“... been reading Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana, recently reissued with a nice introduction by Bruce Chatwin.† Byron’s splendid book is made rather than marred by his unrepentant snobbery. Chatwin, who travelled the same road thirty years after Byron, in 1962, looks back with a different snobbishness that I ...”

“... a place to get out of, if you possibly could. The difficulty was to be fired. AH: Go back to when Bruce Chatwin came on the scene. FW: I slightly knew Bruce before, and knew he was absolutely a genius about art. AH: In an intuitive rather than an academic fashion? FW: I’m not sure. I knew that when he was 18 he was ...”

“... Asia – a list that would include the Etonians Robert Byron and Colin Thubron, the Marlburian Bruce Chatwin and the gentry Scot William Dalrymple – so often boast superior educations if not pedigrees. Aspects of Stewart’s response to Iraq show the influence of his earlier travels. His interest in the culture of the Marsh Arabs, for ...”

“... you might think, than as one ‘smitten with form and colour’? And then there is our own Bruce Chatwin, who as a 20-year-old courier from Sotheby’s was allowed into Braque’s presence when a well-known collector wanted a drawing authenticated. Each time Chatwin recycled the anecdote, his own participation ...”

“... which later turned into books. Gore Vidal, also an admirer of Wyndham, was a frequent contributor. Bruce Chatwin was persuaded by him to begin his career as a writer on the Magazine. Others, it should be said, like Norman Lewis, were not his protégés. The standard was high. We were subjected to intense envy and dislike from those on the newspaper on the ...”

“... who said that there was nothing more beautiful than the naked chest of a dead young man. Bruce Chatwin needs to give the impression that he knows everything, needs to be able to tell you, when you stop with him at an antique shop window off Bond Street, what factory the tea pot came from, and its date. In warning me that I may be basing my ...”

“... when he found a larger readership during the travel-writing boom associated with Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin. One reason for the improvement is that the journeys he made – through Brezhnev’s USSR for Among the Russians (1983) and Deng Xiaoping’s China for Behind the Wall (1987) – weren’t so easily romanticised: depressed by collectivisation ...”

“... spread and rouge faded and money spent, figures such as John Richardson, Graham Sutherland and Bruce Chatwin would have dealings with Helena Rubinstein. Rubinstein trusted Richardson, in as much as she trusted anyone, because he told her that certain paintings in her vast art collection that she believed were fake, were in fact by Juan ...”

“... seventy this year, has had just one hit single (‘Because the Night’ in 1978, co-written with Bruce Springsteen) in forty years, and the only one of her 11 albums with an unassailable reputation is her glorious debut, Horses. I’ve known many people who dearly love Horses, but I can’t recall a single person ever declaring a passion for any of the other ...”

“... which expresses the ‘immediate kinship’ the two men had felt with each other. Then there’s Bruce Chatwin, whose leather rucksack Herzog inherited, and apparently still uses; and the Indochina veteran and photojournalist Denis Reichle (it was he who squashed the scorpion groggily exiting the hammock); and Werner Janoud, ‘completely primal and ...”

“... writing, yet it is tougher and more purposeful than Claudio Magris and more penetrating than Bruce Chatwin, who wasn’t one for burrowing in the archives. Since completing the trilogy Lindqvist has reconfigured his interests rather than simply moved on. The Skull Measurer’s Mistake (1995) was concerned with 22 19th-century figures who resisted ...”

“... Close to the end​ of Bruce Chatwin’s celebrated, cryptic, not completely reliable book In Patagonia, published in 1977, there is a short passage about a resident of what was then the remotest city in Chile, near South America’s cold and windy tip. In a book made up of terse, sometimes haunted fragments, this passage is the most unsettling by some distance ...”

“... the 1970s in particular, was a tendency to pursue dramatic foreign stories for their own sake. Bruce Chatwin’s journalism for the Sunday Times magazine during the same period, equally celebrated then and since, had a similar exotic-but-aimless quality, with stories seemingly sought out for little more than their strangeness and their locations. When ...”

“... training of a trout’, Sandhurst and West Point are not useful frames of reference. Reviewing Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill, John Updike singled out a particular detail as seeming to be ‘miraculously recovered’ from the past – the pink dimple left in the flesh of a man’s neck by the collar stud he has been wearing. ...”