Beholding sundry places

Here’s a Christmas present for anyone with a serious interest in travel. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an armchair aficionado or grizzled explorer. There’s something for everyone, as they say. Eric Newby, the octogenarian doyen of the travel-writing genre, has put together a wonderful literary journey through the centuries and across the seven continents.

Where to begin? How about Herodotus, Father of History, affable Greek aristocrat and probably the world’s first travel writer to boot? Here we find him musing on the unfathomable geography of Europe, ending his erudite aside with the splendidly modern conclusion, ‘But that is quite enough on this subject.’

In a very entertaining introductory section, ‘Notes on Travel’, Newby introduces the reader to Thomas Coryate, a 16th- century English eccentric and traveller (why do these three words tend to go together so easily and so often?). Coryate, fresh from a 2,000-mile walk across Europe, wonders whether travel is simply ‘a certayne gadding about, a vaine beholding of sundry places’, as my wife occasionally suggests.