Considerations of the lives and work of two great literary travellers, which first appeared in June 1989, were among pieces released this week from the archive of the Literary Review. Bruce Chatwin’s What Am I Doing Here is reviewed by Hilary Mantel, who says its author is “one of the practitioners who have enlarged, liberated and dignified the notion of travel writing”. The first volume of Norman Sherry’s “long” and “plodding” biography of Graham Greene, The Life — Graham Greene: Volume One – 1904-1939, is assessed by Paul Theroux, who reckons that Greene’s decision in 1935 to walk through the hinterland of Liberia was “crucial” to his development as a writer.
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