In his new novel, Night of Fire, Colin Thubron writes of one of his characters, “Travel was his vice, his addiction, or else he was trying to escape something.” John Preston, in an interview published in The Daily Telegraph at the weekend, asked Thubron how true that was of himself. “Travel has always been a kind of addiction for me,” he answered, “but I’ve never thought of it as an escape… if anything, I think I’m confronting the world when I travel. For me, staying at home has much more to do with escape.”