Poles, and the mist-draped floes and glaciers around them. Ernest Shackleton, Robert Scott, Robert Peary and Roald Amundsen set off with one prevailing purpose: to reach the extremities of the earth. Hardy, maniacal, even at times suicidal, they scattered ‘firsts’ and ‘furthests’ across the ice: the furthest south of Scott’s expedition of 1901-04, Shackleton’s furthest south of 1909, Amundsen’s arrival at the South Pole in 1911. Robert Peary’s claim that he reached the North Pole in 1909 was later disputed, so it may well have been Amundsen who first

Did you know that on the Central Line’s maiden journey to Shepherd’s Bush, one of the passengers was Mark Twain? Or that The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Sign of Four were both commissioned by the same publisher at the same London dinner? Or that Harrods dropped the apostrophe from its name in 1921, a full 19 years before Selfridges followed suit? My guess is that you probably didn’t — which is where Walk the Lines comes in. Did you know that on the Central Line’s maiden journey to Shepherd’s Bush, one of the passengers was Mark Twain? Or that The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Sign of