A merry dance around the world

'Eric Newby still holds the laurels as the country's wittiest travel writer . . . A Merry Dance Around the World is a collection of all the master's best traveller's tales extracted from a lifetime's travel writing. It is an astonishing catalogue of disasters and misunderstandings, but it had me laughing so uncontrollably my wife eventually forbade me from reading it in public' Sunday Times 'In the increasingly populous realm of travel writing, Eric Newby has acquired Homeric status . . . The extract from Love and War in the Apennines , arguably one of the best travel books ever written, shows Eric Newby at his most scintillating, and the chapter from A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush includes the most luminous moment in modern travelling history' Daily Telegraph 'Whatever Eric Newby writes I read with uncritical pleasure. The Newby travels are classics of their time' Financial Times 'Keeping up with Eric Newby, every breathless puff and pant of it, is worth it all the way. His vitality, which was always more than most people's, gets bigger and his writing richer and funnier' Observer 'Newby is an incomparable, shrewd and witty travel writer . . . Immensely enjoyable' John Mortimer, Mail on Sunday 'Newby has quite rightly established himself as one of the sharpest, funniest and most boisterously entertaining of all travel writers' Sunday Telegraph