A real gem of a book this. Jan Morris works on those chance encounters and experiences that all of us when we travel. But with her keen eye, life of travel and journalistic experience she transforms these into something very special indeed.

Since the Second World War the English speaking world has produced some wonderful travel writers. Think of ramblings of Eric Newby, the dazzling story telling of Bruce Chatwin, the detailed solitude of Colin Thubron or the grumy and grouchy Paul Theroux. All of these are great writers but in my view there is no better than Jan Morris.

Morris published her ‘last book’, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, in 2002. In reality this was the last book produced after a stint of dedicated travel. After this she retired back to her home in Snowdonia from where she continues to write books that draw on a lifetime’s experience of travel.

‘Contact’ sets out to redress the balance of her writing. In her introduction Morris tells us that she has often not given us enough about the people she has met on her travels, not just the famous and infamous but the ordinary folks that she has met along the way.

The book is a set of small but beautiful vignettes. Many are just a paragraph long and non is longer than one page. More often than not the encounters are similar to those that we have had ourselves — the touching, or the quirky that stay in the memory for life and some ways determine our memory of the trip. A few are more privileged, the result a career of journalism that has reached into almost every corner of the world. But when she talks here about, say, a President or the powerful and most influential it’s not the record that is recorded here but the often irreverent and whimsical that stays with us. And, of course, this is often most revealing.

There are encounters with children, folks living on the street, the poor and homeless, taxi drivers and hotel staff, Nepalese hill women and folks who’ve just trotted past her tent as it sits in its wild camping spot. But we also have some of the movers and shapers of our modern world, John Kennedy, Harry Truman, Yves San Laurent and Peter O’Toole amongst many.

Some of these stories are wonderfully humorous and other poignant and thoughtful. Morris’ approaches is always warm and human and sometime wonderfully racy and saucy.

This is a book you can dip into whenever you want to sample its delights, or one which is short enough to devour in one sitting. As soon as I finished the last line of the last moving poem, I found myself opening the book and starting again. It was just as delightful as first time around. How often can you say that?

At the moment this is available as a hardback but as a soft back price. I’d buy it in this form for this is one book that you’ll come back to over and over again.

You can read some excerpts of this book on Amazon: