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“... I have spent​ the greater part of my life, more than fifty years, doing what I am doing now, writing in ink on a lined white pad, hoping not to be interrupted, alone and grateful for my solitude. Weekends are a waiting period, most uninvited talk (the phone, repairmen, Jehovah’s Witnesses) drives me to distraction; national holidays are an annoyance, vacations – when I am unable to avoid them – make me impatient, unless I find a quiet place to read ...”

“... In London​ fifty years ago – the seedy 1970s – no writers I knew had money. This I found reassuring because I was so hard-up myself. My credit was so bad I didn’t qualify for a card and paid for everything with pound notes or bad cheques. No writers I’d heard of had money either – not real money. Big money entered the British book world some years later, an American intrusion that upended the business – indeed turned it from the break-even passion of tweedy, literature-loving, mostly older men (and Norah Smallwood) into an enterprise dominated by accountants ...”

“... Ihad​ planned to become a doctor – I imagined working in a hospital in a tropical country like Dr Schweitzer. I graduated in 1963, but being unable to afford medical school I joined the Peace Corps and worked as a teacher in the British Central African territory of Nyasaland, which became the Republic of Malawi six months after I arrived. Without much encouragement, I was writing all this time – poems, stories and journalism – and now and then publishing my things in American newspapers and in small magazines such as the Transatlantic Review in London, Black Orpheus in Nigeria, and Transition in Uganda ...”

“... don’t you go writing any more of them, Melvyn, until we’ve all had time to catch up.’ Even Paul Theroux’s most devoted readers might by now be puffing a bit and asking for time to catch up. After a fertile beginning (five books in the first seven or so years), Theroux has doubled his striking rate: since ...”

“... at a sitting. This was certainly not because of any previous obsession with either V.S. Naipaul or Paul Theroux. True, I regard Naipaul as one of the most enthralling writers of our time, even though the subjects he has covered – India, Africa, the putrefaction of the post-colonial world – are not ones which engage my interest or my imagination. It is ...”

“... Paul Theroux is the author of The Great Railway Bazaar and The Old Patagonian Express. He is better-known for these than for his nine novels. The novels are extraordinarily different from each other, and haven’t given a distinct image of Theroux as a novelist. He has set them in Kenya, Malawi, Singapore, London, Dorset, Cape Cod, and now in Honduras; and produced as many different kinds of novel ...”

“... Are you making a trip here to write a book?’ inquires the manager as Paul Theroux books into a hotel in Corsica, 136 pages into his latest travel narrative. ‘I don’t know,’ replies the author. ‘It was the truth,’ he adds as an aside. ‘It was too early in my Mediterranean journey for me to tell whether it might be a book ...”

“... to view it for what it is, instinctively reaching back instead to the things we think we know. As Paul Theroux remarks in Riding the Iron Rooster, ‘China exists so distinctly in people’s minds that it is hard to shake the fantasy loose and see the real China.’ Here, then, are four authors taking different routes to ‘the real China’, each ...”

“... tremendously boring trips, under the generic title Great Bus Journeys of the World. In this series Paul Theroux takes the London Transport Number 19 from his house down to the shops. Michael Frayn goes on a sight-seeing tour round Sheffield, and Michael Palin pays five quid to go to India on an old Leeds Corporation double-decker. And I, in a bus-ride ...”

“... from Nowhere seems to me to be that rarest of British things, engaged fiction. It is odd to find Paul Theroux writing an imaginary voyage. One’s first thought is that the author has run out of exotic countries to visit. Perhaps the Theroux passport has expired. Or perhaps he is simply tired of the road and has ...”

“... to which no one is ever invited. There is a mysterious sister.’ That isn’t quite the set-up in Paul Theroux’s very disconcerting new novel, Mother Land. There are two success stories among the seven surviving Justus siblings (one died in infancy), neither colossal, and operating in adjacent areas of cultural activity: the poet and literature ...”

“... I am assuming,’ Paul Fussell said in Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (1980), ‘that travel is now impossible and that tourism is all we have left.’ To be a traveller, you have to move about alone, eschew standard procedures, avoid the commonplace of maps, and hold yourself ready for adventure ...”

“... were to let us feel. But response is anaesthetically frozen by the Arctic objectivity of it all. Paul Theroux’s gaze is not quite as reptilian-cold as Wilson’s. But no one would call his eye genuinely benign. A collection of linked short stories, The London Embassy is a sequel to The Consul’s File. The ‘narrator’, teasingly anonymous, has been ...”

“... colleagues such as Burgess, Nabokov and Amis fils huddling together for warmth at the far end. Paul Theroux’s last novel, My Secret History, deployed a cool transparency of style to great effect in telling a story which appeared to be flagrantly autobiographical: that’s to say, its central character, ‘Andre Parent’, had lived in the same ...”

“... explanation for the prevalence of location work is provided, indirectly, by a character in Theroux’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’: He thought: All travellers are like aging women, now homely beauties; the strange land flirts, then jilts and makes a fool of the stranger. There is less risk, at home, in making a jackass of yourself: you know the rules ...”