“... On one level this is a traditional family romance. Exhausted after finishing his biography of Bruce Chatwin, Shakespeare moved to Tasmania – a place Chatwin never visited – to make a fresh start: ‘I was at that period sick of a life already lived. I hoped never to read another old letter again.’ No such ...”

“... him. Even his eye was egalitarian, as I came to realise when I asked him for his memories of Bruce Chatwin, a friend from his Sunday Times days. He had designed a book of Chatwin’s photographs, turning it into a disputatious work of art: in the spirit of a 1930s volume he admired, Art without Epoch, he put a ...”

“... in his Bloomsbury house: he used to say that it was one of the best things he had ever done. Bruce Chatwin recalled him discussing tiny details of interior decoration and felt that the rooms he lived in were ‘more affected, more calculated and more dandified than anything I could dream of’. The result was alluring but also eccentric. Hodgkin had ...”

“... without the traditional raids and kidnappings. I remembered Herzog’s creed, as reported by Bruce Chatwin: ‘Walking is a virtue, tourism is deadly sin.’ This stern Bavarian dogma, repeated over many mesmeric interviews, lectures and presentations, became a little threadbare, itself a form of cultural tourism. A brand statement. Almost a slogan ...”

“... steps a day. I know this with such precision not because I’ve turned into a cross between Bruce Chatwin and Rain Man but because I’ve been using a Fitbit One, a fancy-schmancy pedometer which tracks how much I’ve been moving about and automatically synchronises it, via a Bluetooth dongle on my computer, with a website and an app on my ...”

“... is the point of the exercise. They are always long books – no miniature monographs like Chatwin’s on Patagonia or Rushdie’s on Nicaragua. Graham Greene spun Journey without Maps out of a few weeks’ trek into the Liberian interior, an itinerary further truncated by illness; for Voices of the Old Sea, perhaps his best travel-book, Norman Lewis ...”

“... and tastes. In her straining after the essence of things, she reminds one of David Malouf and of Bruce Chatwin (who married into her clan). I don’t mean that she copies them: she is too committed, too intense for that; an element of what an American reviewer called ‘self-administered therapy’ convinces one that she is too seriously involved to be ...”

“... a mental health issue, and it’s hard to disagree.Pálsson doesn’t delve too deeply into what Bruce Chatwin called ‘the psychology – or psychopathology – of the compulsive collector’. But his thoughtful and melancholy account gains complex resonance when he confesses his own childhood passion for birds’ eggs: he experienced ‘pangs of ...”

“... he was more like Graham Greene – with whom he shared a period and many destinations – than Bruce Chatwin, who might have learned from Lewis how to be a writer who is also a brilliant disappearing act. Lewis wrote as much fiction as anything else but many of his 15 novels are out of print and his reputation rests entirely on the travel writing. He ...”

“... for the past twenty-odd years. The only parallel I can see in recent British literature is with Bruce Chatwin. The movement is from history to geography, and from the deconstruction of metaphysics, via a differently-grounded thinking, towards a new poetic-intellectual (and hence living) space. For the last five years, I have been living on the north ...”

“... place and report the experience in one of the styles patented by Graham Greene, Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin and Robert Byron. The scholarly version of these explorations is called anthropology, as in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Margaret Mead, and many American scholars in receipt of sabbatical leave and Guggenheim fellowships. If you have ...”

“... on being the prime experiential reality for proto-humans and then Homo sapiens for many millennia. Bruce Chatwin put forward a similar thesis in The Songlines, inspired by the stratigraphy of the Sterkfontein Caves, but he wanted to loop back the predatory lope into his Grand Theory of Universal Ambulation. Trout, on the other hand, is absolutely fixated ...”

“... this side idolatry, for literature and the form of the novel. Elsewhere he writes of his love for Bruce Chatwin, and applauds Calvino’s whimsical notion that what set off the Big Bang at the beginning of the universe could have been ‘the first truly generous impulse, the first expression of love’. In his current seclusion he is heartened by the ...”

“... to re-create their own lives.’ Among recently exposed fantasists, he lists Patrick O’Brian, Bruce Chatwin, Laurie Lee and Jeffrey Archer, all writers for whom a legend as man of action was a large part of their stock in trade. The South African poet Roy Campbell, who was a world-class liar, influenced Van der Post at an impressionable age. (‘I ...”

“... Journey to Armenia is now available in Clarence Brown’s translation, with an introduction by Bruce Chatwin. It appeared first in the Soviet magazine Zvezda in 1933, and was the last piece of his work that Mandelstam would see published in his lifetime. To call it travel writing is to miss the mark almost as badly as the Pravda reviewer who savaged ...”