Read Barnaby Rogerson on Ralph and Molly Izzard’s trek across the Lebanese mountains in 1957 with 4 children, 2 donkeys and Elias.
‘Ralph himself was one of three role models from which Ian Fleming created the fictional James Bond. If you have ever wondered what James Bond, having settled down with Miss Moneypenny, might have been like as a father, then you need look no further.’
Jan Morris described Ralph Izzard as ‘the beau ideal of the old-school foreign correspondent … not only brave and resourceful, but also gentlemanly, widely read, kind, a bit raffish, excellent to drink with, fun to travel with, handsome but louche, honourable but thoroughly disrespectful. He was old Fleet Street personified. Not only did everyone in the business know him, but they had also known his father, Percy Izzard, the Mail’s highly respected gardening correspondent who was the inspiration behind William Boot in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop.’
Such was the unusual stamp of the man who took his four young children off to walk the spine of the Lebanese mountains in 1957. Although his name is on the cover of Smelling the Breezes, it is mostly written by his wife. Smelling the Breezes was Molly’s first book and was published in 1959.
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Read MoreFor forty years (1982–2022) Eland has been publishing travel books, driven by a fascination with human society in all its forms and a desire to celebrate those differences. There’s an exhilarating variety of alternative ways of being, of different ways to think about the world around us and our position in it. And although we can’t all take off for years to settle in a foreign land, learn the language, embed ourselves in a community and observe its complex relationships, we do all know about the liberation of leaving home.
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Read MorePopular perceptions of Afghanistan have changed radically since the mid-1970s, when I lived there. Before the communist coup d’état of 1978, it was a relatively peaceful and obscure location, and during the following years of civil war Afghanistan remained inaccessible and remote. By the mid-1980s, when I had a draft manuscript of Three Women of Herat, I had a hard time convincing a publisher that sufficient people would be interested in reading about Afghan women. Now, by contrast, everyone has heard of Afghanistan as a site of ongoing conflict – a sinkhole into which vast sums of money have been poured and thousands of lives lost. Situated on the strategic crossroads of Central Asia, over and over again the real needs of this beleaguered country have been disregarded by self-interested neighbours, super-powers and Islamist groups such as al-Qaida and ISIS. Now and then ‘the plight of Afghan women’ resurfaces, but media images tend to stereotype Afghan women as downtrodden victims of abuse and violation – a simplistic message that does not reflect my own experience.
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Read MoreAn Englishman Serving at the Court of a Maharaah
The novelist E M Forster opens the door on life in a remote Maharajah’s court in the early twentieth century. Through letters home from his time working there as the Maharajah’s private secretary, he introduces us to a fourteenth-century political system where the young Maharajah of Devas, ‘certainly a genius and possibly a saint’, led a state centred on spiritual aspirations.
1 Jan. [1913]
So many delights that I snatch with difficulty a moment to describe them to you. Garlanded with jasmine and roses I await the carriage that takes us to the Indian Theatre, erected for the Xmas season outside the Old Palace. But to proceed.
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Read MoreUsually when I tell someone in Britain that I live in Jamaica they say the same thing: ‘Isn’t that terribly dangerous?’ If they look dull or annoying, I say ‘Yes, very. Chances of survival are frankly low. Don’t go. Try the Dordogne.’ But if they look interesting, I say to them, ‘Not at all, unless you go looking for trouble,’ and we agree that this is true of any country worth visiting.
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When I return to the UK, recently for shorter and shorter periods, I feel a lassitude settle on me. I don’t have to interact with the people and the environment at all times. The immigration officers aren’t flirting and laughing, no one dares dance in the street, and I am safely cocooned from anything that might harm me. I age too fast in Britain. Take me back to Jamaica.
Read MoreExperience Flows Away
A couple of days later, hot, dirty and exhausted, I arrived in the outskirts of Chiang Mai in the back of a song taow. The truck stopped at a traffic light. There was a band of small boys by the side of the road, holding a bucket of water. I saw them running towards the truck, but it was still something of a surprise when they emptied the entire contents of the bucket over me.
‘It’s the beginning of songkran,’ the driver called back. ‘You’d better get used to it.’
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Read MoreA personal reflection from former Peace Corps Volunteer, Mark D. Walker
Moritz Thomsen was an iconic author and figure to his devoted fan base, and before his death in 1991, he had written five extraordinary books. Although we are of different generations and never met, we shared some similar life experiences as Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs) involved with agricultural development work in Latin America. I would get to know the man through his books, and he would become my literary “patron saint.”
The village Thomsen lived and worked in as a PCV, Rio Verde, on the Esmeraldas River, is located on the northwest coast of Ecuador and the population is largely made up of descendants of enslaved people. This demographic continues to be one of the poorest, most isolated groups in the country, and Thomsen lived and worked among them for most of the last quarter century of his life. He also spent periods of time in Quito and Guayaquil, where he died in 1991.
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Read MoreI took my turn rowing up the Avon with two of the great travellers of my generation, Jeremy Seal and Rupert Smith. This river pilgrimage out from the city of Bath was also designed to be a floating Eland think tank, with book thoughts popping out at our bankside coffee brewing stops. To celebrate what turned out to be the only fine day in May, I wisely swam in the river, where the water was made lively below a loch gate. Some friendly swans joined the aquatic fuck-wits, (as we were affectionately nicknamed by one's wife), during the picnic.
7 May
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Read MoreIntroduced by Barnaby Rogerson
One of the finest British travel books of the twentieth century is Gavin Maxwell’s Lords of the Atlas. It is a book that inspired me as a teenager to travel, and later on to write about North Africa. I must have now read it half a dozen times, with its magic enhanced by each reading. In other books, Gavin Maxwell writes freely about his own life, his family and experiences, but in Lords of the Atlas he hardly appears in the text, the better to focus the narrative on the experience of the Moroccans. Aside from his own researches, Gavin Maxwell was clearly inspired by two travel writers, Walter Harris (especially Morocco that Was) and the three Moroccan books written by the Tharaud brothers.
Jérôme and Jean Tharaud were faithful and truthful observers, dependent on their own experiences which they relate with empathy, but also the sharp eye of actual observation. They were also French, so could not pretend to be innocent observers of the modernization of Morocco through colonial conquest, even when camouflaged as a ‘Protectorate’. However I think you will agree that the extraordinary veracity of their eyewitness accounts, preserves for us the true history of Morocco. We are grateful to Anthony Gladstone-Thompson for making the first ever translation of these books from their original French into a fresh, clear English which Eland is proud to publish.
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Read More‘… it’s unimaginable to me how anyone could not be familiar with Ireland’s greatest travelling icon, our courageous, eloquent, world wanderer, whose seminal works of travel literature over five decades and four continents count as one of Ireland’s greatest literary achievements.’ Manchan Magan, Irish Times
Dervla Murphy in her own words, extracted from a 2016 interview
What is your earliest travelling memory?
My earliest memory should have been – the Rhineland, 1939. Hitler blocked that by sending to Belsen the friend with whom we were to have stayed. So I first left Ireland in January 1948, at the age of 16, to cheer the boys in green at Twickenham. I forget who won. I’ve never forgotten the shock of seeing with my own eyes what bombing can do to a city ... I saw more of the same a year later on my first solo cycle tour of Germany.
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Read MoreExtracted from Barnaby Rogerson’s afterword to Eland’s new edition
Bengal Lancer was published in the summer of 1930 and proved a phenomenal success in both the British Isles and North America. Over 150,000 copies were sold and the London publisher, Victor Gollancz, sold foreign rights to Italy, Spain, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Rumania. The film rights were snapped up by Hollywood for fifteen thousand dollars and in January 1935 Paramount released The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, [starring Gary Cooper] which was saluted as one of the great adventure stories of cinema. Francis Yeats-Brown was able to admire the film on its own merits and was amused rather than outraged that it had so little to do with his book. But having read Bengal Lancer, you will understand how difficult it would be to create a film that would in any way be true to the text.
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Read MoreExtracted from Dervla Murphy’s afterword to Eland’s new edition of The Turkish Embassy Letters
The letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu have long been a favourite ‘quote-mine’ for historians, biographers, essayists and travel writers. Yet to most general readers she herself has never seemed more than an astringent commentator on the sidelines – almost a disembodied voice. In our own day, with its over-fondness for labels, she has been referred to as a ‘pioneer woman traveller and/or feminist’, though it is impossible to squeeze her into either category without distorting her personality. Any reader of her letters must think of her, primarily, as an individual: strong-willed, warm-hearted, keen-witted, high-spirited, often unpredictable, sometimes downright eccentric – a woman who rarely allowed her many disappointments and misfortunes to provoke recriminations or self-pity. She was at once stoical and imaginative, gullible and shrewd, childishly vain and touchingly humble, sincere and loyal in her affections but occasionally indiscriminate in her choice of friends. As the years taught her to value wisdom above knowledge, she became wryly self-mocking. And nowhere in her own writings – feline as she could be in her snap judgements – is there anything approaching the scurrility with which she was repeatedly tormented by Alexander Pope, Horace Walpole and their (often anonymous) hangers-on.
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Read More‘This book about Arthur Rimbaud’s years in Africa was first published nearly a quarter of a century ago. There have been some discoveries since then - two new photographs; a few fragments of reminiscence from those who knew him; some further information about the Abyssinian woman who lived with him in Harar and Aden. I have incorporated these findings in to this new edition. We learn a little more, but the story will always remain shadowy: he has covered his tracks too well.’ Preface to the Eland edition
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Read MoreEland exists to preserve stories about the diverse societies of our world. Most of them are written by outsiders, for there is an energy and an enthusiasm about being a traveller, knowing that you have only a limited time to catch hold of what you can, to question and record before you are forced to move on. Some have been written by people who were unwittingly thrown into another culture, and then decades later distilled their powerful memories into some sort of narrative order.
Last summer, seeking distraction from a history book I was writing, I decided to scribble down some stories about my own culture, focusing on my father’s family and peeling back through fourteen generations until I reached Tudor Norfolk. Covid lockdown had provided the theatre for some very lively debates with my two woke daughters around the supper table and it amused me to write something that could not be accused of cultural appropriation or Orientalism. It was inspired by living, oral culture, collecting together the various strands of stories told to me as a young boy by my great-aunt Eve, who was born in 1897. It’s something I would encourage any young apprentice travel writer to do – start at home. I was determined to be truthful, so that I would create a real sliver of English social and economic history. I also uncovered a cast of characters that by turns reminded me of Surtees anti-hero Jorrocks, of Dickens’ Pickwick as well as scenes that could have been taken from Thomas Hardy and a surprisingly close brush with Trollope’s The Way We Live Now.
Even as I wrote it, and added two hundred black and white photographs, I was aware that I had a readership that could be measured in dozens. But once I had started, I was infected by a sense of duty. Aunt Eve may have had a fondness for racing, gin, cigarettes and improper stories, but it was also clear that despite having no children of her own, she held her family together with her laughter and her delightful, amoral zest for life. So A Book Full of Rogersons feels like a debt from my youth that has finally been paid.
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Read MoreTaken from the biographical afterword
It is impossible to read Lucie Duff Gordon’s letters home to her family without falling a little in love with her poignant joy at life in the face of her imminent death and with her open-minded care for and curiosity about her Egyptian neighbours. It is clear that they, in their turn, both respected and admired her, taking her to themselves in the absence of her own family. What was it that bred such a natural nobility and sense of equality and service in her, when British colonial administrators of a very different stripe were already lining up to exploit the desperate poverty of the Egyptians while trumpeting their own superiority?
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Read MoreThroughout most of her long life, Sybille remained a keen traveller, almost constantly on the move, living in England, France, Italy, in her middle age writing many articles about her extensive journeys through Europe. Prone to anxiety, she never liked to travel alone, and was nearly always accompanied by one of a series of lovers with whom she lived over the years. While in New York Sybille had begun an affair with a woman almost fifteen years her senior, Esther Murphy, sister of Gerald Murphy, the close friend of Scott Fitzgerald. Tall, ungainly, very masculine in appearance, Esther was kind-hearted, clever and formidably well-read, given to talking for hours on end, drink and cigarette always to hand. With the war over, the two women spent hours poring over maps, examining the possibilities of South America, of Peru, Uruguay, Montevideo, all of which turned out to be far too expensive. So they settled on Mexico.
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Read MoreAT BABI’S
It’s Friday 10 pm. Dimitri, Elias and I have just met George, who’s come bustling up Acharnon Street from his Language School, and after the obligatory handshakes and kisses we head for the taverna on Filis Street. Taverna Ta Spata is painted over its green door – green for a taverna that cooks meat, blue for fish – but everyone knows it as Babi’s. Babi comes from a village near Sparta and tonight, as every night except Monday, he is open for business. 10 o’clock being early for Friday night habitues, the taverna is only half full and we therefore have several tables to choose between. I suggest one near the back wall, Dimitri then proposes one in the middle, Elias indicates his preference for one nearer the exit, and George, after a good deal of speculative consideration, finger under chin, eyes in a fine frenzy rolling, decides that we should sit at a table close to the barrels.
Ah, the barrels. There are four of them, racked up on sturdy shelf beams that run from the far end of the inner wall to the opening beyond where, in the kitchen, Babi’s mother and (sometimes) a cousin prepare and cook food which has, nearly all of it, come from Babi’s home village, where his family has lived for generations. The barrels are enormous: wide and deep enough, I think, to drown whole armies of Clarences, and they contain the best retsina in the world. It, too, comes from Babi’s native village, and because we are trusties, as soon as we arrive one or other of us is permitted to fill a copper jug from whichever barrel Babi gestures towards and to collect glasses from the high counter separating the kitchen area from the rest of the taverna. It may take some time before Babi is free to come to our table, but we are not required to wait for drink. And so we clink our filled glasses, bang them on the table, wish ourselves and everyone else good health, and take our first sips.
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Read MoreThis is the piece that Dervla Murphy wrote for OX-TRAVELS: Meetings with remarkable travel writers, published in 2011 by Profile Books, which contains three dozen stories of travel, the royalties of which were pledged to the coffers of Oxfam.
On a cold grey day at the end of March 1964, shortly after my return from India, I first met a Tibetan in Western surroundings – the foyer of a central London hotel. I had been working for some months in Dharamsala, then an overcrowded and under-funded refugee camp for Tibetan children, and that moving encounter with the Tibetan way of being made me feel slightly apprehensive about Lobsang. How would this young man, only five years out of Tibet and three months out of India, be reacting to our Western ways? But I needn’t have worried; by the time our refugee-related business had been concluded I knew that Lobsang was in no danger of being ‘tainted’ – he was simply adjusting to his new circumstances to the extent required by good manners.
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Read MoreThe great twelfth-century traveler Ibn al-Arabi defined the very origin of our human existence as movement. “Immobility can have no part in it,” wrote Ibn al-Arabi, “for if existence were immobile it would return to its source, which is the Void. That is why the voyaging never stops, in this world or in the hereafter.” With a malicious linguistic twist, Ibn al-Arabi confuses our endless movement through time, from cradle to grave, with a pragmatic movement through space. Certainly, even cloistered in one’s room for the whole of one’s life, one is condemned to travel through the years, hour after hour, each one wounding us, as a sundial motto has it, until the last one kills us. And yet, an opponent of Ibn al-Arabi might have argued movement from one point of this earth to another is merely a succession of moments of being still: our geography exists only in the instant in which we are there, standing on our own two feet.
This notion of travel as moving through space, but also being in one place at a time, is vividly exemplified in the travel books of Ronald Wright, Cut Stones and Crossroads and Time Among the Maya, and in the history told in Stolen Continents. For several decades now, he has diligently chronicled the ancient civilizations of Latin America, traveling through Peru and Mexico, and rooting himself in a succession of historical moments, visiting not only the present landscapes but also those long vanished, like the courageous Time Traveller imagined by H.G. Wells. Wright witnesses the past from the vantage point of the present and reports back to us.
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Read MoreBut I didn’t go – because there was another side to it: I was infatuated with the village. I loved the slow simplicity of the subsistence farmer’s life: how going to work meant growing food to eat; how everything was acted out against a backdrop of the landscape, the weather and the seasons. For all its hardships, life had a basic logic that we’ve long since lost in the West. I loved the absence of shops and advertising, the purity of children who’d never watched television, the great pleasure of eating different foods as they ripened with the seasons – the first wild greens and strawberries, a rare bowl of milk in summer – as opposed to our own processed and preserved permanent supplies. But most of all I loved the occasional feeling that we belonged, like the time I became mitini (ritual friend) with Jakali; and like the time we came back from Kathmandu with fishing hooks and lines, spices and photographs as presents, and were invited to house after house for celebratory meals.
*****
In the years since we left Talphi, Peter has been back three times. He tells me that Kalchu and Chola and the children have been pleased to see him and are as warm and generous as they ever were. He also tells me the news of the village; who has been married, who has had a child, whose son now has a government job in Jumla. I haven’t been back. For the time being, the memory is as much as my senses can process.
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