Eothen: Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East

One of the most witty and idiosyncratic travel books, Eothen started out as a few notes scribbled on the back of a map for a friend, but took Kinglake seven years of painstaking work to finesse. The physical details of the journey, undertaken in 1834 through Turkey, Cyprus, the Holy Land, Cairo and Damascus, are barely mentioned. The infectious charm lies in the conversations, the whimsical chance encounters and the attitudes of the author.

Kinglake was writing to amuse but also to lampoon the pomposity of earnest travellers seeking to establish themselves as professional authorities. His literary assassination of the self-deluded expatriate Lady Hester Stanhope is ruthless. The influence of Eothen has been felt by generation upon generation of writers. Mark Twain, Peter Fleming, Eric Newby, Robert Byron, Paul Theroux and William Dalrymple have all saluted the book and recognised Kinglake as a stylist without equal.