I first encountered Jonathan Raban as an absence, a glamorous rumour. I had come to UEA in 1970 as a graduate student. He had left the year before but was far from forgotten. The pubs where he drank were pointed out to me. One of my tutors, Malcolm Bradbury, directed me to an article he had written about the art of criticism as a form of fiction writing. The idea struck me as faintly scandalous but also very exciting. What if critics were, in their own way, story tellers? What if the purpose of criticism was to release the reader’s imagination rather than confine it in concepts? There seemed to be something free spirited about his writing. He didn’t want to get boxed in by oppositions between the modern and the traditional, or the English and the American, but would think on his own terms about what he liked and what he didn’t. I wanted to read more . . .

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When Peter Mayne visited the shrine of Ghazi Baba, it was being rebuilt, “so that what was once a modest little place perched on a rock is now going to look like a provincial movie-house”. The functional stairs that lead up to the shrine retain a quasi-commercial feel seventy years on. There is no doubting the fervour of those ascending them though, and that, together with the humour and humanity that he encountered in rural Sindh, seem little changed.
 
Cities are different and there is a familiar sense of purpose in Karachi. Pedestrians, fixed on personal ends, eschew eye contact with passers-by. Like New York, Hong Kong or Mumbai, other port cities grown great from immigration in recent centuries, Karachi’s monuments consciously proclaim the wealth that was generated here. The extensive yellow sweep of the domed Karachi Port Trust is a temple to commerce, while the Gothic Revival Frere Hall, once the town hall, blends Italianate and Moghul influences, with a slender spire on top that wouldn’t look out of place on a Zurich church.

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First person that inspired you to become a story-teller?  Be it teacher, grandmother, the radio.

Working-class kids didn’t have books in the early sixties and nobody told stories, except about the football. When I was about nineteen, Arthur Grimble’s A Pattern of Islands made me realise what travel writing could do – that it was the perfect vehicle in which to smuggle in the ineffable.
 
Is there a home?  How many? Where do you write now?  

Yes there is a Victorian butcher’s shop on Hampstead Heath that has been home for thirty years. I write wherever I am – it’s a wholly inaccessible luxury not to have to get on with it every single day. What would one tell the gas man?
 
Writer or travel-writer or adventurer ?  How will booksellers describe you, when we want to carry on selling your books?

‘Writer’ is quite enough

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If you have not yet read Brazilian Adventure or News from Tartary you are in for a roller-coaster of adventure and misadventure. You will also be left in awe at the stamina, bravery, enterprise and self-deprecating humour of Peter Fleming, as well as appreciating the nonchantly camouflaged steel of his ambition.  He is a fascinating example of pluck in whatever extreme situation he finds himself, but always given an individual twist, for his adventurous spirit was married to a rapier-like skill with words and a dedication to the truth. He also had a lifelong delight in the theatre, which he put into practice by marrying one of the great actresses of the age, against the determined opposition of his mother.  His friends recognized this rare combination of physical toughness, literary precision and delight in life by likening him to a figure from Elizabethan times. 

Last New Year, I ripped up a book contract.  It was an intriguing sensation to free yourself from the otherwise desired embrace of a Publisher. As all hungry freelance writers know, you need to lie about your availability and accept multiple and contradictory commissions with enthusiasm. Editors do not want to employ writers who say No.  
So why did I do it?  Guilt about broken deadlines was not a primary concern. Deadlines are a vital aspect of newsprint journalism, but if you are writing a book they are mere fences to be jumped, as if you were an old hunter at a point-to-point.  But I did know we were going forward into one hell of a year at Eland, moving all 182 titles into a new warehouse and a new distributor. I may also have talked about my next book too much, which can kill the joy of settling down in a dark corner for three months.  The story had already been told.  I was also enjoying the comparative success of The House Divided: Sunni, Shia and the Making of the Middle East and the invitations to book festivals.  

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I recently had to re-read The Innocent Anthropologist and it was a strange experience.  I didn’t choose the title but I now find it wholly appropriate – none of the cringing political correctness you find in the current anthropology that has lost its cutting edge, the boundless optimism of those times, the faith in the subject itself and the value of human contact that it entails but alongside an awareness that one of the great universals is the ability to laugh at ourselves when we are at our most serious.  When I showed it to my ex-tutor he warned me never to publish it as it would end any hope of an academic career.  At a meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, a motion was proposed that I should be thrown out. It was not passed and nowadays it is often the first book prescribed on undergraduate reading lists.  I feel a nostalgia for that lost me – so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

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Gamel Woolsey, author of ‘Death’s Other Kingdom: A Spanish village on the eve

of the Civil War’.  Read Michael Jacob’s afterword to this remarkable first-hand

account of the Spanish Civil War in our latest newsletter (now on our website)

alongside news from Action Syria, Cornucopia, the Dorchester Lit Fest,

Sherborne and Ilse Schwepcke

‘Of all the foreign eyewitness accounts of the Spanish Civil War, Gamel Woolsey’s

Death’s Other Kingdom is one of the most moving and unusual. It is one of the few

records of the war that is fuelled more by a love of Spain and its people than by

any firm ideological standpoint. Woolsey was someone whose political position

ran contrary to the Left Review’s famous assertion of 1937 that it was impossible

for authors not to take sides on the issue of being for or against Franco and

Fascism. But then, to her contemporaries, she would barely have been

considered an author at all. By the time of her death in 1968, she seemed

destined to go down in history merely as the wife of the writer and Hispanist

Gerald Brenan … Rereading the book today, one is struck by how pertinent it

remains as a commentary on war in general, and on war’s impact on the lives of

those ordinary human beings whom the rhetoric of politics and ideology never

reaches.’  Michael Jacobs

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It was our first morning in Iran. 

Mashhad was our base for the first couple of days, as we acclimatised and explored the north-east of the country.  The distances were vast, and some of the journeys were clearly experimental, but to be seeing things in Iran that Bruce had never seen was a privilege in itself.  Our second day took us towards the Afghan border but was broken by a two-mile walk so that we could arrive at an isolated Seljuk caravanserai having understood something of the landscape.  Our trip to discover the secret encampment of Nadir Shah (where his treasure had been stored and where he was murdered by his own bodyguard) was accompanied by a thunderstorm that swept a river of mud, speckled with vast boulders, across the road.  Like all Bruce missions there was an inscription to be identified – up a narrow mountain gorge, carved into the living rock – which took us through a nomad encampment where he picked up a charming young guide.  He was delighted to find that the inscription, like Nadir Shah himself, was vast and imposing, but essentially Turkic with Persian embellishments.

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Above a curry house in Brick Lane lived Clive Murphy like a wise owl snug in the nest he constructed of books, and lined with pictures, photographs, postcards and cuttings over the nearly fifty years that he occupied his tiny flat. Originally from Dublin, Clive had not a shred of an Irish accent. Instead he revelled in a well-educated vocabulary, a spectacular gift for rhetoric and a dry taste for savouring life’s ironies. He possessed a certain delicious arcane tone that you would recognise if you have heard his fellow-countryman Francis Bacon talking. In fact, Clive was a raconteur of the highest order and I was a willing audience, happy merely to sit at his feet and chuckle appreciatively at his colourful and sometimes raucous observations.
 
I was especially thrilled to meet Clive because he was a writer after my own heart who made it his business to seek out people and record their stories. At first in Pimlico and then here in Spitalfields through the sixties and seventies, Clive worked as ‘a modern Mayhew, publishing the lives of ordinary people who had lived through the extraordinary upheavals and social changes of the first three-quarters of the century before they left the stage.’ He led me to a bookshelf in his front room and showed me a line of nine books of oral history that he edited, entitled Ordinary Lives, as well as his three novels and six volumes of ribald verse. I was astonished to be confronted with the achievements of this self-effacing man living there in two rooms in such beautiful extravagant chaos.

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Jaipur is the best literary festival in the world, not because it is the biggest (it is not), nor because it is well-funded (it is not) but because it is free. Or almost free. You have to register in advance, but the five-day student pass will set back a young scholar 100 rupees, which is under £1.
 
This creates an audience unlike anything else I have encountered. A Jaipur audience is younger, smarter, more alert and attentive. It is opinionated, bright-eyed and stylish. Since no one buys seat tickets, if the audience feels that the speaker (be they ever-so-famous on the little screen) is underperforming, they simply rise up and go listen to someone more articulate and honest, often achieving this exit with some style, as sarees and scarves, or school blazers, are adjusted with a determined flourish.  At any hour of the day there are seven simultaneous talks being held, most of them in open-sided tents within the Jaipur Festival compound, so there is plenty of choice, and plenty of freedom to move. My travelling companion and I agreed not to attend the same talks so we could double up on the already dazzling range of options.  On each of the five days (Thursday through to Monday) the three biggest tents (Front Lawn, Charbagh and Surya Mahal) will host nine separate sessions, including a start-up session of a Morning Raga – classical Indian music. In the early evening there is always a raucous, high-volume and boldly-lit rock concert performed by bands flown in from Delhi or Bombay for which tickets are keenly purchased by Jaipur’s youth. For the rest, no individual, neatly numbered seat tickets are sold for any of the acts, nor are seats reserved for speakers or sponsors. So unlike our dear old, stuffy little Britain there are no veiled class distinctions in the seating, or entrance queues waiting for ticket checking, just a determined free flow of individuals. For the more popular sessions, a crust ten individuals thick can surround the packed rows of seats within the tents, all craning to get some sort of view. In the indoor halls, if there are no free chairs, the overflow audience neatly folds their legs to sit in the aisles or cluster around the stage.

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A Quiet Evening: The Travels of Norman Lewis, introduced by John Hatt

After founding Eland in 1982 with the purpose of reviving exceptional travel literature, my earliest ambition was to bring Norman Lewis to a wider readership. Therefore Eland’s first publication was A Dragon Apparent, his wonderful account of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia before those nations were engulfed in the Vietnam war.  I went on to republish what I considered to be Norman’s four best books. After passing the Eland baton to Rose Baring and Barnaby Rogerson, I stayed in close touch; but, because they managed the company with such love and skill, I took a back seat. All the same, I recently beseeched them to allow me to assemble a new anthology of Norman’s best articles. They generously agreed, and this is the result.

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Taken from the Biographical Afterword

In this, Joe’s first book, he has already distilled his marvellous range and strides onto the authorial stage fully formed. ‘Drying saris fluttered from balconies like banners ... Whenever the train stopped, men passed by with tea urns shouting chai, chai, and there were cows sleeping on the platform and figures stretched out like corpses with grey sheets.’
 
He is restless, fiercely observant, and we see ‘Small sodden goats huddled in doorways with mouths shaped into smiles and cold yellow eyes ... A beggar woman mewed “Bap, mabap and touched her cracked lips”’. Joe shared his sandwiches; she ‘snatched through the window – I noticed her elegant hands’. And, intrigued, he’s drawn us in.

He is warm, funny, irreverent, unembarrassedly self-revelatory. Discreet and formidably knowledgeable, he has little interest in either dissimilation or false modesty. In conversation and on paper, swooping from one thought to another, he then makes a sharp turn for an historical digression.

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Being read to out loud has magic to it.  Children and old people immediately understand that it means not just compelling words but close company, real engagement and an abandonment of all other distractions to engage in a shared, lived experience of now.  It is impossible to be a good reader, caught up in the musical pace of your narrative and keeping a weather eye over your menu of accents, and not be totally present.

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When Robert Byron wrote The Station, he was twenty-two years old. Few other people write books when they are twenty-two, but then Robert Byron was not like other people. He had, moreover, written one book already. Europe in the Looking Glass, a typically ebullient record of a journey with two Oxford friends through Germany, Italy and Greece, had been published in 1926, when he was twenty-one. It is very much a young man’s book – how could it have been anything else? – yet already on almost every page there are flashes of the biting wit, the astonishing power of visual observation, the faintly mannered style with its occasional fearless plunges into the purple patch, the perceptiveness so acute as sometimes to verge on clairvoyance (such as when he writes of Bavaria that ‘it is here, more than in Prussia, that the survival of militarism is to be feared’) that were to be the hallmarks of his later voice.

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‘Sensitively written, beautifully understated … this honest book is one of the few contemporary novels to show Japan as it was and is.’ The Japan Times

The Ginger Tree is one of only a handful of novels on the Eland list, yet its vivid sense of place, strong narrative drive and the engaging voice of its young Scottish heroine who recounts her experiences as a single woman in Japan in the decades leading up to the Second World War, make this book one of our bestsellers.

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It is easy to sympathize with Lewis’s respect for the tough, independent, bloody-minded fishermen and the eccentricities of the impoverished landowner and priest. He became a fisherman himself in partnership with his friend Sebastian, and the lovingly detailed descriptions of diving and fishing in crystal waters are superb. The two men maintained a safe distance from the professionals, diving only for those fish that the Farol men ignored.

But any illusion that the people in these isolated villages lived an idyllic life, playing guitars and feasting on Elizabeth David dishes, is dispelled by this book. The guitar was despised, the meals were mostly stews of poor meat, and the wine was thin and acidic. Between October and March, hunkering down for the long winter, the fisher­men had to live on the proceeds from their summer catch. Lewis may have made great efforts to fit in and he certainly helped many of the hopelessly innumerate locals order their affairs and avoid being cheated by the French dealers who came down to buy their fish, but he doesn’t seem to have hung around much when summer ended.

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The greatest challenge in writing The House Divided was to maintain balance, not just between Sunni and Shia, but also between the three great identities within the Middle East; Arabia, Iran and Turkey. The book took several years to write (earlier drafts were three times longer), and was based upon many decades of research and travel. But finally, it was edited and complete, in September 2023. As I set off for a break in Rome, the war between Russia and the Ukraine dominated the news and, for once, the Middle East seemed quiet.  I spent the day of October 7 exploring the ruins of the antique port of Ostia, where the Tiber meets the sea and where I heard news of the Hamas massacre of 1200 Israelis outside Gaza. By the time I returned to London, the Israelis had launched a revenge attack on Gaza and the Middle East was set off into a new whirlwind of violence.

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Peter Mayne’s The Narrow Smile, reviewed by James Crowden
for the Royal Society of Asian Affairs
 
Peter Mayne (1908-1979) was a bit of a card, quick witted, suave and genteel. His English friends included Cyril Connolly, Ronald Searle, Francis Bacon and Osbert Lancaster. Just the sort of writer who gets himself deeply embedded by drinking gin and cider in London bohemian Society or drinking tea on the North West Frontier. Pathan and Hampstead codes of honourable behaviour have much in common. The greatest crime is to be boring… Peter had many friends not just in Pakistan. He spent many years in India, first in shipping in Bombay and then in Madras. His father had run a top notch college for Indian Princes - Rajmukar College down in Gujerat.

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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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In 1880 Christian Watt, a woman of forty-seven who was to be a patient for many years in Cornhill, the Aberdeen Infirmary for those suffering from mental disorders, started to write down recollections of her life. She wrote on foolscap sheets of paper in pencil – pen and ink were forbidden within the institution – with a firm, clear hand. Her memory was encyclopaedic, her gift of narration superb. Before she died in 1923, she had recorded the principal events and impressions of a life of ninety years, describing folk and incident of the mid-nineteenth century in a way which, six decades later, brings both before our eyes.

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I am not neutral about Don McCullin.When I was a photography-obsessed teenager,
he was quite simply my God. I well remember sitting in the back row at maths classes 
in 1980s Yorkshire, covertly flicking through the school library’s copy of Don’s
 Hearts of Darkness, transported from a dull world of equations and trigonometry – taught, for duffers like me, in a shabby, paint-peeling Portakabin – to the war-torn jungles of Vietnam and Laos, the darkly barricaded streets of Famagusta and Beirut, the Killing Fields of Cambodia and Biafra. Don’s work was eye-opening, shocking, exhilarating, frightening and deeply disturbing all at once; and for a teenager it was utterly irresistible. Moreover, it
 spoke to a heady and thrilling world of photojournalism that I longed to be part of.

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Brazilian Adventure is as fresh a story today as it was when originally published in 1933.
 
It began with an advertisement in the agony column of The Times: ‘Leaving England June, to explore rivers Central Brazil, if possible ascertain fate Colonel Fawcett; abundance game, big and small; exceptional fishing; room two more guns.’ Colonel Fawcett and his son Jack had embarked on a journey in 1925 in search of a supposed lost city and were never seen again. This expedition was too much of a temptation for Peter Fleming, a young
journalist with energy and an appetite for adventure.

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