Over at the NYTimes arts blog, Peter Whitfield discusses his new broad history of travel literature, which 'ranges from the travel stories of the Bible and the ancient Greeks to 20th-century wanderers like Patrick Leigh Fermor and Bruce Chatwin':

'It’s often said that since we can all travel anywhere, what’s the point of travel writing? But I think that in a world where so much is phony, we need to find the genuine, and this is what the travel writer is for now: to show us what’s under the surface; to warn us what tourism does to us and to the places we visit.'

Find more here.