Guidebooks featured large in my listening and reading over the weekend. In A Point of View on Friday on Radio 4, the writer Sara Wheeler explained why she can’t throw away old ones. “Out-of-date guides,” she says, “offer valuable perspective on how people like us went about things ten years ago — or fifty, or a hundred. The past being a foreign country, in my battered volumes, pages stained with beverages of yore, I get to see how they did things differently there…”

In the Financial Times, Ludovic Hunter-Tilney marked the centenary of the longest-running guidebook currently published in the English language: the South American Handbook. In 1924, he says, “there was no such thing as a backpacker with coagulating clumps of dreadlocks clad in indigenous Andean clothing and a beret from Buenos Aires (er, guilty as charged). The [first] edition was aimed at commercial travellers in an era when Britain was a principal trading nation with South America, and Argentina had the largest population of British residents outside the empire or the US. One of them was my grandfather, a three-year-old boy living in Buenos Aires when the first Handbook appeared.”