Earlier this year, Kamal Abdel-Malek, Professor of Arabic Literature at the American University of Dubai, published America in an Arab Mirror, an anthology of Arab travel writing in the US during the past century that is at once unexpectedly illuminating and disquieting. OxTravels, a new anthology of writing co-edited by Rogerson, reveals a multicultural cast of 36 authors including Aminatta Forna, Oliver Bullough, Sonia Faleiro, Peter Godwin and Rory Stewart. "We could easily have added another three dozen, in a separate collection tomorrow, who would all be in the front rank," says Rogerson. The compulsively readable Dutchman Cees Nooteboom would surely be among them. Ongoing translation of hitherto inaccessible foreign writers such as the fabulously curious, effervescent 17th-century Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi, author of the ten-volume Seyahatname or Book of Travels, only confirms the universality of the genre.
For a final verdict from the man Jan Morris called a "transcendentally gifted writer", I travel to West London, where the two tribes of Holland Park and Shepherd's Bush collide. Thubron is the first travel writer president of the Royal Society of Literature, a tribute both to his virtuoso skills and, if this is not wishful thinking, the enduring significance of the genre. His latest book, To a Mountain in Tibet, was published earlier this year to a symphonic swoon from the critics. It thrust the reader into an enchanted world of sky-dancers and demons, landscapes of fearful majesty and "charged sanctity" that clung to Thubron's plangent prose. At the Tibetan border "the ebbing waves of the Himalaya hang the sky with spires while ahead the land smoothes into an ancient silence". Nearing the lung-shredding, wind-haunted summit of his holy pilgrimage, "the mountain valley closes unsoftened around our strange heterogeneous trickle of beasts and humans drawn up like iron filings to the pass."
Beyond the cool, book-lined sitting room, French windows open on to the blinding clatter of summer: shades of MacNeice's sunlight on the garden. At 72, Thubron sounds a confident note. Travel writing's long history of successful adaptation over many generations stands it in good stead, he says. "The genre is very flexible. It will always meld itself to what is there and available, which is abroad, and whether it's more familiar or less familiar, it's still going to need a voice to tell us about it. I do think the world has to be reinterpreted constantly, the impetus to explain it is just a human impulse. I don't think any other genre has that opportunity."
From Babylon to Ancient Greece, through the Middle Ages and into modern times, history suggests this: that for as long as the world continues to change and human nature remains the same, this curious international tribe will continue to go out and travel and write and tell stories that people want to read, fuelled by what Baudelaire called "la haine du domicile et la passion du voyage". As Robert Louis Stevenson put it, "The great affair is to move."
Paddy, of course, put it differently. One of his favourite sayings, which expressed his own creed as well as our preternatural need to travel, harks back to St Augustine. He personified it with élan: solvitur ambulando — it is solved by walking.
