A taste for travel

John Julius Norwich

Published by Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover with dustjacket

When Thomas Cook organized his first excursion, in England on July 5, 1841, 570 intrepid men and women paid one shilling each to ride a train ten miles and back accompanied by a brass band, and were rewarded with tea and buns at the finish. The age of the tourist had arrived. But as it became easier and easier to travel, it became more and more difficult to be a true traveller — to find the excitement, the challenge, and the endlessly intriguing unknown that travelling had once automatically implied.

Today we make our reservations, hop on planes, follow the guidebooks, and see the world, yet we don't often experience what we see. And it is this kind of experience — this immersion in place and people, this intense quickening of the senses — that John Julius Norwich (himself a passionate traveller) celebrates with this wonderful collection of travel writings.

Norwich has chosen excerpts from the writings of authors from Homer to Paul Theroux, and he groups them not chronologically but according to aspects and themes of travel that have been applicable in every age: "Advice to Travellers," "First impressions," "Hardships," "Health and Hygiene," "Cuisine," "Bad Moments," "Euphoria," and "Homecomings" are only a few. The extracts run from the very simple (The Natural History of Iceland, published in 1758, contains a chapter entitled "Concerning Owls," which in its entirety reads: "There are no owls of any kind in the whole island:') to the fantastically detailed (William Lithgow's harrowing description of his incarceration as a British spy — which included six hours on the "Racke" — in Malaga in the early 1600s); from the poetically tongue-tied (Lawrence Durrell writes of the Greek island of Kalymnos: "The mind runs up and down the web of vocabulary looking for a word which will do justice to it. In vain.") to the brilliantly descriptive (Charles Dickens's first impressions of Italy are as rich as any of the worlds he created in his novels).

Among the other writers whose work is tapped for this compendium are: Chaucer, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Karl Baedeker, Evelyn Waugh, Jonathan Raban, John Ruskin, Freya Stark, Mungo Park, Mark Twain, Mary Kingsley, Graham Greene, Bruce Chatwin, Lady Diana Cooper, Noel Coward, Sybille Bedford, and Henry James. But a large part of the book's charm lies in Norwich's own narrative, anecdotes, and comments with which he links his selections. The result is a highly personal and wonderfully entertaining "companion" for the actual or the armchair traveller — a companion that recalls and re-creates the adventure and romance that travel itself once gave us.