Travel

It is hard to imagine any Victorian man living a fuller life in a flimsier body than Robert Louis Stevenson – and he certainly wouldn’t have managed it without the support of his partner and wife of several decades, Fanny Van de Grift. Born in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850, Louis suffered from countless childhood illnesses that limited his activity to reading books, writing stories and staging ‘pasteboard theatre’ productions with his nanny, or else travelling to health spas in Marseille, Genoa and Naples. He strongly resisted his father’s efforts to enlist him in his own career as a lighthouse designer, and at Edinburgh University the only thing he excelled at was truancy.

As a child, Edward Wong had no idea that his father had been in the People’s Liberation Army. The only uniform the young Wong associated with his parent was the red blazer of Sampan Café, the Chinese take-away his father worked at in Virginia. China was seldom spoken of, with Wong getting only snatches and hints of what seemed like a painful family history – one the adults were keen to brush over. But, like many second-generation immigrants, Wong gravitated towards his father’s homeland in a bid to better understand the man. His parents’ silence only compounded the enigma.

Michel Leiris (1901-90) was one of those intellectual adventurers who are the astonishment of French literature in the 20th century. Their achilles’ heel is that most were communists, in a few cases Nazis; and nothing kills the life of the mind more thoroughly than preaching. Their saving grace is that many were eccentric characters, and their autobiographical work can often be their most luminous legacy. Among Leiris’s subjects are his dogs, his ideal hotel, his hatred of Wagner, his Anglophile snobbery and his tailor Because they were anti-form, the ideal prose vehicles became ‘aphorism’ or ‘fleuve’. The most brilliant of the French aphorists, Emile Cioran (though he was Romanian), exclaimed in an interview ‘Expression – that’s the cure!

Were trains to blame for the travel writing boom of the 1980s? When Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar was published in 1975, it sold 1.5 million copies and launched a publishing phenomenon. At first, long-distance train journeys conjured all the romance of the golden age of travel: leather luggage, first-class compartments and the billowing steam from an antique engine. But with each new imitator, the format became increasingly stale, and now train trips suggest the cushioned charm of Michael Portillo’s never-ending BBC series. Nevertheless, as Clare Hammond shows in On the Shadow Tracks, rail journeys can still take the traveller deep inside a country.

The idea of the kitchen as a space for transformation and transportation is not a new one. Many writers have explored the room’s ability to offer both domesticity and alchemy at the same time – how it allows cooks to travel vicariously through the food they make. This is the subject of Cold Kitchen, Caroline Eden’s memoir of her time spent in her kitchen in Scotland and of her travels to Eastern European and Central Asian cities – and somehow she makes it fresh and compelling. She is an author and critic who has written extensively about the food and culture of the countries of the former Soviet Union. Black Sea, in which she explored Odessa, Istanbul and Trabzon, received a clutch of prizes, and Red Sands, about Central Asia, won the prestigious André Simon food book award.