Search Results

“... Why did you walk from Cajamara?’ Dervla Murphy is asked towards the end of Eight Feet in the Andes. ‘It is a long way and the roads are bad. It is possible to fly from Cajamara ... to Cuzco. It is not necessary to walk.’ The speaker has hit upon a truth about modern travellers. They are not tracing a route from the known to the unknown ...”

“... Dervla Murphy made her name as a writer who got on her bike and travelled bravely and alone through the less accessible parts of the non-European world. More recently, she stayed closer to her Irish home and investigated the religious and social divisions of Northern Ireland. In this book she turns her attention to the non-European populations of two British cities, Bradford and Birmingham, and there confronts the hazards and complexities of inner-city life with the same fortitude – sometimes amounting to pig-headedness – which carried her through Baltistan, Ethiopia and the further reaches of Nepal ...”

“... I should be reading In Siberia by Colin Thubron, or perhaps Muddling through in Madagascar by ...”

“... emotions which are too near and intimate to permit of general perusal’. According to Dervla Murphy’s preface, Henriette was a fervent royalist and the first thing she did on reaching the summit was to drink the health of the Comte de Paris in lemonade (other Alpine annalists confirm this). Of that ceremony, surprisingly, there is no ...”

“... firmly in the hands of English-speakers, and has remained so ever since. In South from the Limpopo Dervla Murphy records her surprise in the mid-Nineties at encountering Poor Whites, mostly Afrikaners, begging in the towns of South Africa’s four provinces. They were usually drunk or stoned, and unexpectedly numerous, ‘wandering around in rags, their ...”

“... delusion that cycling is hell is clearly not recent. In Full Tilt: Dunkirk to Delhi by Bicycle, Dervla Murphy lamented the general attitude to my conception of travelling, which I once took for granted as normal behaviour but which strikes most people as wild eccentricity, merely because it involves a certain amount of what is now regarded as hardship ...”