Next week I’m going to Ladakh for a travel gig. Me neither — never heard of it. So I heaved out my Victorian world atlas and found it at the apex of India, northwest of Kashmir, and sharing a border with Tibet. Then I went online to find books about the place. Choice was limited. I bought A Journey in Ladakh by David Harvey (‘Extremely entertaining, a classy travel book and a palpitating fragment of a spiritual autobiography’ — David Mitchell, New Society); I bought Ancient Futures by Helena Norberg-Hodge (‘The book that has had the greatest influence on my life… about tradition and change in a remote corner of India that has never been subject to the brutality of the modern, global economy’ — Zac Goldsmith); and I bought The Road to Lamaland by ‘Ganpat’ (M.L.A. Gompertz), published in 1919, and therefore predating the age of the fatuous puff.
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