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“... It is hard to read this book dispassionately. Its gathering of stories, portraits, travelogues and fragments embodies such a rush and depth of enthusiasm – the stuff of many lives lived in a single too-short one – that the reader grows haunted by regret for everything Bruce Chatwin would have written had he not died so early. The selection was made at his own request ...”

“... like to project themselves as illusionless figures, immune to prettifying, exoticising urges. Colin Thubron isn’t shy about not liking places: he often endures bouts of melancholy on his journeys and writes about the way ‘a little architectural charm, or a trick of the light, could turn other people’s poverty to a bearable snapshot’. But an ...”

“... vicariously. In China, however, Westerners can now travel more freely than the people themselves. Colin Thubron is a gifted and accomplished travel writer, whose book Among the Russians has been described as one of the best travel books written this century. To him the opening-up of China was ‘like discovering a new room in a house in which you’d ...”

“... to. I’m staying put this summer. If I’m to believe Auden I should be reading In Siberia by Colin Thubron, or perhaps Muddling through in Madagascar by Dervla ...”

“... Bai Xing, ‘Old Hundred Names’; the shortage of surnames bespeaks a passion for anonymity. When Colin Thubron began his recent travels, he feared that he might not make contact with the individual at all, and when Behind the Wall was published, he spoke of ‘the strange kind of delight’ the traveller feels when the Chinese behave in a way he can ...”

“... sufficiently establish itself. If Jennifer Potter’s heroine is technically a fallen woman, Colin Thubron’s hero has to do with falling in a physical and, more vaguely, metaphysical sense. Mark Swabey is in prison for a crime whose actual nature isn’t revealed until near the end of this terse tale, but which is connected with his passion for ...”

“... not finish that book. There’s no real explanation. But now Artemis Cooper, his biographer, and Colin Thubron have done it for him – or done as much as they could.* The Broken Road (they chose the title) is more or less the manuscript ‘Paddy’ left behind; it breaks off at Burgas, in Bulgaria, before he reached Istanbul. With it comes ‘the Green ...”

“... that travel writers on Central Asia – a list that would include the Etonians Robert Byron and Colin Thubron, the Marlburian Bruce Chatwin and the gentry Scot William Dalrymple – so often boast superior educations if not pedigrees. Aspects of Stewart’s response to Iraq show the influence of his earlier travels. His interest in the culture of the ...”

“... between owner and finder. It is a nice question how this stipulation would apply to my passport. Colin Thubron’s wonderful book In Siberia (1999) describes the author’s visit to a village on the river Yenisei in the far north inhabited largely by one of the native peoples of Siberia, the Entsy. It is a remote, brutal place where the only consolation ...”