Dervla was all about books: reading books, writing books, researching books, and reviewing books – dissecting them with a scalpel. This last metaphor is apt because she said that her other chosen profession would have been that of a surgeon, if life’s randomness had led that way. If her father had found work in Dublin rather than moving to a rural town like Lismore, would Dervla have followed a more conventional educational path and aimed to become a surgeon, of which she often dreamed? Then maybe she would have been Professor Murphy, eminent vascular surgeon, instead of travel writer extraordinaire.
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Read MoreIt is not often that you get to talk with a beer-drinking prophet, so when I am asked if Eland will ever make a serious profit, I can tell them we have already banked our greatest dividend, talking the world with Dervla Murphy.
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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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