I've always suspected, as they toil across a scorching steppe somewhere, laden down by backpacks and nourished only by a couple of stringy sheep's eyes and/or duck's feet, that travel writers are born rather than made. The suspicion is confirmed by the first of this collection of extracts from the Newby oeuvre, in which the five and a half year old author goes into floods of tears when forbidden to visit an exotic sounding place called Godshill on the Isle of Wight. He made up for it in later life, and no mistake: after an abortive and, here, hilariously described period as a dress salesman, he ran away to sea and never looked back. Whether he is writing about the Trans Siberian Railway or the Burren, Newby always writes about the people he finds there, and so brings it, literally, to life; his deceptively languid asides bring tears of laughter to the unwary eye; and his priceless encounter with traveller par excellence, Wilfrid Thesiger, in the foothills of the Hindu Kush is, surely, up there with "Dr Livingstone, I presume?" in the all time annals of travel writing.
