Extracted from Dervla Murphy’s afterword to Eland’s new edition of The Turkish Embassy Letters
The letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu have long been a favourite ‘quote-mine’ for historians, biographers, essayists and travel writers. Yet to most general readers she herself has never seemed more than an astringent commentator on the sidelines – almost a disembodied voice. In our own day, with its over-fondness for labels, she has been referred to as a ‘pioneer woman traveller and/or feminist’, though it is impossible to squeeze her into either category without distorting her personality. Any reader of her letters must think of her, primarily, as an individual: strong-willed, warm-hearted, keen-witted, high-spirited, often unpredictable, sometimes downright eccentric – a woman who rarely allowed her many disappointments and misfortunes to provoke recriminations or self-pity. She was at once stoical and imaginative, gullible and shrewd, childishly vain and touchingly humble, sincere and loyal in her affections but occasionally indiscriminate in her choice of friends. As the years taught her to value wisdom above knowledge, she became wryly self-mocking. And nowhere in her own writings – feline as she could be in her snap judgements – is there anything approaching the scurrility with which she was repeatedly tormented by Alexander Pope, Horace Walpole and their (often anonymous) hangers-on.
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Read MoreTaken from the biographical afterword
It is impossible to read Lucie Duff Gordon’s letters home to her family without falling a little in love with her poignant joy at life in the face of her imminent death and with her open-minded care for and curiosity about her Egyptian neighbours. It is clear that they, in their turn, both respected and admired her, taking her to themselves in the absence of her own family. What was it that bred such a natural nobility and sense of equality and service in her, when British colonial administrators of a very different stripe were already lining up to exploit the desperate poverty of the Egyptians while trumpeting their own superiority?
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Read MoreThroughout most of her long life, Sybille remained a keen traveller, almost constantly on the move, living in England, France, Italy, in her middle age writing many articles about her extensive journeys through Europe. Prone to anxiety, she never liked to travel alone, and was nearly always accompanied by one of a series of lovers with whom she lived over the years. While in New York Sybille had begun an affair with a woman almost fifteen years her senior, Esther Murphy, sister of Gerald Murphy, the close friend of Scott Fitzgerald. Tall, ungainly, very masculine in appearance, Esther was kind-hearted, clever and formidably well-read, given to talking for hours on end, drink and cigarette always to hand. With the war over, the two women spent hours poring over maps, examining the possibilities of South America, of Peru, Uruguay, Montevideo, all of which turned out to be far too expensive. So they settled on Mexico.
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Read MoreThis is the piece that Dervla Murphy wrote for OX-TRAVELS: Meetings with remarkable travel writers, published in 2011 by Profile Books, which contains three dozen stories of travel, the royalties of which were pledged to the coffers of Oxfam.
On a cold grey day at the end of March 1964, shortly after my return from India, I first met a Tibetan in Western surroundings – the foyer of a central London hotel. I had been working for some months in Dharamsala, then an overcrowded and under-funded refugee camp for Tibetan children, and that moving encounter with the Tibetan way of being made me feel slightly apprehensive about Lobsang. How would this young man, only five years out of Tibet and three months out of India, be reacting to our Western ways? But I needn’t have worried; by the time our refugee-related business had been concluded I knew that Lobsang was in no danger of being ‘tainted’ – he was simply adjusting to his new circumstances to the extent required by good manners.
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Read MoreThe great twelfth-century traveler Ibn al-Arabi defined the very origin of our human existence as movement. “Immobility can have no part in it,” wrote Ibn al-Arabi, “for if existence were immobile it would return to its source, which is the Void. That is why the voyaging never stops, in this world or in the hereafter.” With a malicious linguistic twist, Ibn al-Arabi confuses our endless movement through time, from cradle to grave, with a pragmatic movement through space. Certainly, even cloistered in one’s room for the whole of one’s life, one is condemned to travel through the years, hour after hour, each one wounding us, as a sundial motto has it, until the last one kills us. And yet, an opponent of Ibn al-Arabi might have argued movement from one point of this earth to another is merely a succession of moments of being still: our geography exists only in the instant in which we are there, standing on our own two feet.
This notion of travel as moving through space, but also being in one place at a time, is vividly exemplified in the travel books of Ronald Wright, Cut Stones and Crossroads and Time Among the Maya, and in the history told in Stolen Continents. For several decades now, he has diligently chronicled the ancient civilizations of Latin America, traveling through Peru and Mexico, and rooting himself in a succession of historical moments, visiting not only the present landscapes but also those long vanished, like the courageous Time Traveller imagined by H.G. Wells. Wright witnesses the past from the vantage point of the present and reports back to us.
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Read MoreAn Affair of the Heart is one of several books Dilys Powell wrote about Greece. Part memoir, part history and part travelogue, it is written with great emotion but little sentimentality.
While she was at Somerville College, Oxford, where she read modern languages, Dilys Powell met Humfry Payne, and they married in 1926, the same year that he became the Director of the British School at Athens, the archaeological organisation responsible for digs undertaken by the British in Greece. After Powell joined the literary pages of the Sunday Times in 1928, she divided her time between Greece, where she joined her husband on excavations, and London, where she pursued a journalistic career that was to last five decades. For nearly ten years she spent a good deal of time with Humfry at his site at Perachora on the Gulf of Corinth, but after his tragic death in 1936 from a staphylococcus infection
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Read More‘Candles glow like fireflies through the smoke,’ Ronald Wright observes as he climbs up to Mass in a Catholic church that doubles as a Mayan site in Chichicastenango, Guatemala. ‘Women on the lower steps are selling arum lilies and other flowers, as bright as their striped huipiles; silent babies stare wide-eyed from brilliant carrying cloths on their mothers’ backs. Most of the Quiché men wear straw Stetsons and cheap manufactured clothes, but at the top of the platform, there are half a dozen chuchkahau dressed in the outfit we’ve seen on the hotel staff. Here the strange blend of Mesoamerica and Europe seems appropriate, adding dignity to the lined, fervent faces swinging censers, calling on ancestors, kneeling in quiet supplication, oblivious of the orderly turmoil all around them.’
It’s only one paragraph among a thousand such, at once vivid and suggestive, drawing expected exoticism together with unexpected details into a fine, complex mesh. I can see the candles like fireflies, the wide-eyed gaze of the babies amid the dazzling colours. Yet I can also see how the local indigenous population has a genius for surviving by taking in the ways of the conqueror and making them its own—the central theme of Wright’s account of travelling through Guatemala, Mexico, and Belize in 1985. I see how Stetsons and somewhat inauthentic local costumes merge, and how shades of Europe (those ‘swinging censers’) flit through the New World setting. Everything is ‘orderly turmoil.’ In the same breath, I notice how my guide to the site can recognize lilies as well as esoteric customs, can register how the scene before him is and is not something authentic and traditional. Our author is a passionate empiricist, we realize, less interested in passing judgment than in collecting observations, sensory and human and historical, so that we find ourselves constantly encircled by the world he is describing, and subliminally aware of how Mayan culture can sustain its cyclical calendar in the midst of a younger world committed to linear ‘progress.’
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Read MoreLike us, Michael Haag first got into the travel book game by putting together guidebooks. His Cadogan guide to Egypt was first rate. Michael was both amused and world-weary at the same time and his eyes would flash open with passionate interest before glazing over like a lizard. He spoke with an odd, almost Damon-Runyan lisp, as if always delivering a stubby punch line.
When we were thinking of setting up in business, he invited us to supper in his basement flat in North London so that he could share his experience of running a small literary list. It was a memorable evening, for his Egyptian wife Loutfia played a hand drum between courses, his friend Justin told us horrifying stories about Vietnam and we drank a lot of red wine while trying to remain balanced on red leather pouffes. The core of his advice was to not get divorced, for in his case it had taken away the London family home the value of which upheld the large overdraft needed to support the outgoings of a small publisher. But Michael had paid off every last penny he owed to his printers by selling his publishing company to a businessman from Saudi Arabia who loved books but did not understand the need to sell them or open letters, let alone reply to them. With Michael’s advice we eventually got hold of one of the jewels in his list which was Ralph Bagnold’s Libyan Sands, after it had languished in legal limbo during the slow ossification of his old business. He also published T E Lawrence’s Crusader Castles and E M Forster’s guidebook to Alexandria, Pharos and Pharillon. I was mightily intrigued by both books, but in the end you realise that they hide more than they reveal. The only other books in his list that were really outstanding were Dilys Powell’s two Greek books: A Villa Ariadne and An Affair of the Heart. We admired them from afar for decades but have finally managed to add them to the Eland list.
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Read Moreby Barnaby Rogerson
I have been lucky enough to travel with Don McCullin in both the Libyan and Algerian deserts looking for Roman ruins. Last year we decided to expand our horizons and drive through the Troad in north-west Turkey, and then hop over to have another look at the temple of Baalbeq in eastern Lebanon. We have had some wonderful successes in the past – like finding the Saharan frontier fort of Bou Njem at dawn – but there have also been some failures. On this latest trip, walking around the excavations of the Late Bronze Age city of Troy, talking excitedly to the director of the excavations about Hector and Achilles in the gathering dusk was a totally thrilling experience for me, but I noticed it did not have quite the same fascination for my travelling companion. His camera bag remained buckled up (always a bad sign) apart from one photograph of Hector, the excavation guard dog.
The next morning, I knocked lightly on the door of Don’s room to check he was up. It was dark, and we were hoping to catch the Roman statues in the site museum in the first light of dawn. The door immediately swung open, and Don appeared, bags packed, camera case to the fore. The shadow of a grin crept across his face as he met my glance. ‘Up at last I see,’ he said. ‘Only you could have slept through your mate making such a din.’ The mate he was referring to was the muezzin, calling the dawn prayer.
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Read MoreEothen is such an easygoing book, so funny, so crisp and vivid in its handling of people and places, that the reader may well not notice that it is also a very slippery book indeed. It seems so lightly and spontaneously done, this quizzical self-portrait of an Old Etonian swanning idly around the Middle East in the 1830s. Its determinedly inconsequential surface masks a degree of artistic guile for which Kinglake has never received full credit.
‘My excuse for the book is its truth,’ he announces in his Preface. One may let one’s eyebrow lift a fraction at that statement, since the preface itself is an elaborate, and highly purposeful, lie. Kinglake passes off Eothen as a hastily written letter (a ‘scrawl’) to a travelling friend. It was no such thing. The book took Kinglake a decade to write. It was revised and re-revised; its style of bright talk was the product of a long process of literary refinement. In the Preface, Kinglake rejoices in the book’s ‘studiously unpromising’ title and makes the assurance that it is ‘quite superficial in its character’. For an ironist, the worst of all fates is to be taken literally – and Kinglake, adored though he was by generations of Victorian and Edwardian readers, has usually been taken, or mistaken, at his word.
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Read MoreDouglas Botting was a trusted friend of Gavin Maxwell in the last 12 years of his life and a fellow explorer-traveller-writer, so was uniquely equipped to understand both the creative and destructive demons that drove him. He has written an empathetic study of a man, which reads like the most bizarre and eccentric adventure story. Here he relates encountering Maxwell for the first time.
The first time I met Gavin Maxwell – poet, painter, shark-hunter, naturalist, traveller, secret agent and aristocratic opter-out – was a shock. ‘Come round for a drink,’ he had said over the phone. ‘Say, about tea time? Take the bus up the King’s Road. Get off just before the World’s End and double back. The square is on your left, between the road and the river. Paultons Square. Number 9.’
I found the house without difficulty, a tall, narrow-fronted terrace house in a large, tree-filled square on the furthest frontier of fashionable Chelsea. There were two bell pushes by the front door: the lower one was labelled ‘G. Maxwell’, the upper one ‘K. Raine’. I pushed the lower one and waited. Nobody came, and after a minute or two I went back to the pavement and leaned over the railings to try and peer through the front window. Behind the net curtain I could make out nothing but a brightly lit glass fishtank standing waterless and fishless on the windowsill. Inside the tank I could see the outline of what I took to be a large stuffed lizard, a sort of dragon in miniature, about a foot and a half long, with a tawny coloured, scaly skin. As I stared transfixed at this Jurassic apparition I saw that it was not stuffed after all but very much alive, for suddenly a long tongue like a snake’s flickered out of its mouth, snatched at an insect that looked like a grasshopper, then just as suddenly retracted. My attention was instantly distracted from this startling reptile by a flash of iridescent wings and a frantic fluttering of brilliant electric-blue and green feathers in the upper window pane. Some kind of tropical bird, wings beating furiously like a humming bird, hovered momentarily behind the glass, then swooped away and was lost from view in the darkness of the room’s interior.
Read MoreI was first introduced to The People of Providence as I sat bewildered and exhausted, nursing my six-day-old first-born. A friend appeared with a birthing present, a 370-page book which I was told would enrich and change my life. Actually, quite a lot seemed to be altering in my life at that time, and I added it to the list. I had just made the decision to change my career from hospital doctor to GP and was open to new ideas about people and their lives. Once my baby allowed me to do anything for more than 15 minutes at a time, I began to dip into the book and was immediately hooked. Here was such a diversity of people talking openly about so many parts of their lives lived on an ordinary inner city housing estate. It was a complete revelation to me, coming from a hospital background with a rich and honourable tradition of trying to ‘Get it right for bed 17, a case of …’. Now I was being invited to think about how the person in bed 17 might have a whole other life.
Read MorePeter Goullart spent nine years in the all but forgotten, ancient Nakhi Kingdom of South West China. He had a job entirely suited to his inquiring, gossipy temperament, for it was his mission to get to know all the local traders, merchants, inn-keepers and artisans so that he could report on which characters should be backed by a loan from the Co-Operative movement. In his company we get to hear about the the love affairs and the social rivalries of his neighbours, attend magnificent banquets, meet ancient dowagers and handsome warriors as well as catching the sound of the swiftly running mountain streams, the coarse ribaldry of the market ladies and the happy laughter emerging from out of the wineshops. For he remained fascinated by this complex society which believed simultaneously and sincerely in Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, in addition to their ancient religion of Animism and Shamanism.
Read MoreWhen you think of Hampshire, you think of chalk streams and downland, military and naval enterprise, sailing and King Alfred, and Winchester Cathedral. But its literary heritage does not leap to mind. And yet Hampshire has played a surprisingly important role in nurturing the book. For the English novel reached its earliest flowering through the genius of Jane Austen, who was born and lived most of her life here. The world that she depicts in her exquisite novels, and her scintillating and detailed understanding of the human psyche, were born of the county and of her observation of her Hampshire neighbours and friends. But her Hampshire is only part of the story . . .
Read MoreWhen you think of Hampshire, you think of chalk streams and downland, military and naval enterprise, sailing and King Alfred, and Winchester Cathedral. But its literary heritage does not leap to mind. And yet Hampshire has played a surprisingly important role in nurturing the book. For the English novel reached its earliest flowering through the genius of Jane Austen, who was born and lived most of her life here. The world that she depicts in her exquisite novels, and her scintillating and detailed understanding of the human psyche, were born of the county and of her observation of her Hampshire neighbours and friends. But her Hampshire is only part of the story . . .
Read MoreRose Baring and Barnaby Rogerson, the husband and wife team who run Eland were set identical questions by Georgia de Chamberet at The BookBlast® Diary - enjoy the answers!
Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
ROSE: No, but there were books around. I was quite a lonely child and books were a marvellous escape and provided adventure, friends and role models – Noel Streatfield, E. Nesbit, Johanna Spyri, L. L. Montgomery, Louisa M. Alcott and Lucy M. Boston. Just remembering makes me want to get back under the sheets and counterpane with a pile of them.
BARNABY: No, I can remember them both being rather concerned that I was reading “yet another book” instead of riding a pony, or playing with the dogs. There were many books in the tiny, dark Tudor cottage in which I was brought up, but they were mostly all inherited. They included a vast shelf of bound Punch magazines and a full set of Jorrocks. At a young age I used my pocket money to acquire the Ladybird history books but before the age of seven I had graduated to Jackdaws – fascinating folders of facsimile historic documents and maps.
Read MoreSpellbound by his grandmother’s Anglo-Indian heritage and the exuberant annual visits of her friend the Begum, Isambard Wilkinson became enthralled by Pakistan as an intrepid teenager, eventually working there as a foreign correspondent during the War on Terror. Seeking the land behind the headlines, Bard sets out to discover the essence of a country convulsed by Islamist violence. What of the old, mystical Pakistan has survived and what has been destroyed? We meet charismatic tribal chieftains making their last stand, hereditary saints blessing prostitutes, gangster bosses in violent slums and ecstatic Muslim pilgrims.
Read MoreDuring the Second World War Janina David was smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto, hidden in a convent and raised by Catholic nuns. Recently, Janina was delighted to have succeeded in getting the nuns recognised by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations. To commemorate this achievement, and to remind ourselves of the trauma of war and exile, we revisited this moving description of Janina’s return, alone, to her native town in Poland back in the early 1960s. Both of Janina’s parents were killed by the Nazis in the extermination camps.
Read MoreIt seemed apt that I should discover Juliet living in Russia when I was there. And apt that rather than living in Moscow like the vast majority of foreigners, she was living in Peredelkino, a retreat from the city where wooden dachas sheltered improbably but cosily, like mushrooms, in the all-encompassing forest. Like Churchill’s description of the country itself, she had always been to me something of ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’ . . .
Read MoreCan a book save one’s life? I used to think so when stationed in Mogadishu, avoiding thoughts of murder or suicide in that sunburnt madness only by immersing myself in Gerald Hanley’s Warriors (1971). Day after day I would throw myself on to my bed after another utterly fruitless, pointless day in the president’s office, and lie down, sweating beneath squadrons of flies and mosquitoes, and try to forget about it all.
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