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“... I am not a travel writer,’ Jonathan Raban said in a recent interview. ‘For me, “travel writer” means someone who samples other people’s holidays – you talk about the food, the hotel, throw in a bit of local colour. If I thought that was the business I was in, I’d slit my throat.’ Bad Land, Raban’s new book about Montana, examines the present remains and historical origins of the last great wave of American western settlement, the migration of homesteaders to eastern Montana in the first decade of this century ...”

“... When the hero of Jonathan Raban’s new novel is scolded for living in a world of his ‘own construction’, the implied rebuke falls flat: this, for Raban, is the whole point of America. Raban’s travel books present America as a ‘glittering fiction’, a country shaped by the ardent imaginings of its immigrant millions and by the universal reach of its popular fables – ‘the mythology of the western and the romance of the frontier ...”

“... Jonathan Raban’s first work of fiction, Foreign Land, was published in 1985; his second, Waxwings, in 2003; Surveillance is his third. A gap of almost twenty years, and then two novels in fairly rapid succession. In the meantime, he has written a number of works of non-fiction: of memoir, reportage and – for want of a better way of putting it – travel writing ...”

“... of the open road, Between the Woods and the Water is a lively, engaging book. On 1 April 1982, Jonathan Raban set out from Fowey Estuary in a 30-foot ketch, the Gosfield Maid, to sail round the British Isles. ‘I wanted to find out what, on earth or sea, made my peculiar country tick.’ His procedure was to deal with boat and sea for a while, call ...”

“... writing – the traveller going to an unexciting location and reporting on his lack of excitement; Jonathan Raban and Hugo Williams purvey this mode as well. Is it that old-style travellers chose their destinations better? Did they perhaps fake their enthusiasm? Or was the world simply fresher then? Today’s travellers may claim a greater truthfulness by ...”

“... Road to Oxiana (1937) or Paul Theroux’s Great Railway Bazaar (1975).’ For the Century edition, Jonathan Raban likewise sees a link with Theroux and Robert Byron (‘Byron comes close to plagiarism,’ he suggests) and he adds Evelyn Waugh’s Labels and Graham Greene’s Journey without Maps to the list of Eothen’s presumed descendants. It might be ...”

“... by authors who save their best efforts for quite different sorts of writing. They may, as Jonathan Raban’s title suggests, be working for love as well as money, and it is easy to understand their wish to give their best work in this kind a more permanent form. Raban has some engaging remarks on this ...”

“... parable. Last month, two novels appeared which suggest that this process may already be under way. Jonathan Raban’s Foreign Land and Black Marina by Emma Tennant are, from the formal standpoint, very different kinds of novel, but they share, quite strikingly, an un-English pre-occupation with the problem for the individual of belonging in the modern ...”

“... his Homer before he hoped that somebody would hang him, and the same wish may well have filled Mr Raban’s bosom: the subject is so enormous and it has been considered time out of mind from so many points of view – physical, metaphysical, oceanographical, navigational, as a place for battle, swimming, fishing, drowning, shipwreck – that the boldest mind ...”

“... a failure or a defeat. Some of the reasons may perhaps be glimpsed in what the novelist said to Jonathan Raban (the New Review, 1974): I believe that this charade-quality of society has been present since the 18th century. Ever since society has been so poised on the cataclysmic edges, there’s been a sense that people have been consciously doing ...”

“... they’d like to know. In his recent book of American peregrinations, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, Jonathan Raban fetches up amid the small, insular community of Guntersville, Alabama, where he meets a young motel-owner called Tim. Tim is writing a novel. Raban is consulted for a professional opinion of the work in ...”

“... Adult responsibilities are represented as almost unbelievably dull. In The Society of the Poem Jonathan Raban argued that a significant number of post-Movement poets accepted the daily rituals of the postwar world as nearly sufficient for the inner life: ‘The imprints of the same mass images, the same commuting time-schemes, the same communal hopes ...”

“... 18th century, and has recently enjoyed some popularity, not only in the work of writers such as Jonathan Raban and W.G. Sebald, but also in historical re-enactments such as Channel 4’s 1900 House and 1940s House, which have exposed their participants to the rigours of a previous age. BBC2 responded with The Trench, whose volunteers were subjected to ...”

“... V.S. Naipaul, who hated having to teach creative writing in Uganda but was still short of money. Jonathan Raban taught at Smith College in the early 1970s but loathed it. ‘Never again,’ he said, no matter the money. A number of writers, Anthony Thwaite among them, taught in Kuwait or the desert emirates and had stories of segregated classrooms and ...”

“... compared by Robert Nye to the poems written by Thomas Hardy after the death of his wife, and by Jonathan Raban to In Memoriam. The subject is a precarious one for poetry, and Dunn has not always succeeded in avoiding the pitfalls. Poems like ‘Dining’ and ‘Arrangements’ are dangerously direct; Dunn’s most literal style can hardly sustain such ...”