Bruce Chatwin – The Songlines Introduction, by Nicholas Shakespeare “And what makes you think you can show up from Merrie Old England and clean up on sacred knowledge?” One autumn evening in 1983, Bruce Chatwin, then aged 43, joined Jorge Luis Borges and Mario Vargas Llosa for a [...]

W. Somerset Maugham – Collected Stories Introduction, by Nicholas Shakespeare When you come down to brass tacks the value of a work of art depends on the artist’s personality. W. Somerset Maugham. Towards the end of his life, the most widely read English writer since Dickens, and the [...]

Bruce Chatwin – In Patagonia Introduction, by Nicholas Shakespeare In December 1974, the 34 year-old Bruce Chatwin departed Buenos Aires on the night bus south, beginning a journey that would transform a truant journalist to one of the most stylish and original travel-writers of the late twentieth-century. That [...]

Evelyn Waugh – Collected Travel Writing An introduction to Evelyn Waugh’s travel books As soon as I set out on my own, things began to go slightly against me, Ninety-Two Days In January 1932, Evelyn Waugh’s American publisher, John Farrar, wrote to a friend: “One very important literateur [...]

William Faulkner Introduction by Nicholas Shakespeare “The South,” said Shreve. “The South. Jesus.” I remember Oxford, Mississippi, as a small, prim town of white-painted metal bedsteads and on the lawns the brass of fallen leaves. There was a fine bookshop in the square and a university. Otherwise, the [...]

Gabriel Garcia Marquez by Gabriel García Márquez “There is a great deal that is interesting in cholera.” Chekhov One seventh of July at six in the afternoon, a woman of seventy-two and man of seventy-eight ascend a gangplank to begin one of the greatest adventures in modern fiction. [...]

Graham Greene A talk at the Berkhamsted Festival, 30/9/2013 I want to begin by holding up one of my dearest possessions, which has hung for the past 25 years on a wall opposite my desk. It’s a framed telegram – from the days when we had telegrams [...]