Can a book save one’s life? I used to think so when stationed in Mogadishu, avoiding thoughts of murder or suicide in that sunburnt madness only by immersing myself in Gerald Hanley’s Warriors (1971). Day after day I would throw myself on to my bed after another utterly fruitless, pointless day in the president’s office, and lie down, sweating beneath squadrons of flies and mosquitoes, and try to forget about it all.

George Orwell says somewhere that autobiography is to be trusted only when it reveals something dreadful. Almost any sort of life when viewed from the inside consists largely of a series of defeats.

I am probably one of the few persons to have been tipped by a taxi driver, instead of the normal reverse transaction being the case. It was a small matter, yet provided an unforgettable moment of illumination of a cultural and spiritual divide between the East, as represented by Burma, and the West.

Today Vesuvius erupted. It was the most majestic and terrible sight I have ever seen, or ever hope to see. The smoke from the crater slowly built up into a great bulging shape having all the appearance of solidity. It swelled and expanded so slowly that there was no sign of movement in the cloud which, by evening, must have risen thirty or forty feet into the sky, and measured many miles across . . .

On an early Monday evening in November Norman and Lesley made a rare trip to London together. The occasion was a birthday party at the Groucho Club for Martha Gellhorn, a few month younger than Norman. Both were now eighty-five. Lesley recalls that the dinner was "fascinating. Her coterie of young men [was there], John Simpson, Jon Snow, Nicholas Shakespeare, John Hatt. It was predominately a male occasion." Gellhorn had been asked, as had Norman, by the Daily Mail to write a piece about her best of all time travel book for its New Year's Day edition, and told him she had chosen Naples '44. 

'Empire' is undoubtedly the right technical term for a mass of sea-sundered territories ruled from a single centre. When I lived in Malaysia I was aware of Sumatra a few sea miles to the west; when I was in Brunei (which on Norman Lewis's map has, with Sabah, been swallowed by Sarawak) I was to the north of an unexplored mass of jungle that belonged to Indonesia.

THEY CHANGE THEIR SKY, not their soul,' as Horace said, 'who run across the sea.' The sad old Roman truth is not to be refuted. Escape is never more than partial. Nevertheless, at a minor geographical level small, reviving evasions can be planned. This one was to Spain, an unlikely bolthole, it might be supposed, in the era of the package deal; yet far from the Costas in the deep interior rich lodes of undisturbed hispanidad remain to he discovered . . . 

THEY CHANGE THEIR SKY, not their soul,' as Horace said, 'who run across the sea.' The sad old Roman truth is not to be refuted. Escape is never more than partial. Nevertheless, at a minor geographical level small, reviving evasions can be planned. This one was to Spain, an unlikely bolthole, it might be supposed, in the era of the package deal; yet far from the Costas in the deep interior rich lodes of undisturbed hispanidad remain to he discovered . . . 

I chose Farol on the Costa Brava and as it turned out spent three summer seasons there, studying and writing about the life of the people. Protected by an approach down something hardly better than a can track, followed by steep gradients and hairpin bends, and a final patch of swamp crossed by a swaying bridge, the village was perfect from my point of view . . .

A Dragon Apparent and Golden Earth established Norman Lewis as a writer of uncommonly well-written prose, who, as Cyril Connolly noted, had a remarkable gift for making even a lorry seem interesting. Both books, published in impressively short succession, were lavished with superlatives from the critics of the time . . .

For many of its practitioners, travel writing is entirely a romantic venture by which the writer imagines himself as the hero of his own account, tramping his way through uncharted sands like Lawrence of Arabia. A more modest writer might see things less conceitedly and make himself the fool instead; but surely only a truly self-effacing one could resist the temptation of making himself the central character in his own travel book . . .

There were seven jars attached to the framework in the centre of the room and as soon as the chief’s sons-in-law had arrived and hung up their cross-bows on the beam over the adventures of Dick Tracy, they were sent off with bamboo containers to the nearest ditch for water . . .

The writer Norman Lewis, who has died aged 95, once claimed to be the only person he knew who could walk into a room full of people, and leave it some time afterwards without anyone else realising that he had been there. That there was only limited truth in the assertion was unimportant; it says far more about his modesty that failing to attract attention was the only claim he pretended to . . .

This is a biography by someone who dislikes biography about someone who disliked exposure,' declares Julian Evans in his preface, adding that he wrote this book only to stop anyone else doing so . . .

Norman Lewis has spent a lifetime travelling the world and writing about it. In conversation with Michael Parkinson, he recalls his curious upbringing in Wales with three maiden aunts, his travels in Cuba where he met Ernest Hemingway, and his love of Naples which led to his writing two books on the Mafia. He also chooses the eight records he would take to the mythical island . . .