There was another enthusiastic review in the FT at the weekend of Rob Cowen’s latest book, in which he sees the A1 between London and Edinburgh as “a timeline running through the land”. The North Road, Jerry Brotton writes, “is many books in one, and a triumph in all its facets: a journey undertaken; an embodied metaphor of a road well-travelled; a painfully honest memoir of resilience and survival; and a moving account of the powerful legacy and overwhelming wonder of the family.”

In the Times Literary Supplement, Pablo Scheffer says Ben Coates’s The Invention of Amsterdam is “an affectionate portrait” and a sympathetic introduction to the city. Also in the TLS, Guy Shrubsole reviews Born of Fire and Rain by ML Herring, “a dazzling journey through the dripping, moss-clad rainforests of the Pacific Northwest of America”, but one, he says, that lacks bite in practical advice on how to save the trees from destruction.

Sir Michael Palin’s account of his recent trip to Venezuela, where he has been making a new series for Channel 5/ITN, will be published by Hutchinson Heinemann in September, according to The Bookseller. Nigel Wilcockson, who acquired rights to the book, says: “Michael’s boundless sense of curiosity, warm sympathy and sharp eye make him the perfect travel companion to a country about which we hear so much but know so little.”