John Hatt’s Eland was the first of a wave of travel lists that emerged in the early 1980s, quickly joined by Century Travellers, the Penguin Classic Travel Library, Picador and Virago. It can never define exactly what it’s looking for in a book until it stumbles across it, but it needs to be observant of others, capable of summing up the spirit of a place and catching the moment on the wing … as well as being funny, wry, intelligent, humane, tragic, lyrical, universal, self-deprecating and idiosyncratic. And the whole book must be held together by a page-turning gift for story telling.
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John Hatt’s Eland was the first of a wave of travel lists that emerged in the early 1980s, quickly joined by Century Travellers, the Penguin Classic Travel Library, Picador and Virago. It can never define exactly what it’s looking for in a book until it stumbles across it, but it needs to be observant of others, capable of summing up the spirit of a place and catching the moment on the wing … as well as being funny, wry, intelligent, humane, tragic, lyrical, universal, self-deprecating and idiosyncratic. And the whole book must be held together by a page-turning gift for story telling. 
