Tuesday, June 29, 2021

SOLD More humorous travel writing from Eric Newby

 



SOLD

Good condition. Cover looks like it has been bent and straightened. PB. 288pp. $15 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Here, in this selection of the best of Eric Newby's published writings, we learn how to clean out a pigsty in a gale near Cape Horn; what it is like to row 1200 miles down the Ganges, or live behind German lines in occupied Italy; how to brave dress buyers in post-war Edinburgh and in the wilds of Mayfair; deal with terrifying conductresses on the Trans-Siberian Railway; and cycle round Ireland in what was optimistically described as summertime - it actually rained for five months.

'Eric Newby still holds the laurels as the country's wittiest travel writer . . . "A Merry Dance Around the World" is a collection of all the master's best traveller's tales extracted from a lifetime's travel writing. It is an astonishing catalogue of disasters and misunderstandings, but it had me laughing so uncontrollably my wife eventually forbade me from reading it in public' "Sunday Times"

'In the increasingly populous realm of travel writing, Eric Newby has acquired Homeric status . . . The extract from "Love and War in the Apennines," arguably one of the best travel books ever written, shows Eric Newby at his most scintillating, and the chapter from "A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush" includes the most luminous moment in modern travelling history' "Daily Telegraph"

'Whatever Eric Newby writes I read with uncritical pleasure. The Newby travels are classics of their time' "Financial Times"

'Keeping up with Eric Newby, every breathless puff and pant of it, is worth it all the way. His vitality, which was always more than most people's, gets bigger and his writing richer and funnier' " Observer"

'Newby is an incomparable, shrewd and witty travel writer . . . Immensely enjoyable' John Mortimer, "Mail on Sunday"

'Newby has quite rightly established himself as one of the sharpest, funniest and most boisterously entertaining of all travel writers' " Sunday Telegraph"

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