Kingdom by the Sea (Essential Modern Classics) (Collins Modern Classics)

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Like those gulls who soar on summer thermals and then find they cannot get down to earth again, but must wait till the sun sets, and the land cools, and the terrible strength of the upward thermal releases them to land exhausted. After eleven years living as an American in London, Paul Theroux set out to travel clockwise round the coast and find out what Britain and the British are really like. And the sandwiches put him one meal away from worry; today, he would not have to think about food, with that huge breakfast inside him that made even burping a pleasure, for it brought back the tastes of porridge and bacon and egg and marmalade. British author Westall wrote The Machine Gunners and other prize novels for young readers that appeal equally to adults. His novels include The Lower River and The Mosquito Coast, and his renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and Dark Star Safari.

However, he's amongst the best for idiosyncratic, personal, impressionistic relation, and the miserable old git persona very well suited indeed to the time and place he describes in The Kingdom by the Sea.As a result, the book is full of observations on the English, the Scot, the Welsh, and the northern Irish. So I had done the right thing in traveling the coast, and instead of looking out to sea, I had looked inland.

This is a bleak and flawed landscape, filled with people we fear, people we pity, people we would likely avoid. Paul Theroux's round-Britain travelogue is funny, perceptive and 'best avoided by patriots with high blood pressure. He describes how the driver stops frequently to deliver items like milk and newspapers to isolated houses. Vicarages, silver sixpences, ``the banked sleekness of chestnuts'' and good-hearted ghosts are among the trimmings that give these posthumously collected stories their old-fashioned charm.

Paul Theroux lebt schon elf Jahre in London als er erkennt, dass er nicht viel von Großbritannien und den Briten kennt, zumindest nicht aus erster Hand. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Two brilliant points of white, lighting up a black landscape of greenhouse, sweet-pea trellises and cucumber-frames. The Kingdom by the Sea is now, of course, a period piece, and Theroux natural talent for misery and depressiveness is ideally suited to depicting the Kingdom of 1982, the time of the Falklands War, the gloomy hardships of Thatcherite depression with huge unemployment, empty hotels and closed factories, the destruction of industry, the Northern Irish 'troubles' in full bloom, the looming end of the railway network.

The use of language is often impressive and thought-provoking but language is like a picture frame - no matter how wonderful, it can not mask a weak painting - in fact it seems to accentuate the failings of the picture. Then there were a couple of parts that crossed quite far into uncomfortable and combined with the jarring, perplexing ending, took this from great to "it's ok" for me. The reality of war is the chill current that runs through the five stories in Westall's latest collection.But as he and his dog companion journey along the northern English coast, there is never enough distance between them and the terrible war.

It’s a sustained joke with a huge amount of truth to it, and one of the most memorable and funniest passages of travel writing that I know.

And for those bored of travelling the most travelled and described bit of Europe, Daniel Kalder's Lost Cosmonaut provides a wonderful account of the bits you wouldn't even think were there. north to union with Ireland by their horror of traditional Roman Catholic doctrine on contraception. Joining eccentric Joseph Keilty by the sea, Harry learns to scavenge along the beach and makes friends with some nearby soldiers, until once more he is driven on alone. The garden, every detail of it, the bird-bath and the concrete rabbit, flashed black, white, black, white, black. He is travelling at the time of the Falkland’s War (‘this Falkland’s business’ as the people he meets are wont to say).