There was more praise yesterday, in The Sunday Times, for Sara Wheeler’s Jan Morris: A Life (Faber, £25). “Brave, beautifully written and shrewdly researched, this is a riveting read by a writer at the top of her game,” said the historian and travel writer Justin Marozzi.
In the same paper, James McConnachie was impressed by Helena Attlee’s The Fire in the Mountain (Particular Books, £25), her “acutely observed” account of the Etna region of Sicily. While many travel and nature books these days were characterised by overwrought prose and over-present authorial personalities, this was “refreshingly different… travel writing of the quietly classical kind”.