"Many of the greatest travel books of the late 20th century were about epic journeys, often by young men, conveying the raw intoxication of travel during a moment in life when time is endless, and deadlines and commitments are non-existent; when experience is all you hope to achieve and when the world is laid out...

"I am not sure I believe in national characters. I think it is nonsense to talk about the French being like this or the Italians like that. I agree that one of the flaws of the travel book is this assumption that there is a national stereotype. What I do like in the English travel...

"The question remains: does travel writing have a future? The tales of Marco Polo, or the explorations of “Bokhara Burnes” may have contained valuable empirical information impossible to harvest elsewhere, but is there really any point to the genre in the age of the internet, when you can instantly gather reliable knowledge about anywhere in...

"In the years after Edward Said's Orientalism , the exploration of the East -- its peoples, habits, customs and past -- by travelers from the West has become a target for scholarly bombardment. Travel writers have often come to be seen as outriders of colonialism, attempting to demonstrate the superiority of Western ways by 'imagining'...

"If 19th-century travel writing was principally about place -- about filling in the blanks of the map and describing remote places that few had seen -- the best 21st-century travel writing is almost always about people: exploring the extraordinary diversity that still exists in the world beneath the veneer of globalization." --William Dalrymple, from the...