The Kingdom by the Sea

"This was his journey around Britain in 1982, with the Falklands war as a backdrop. He travelled around the British coast, taking trains to seaside towns. The Kingdom by the Sea is a lovely title for a book. He brought his American view to the most British part of Britain – the seaside resort. There is one wonderful riff in it, after his brain had been sufficiently addled by travel, where in two pages he creates a composite seaside resort. It’s a sustained joke with a huge amount of truth to it, and one of the most memorable and funniest passages of travel writing that I know. He was an enormously fresh writer at that stage, and had a wonderfully unflinching eye. There are two other travel authors who share that quality in particular. One is Geoffrey Moorhouse, my old mentor, who had an unfailing honesty to him – he was an absolutely trustworthy guide. The other is Bill Bryson , who is a captivating writer but he’s there primarily for the jokes rather than the insights. I think Theroux is somewhere between the two. He was also immensely prolific. I read The Great Railway Bazaar when I was 25, on my first long distance travel trip. I was in Africa and he was writing about Asia, but it had an enormous influence on me as the kind of book that I would one day like to write. Yes, and in fact The Great Railway Bazaar was the seed that became Eleven Minutes Late ."