Travellers' Century

Benedict Allen follows the travels of quintessential British amateur traveller Eric Newby. Born in suburban Hammersmith between the Wars, Newby was dismissed by his public school as 'not clever', and his life became a catalogue of challenges. As a teenager he went to sea to serve as a deck hand, sailing around Cape Horn. During the Great War he joined the Special Boat Squadron, where he was captured and escaped from an Italian POW camp during which time he met his wife of 60 years, Wanda. Newby itched to discover the world and, in the mid-1950s, abandoned an unhappy career in the rag trade to head off with diplomat Hugh Carless into remotest Afghanistan and climb Mir Samir. The journey was immortalised in A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. 50 years on, Benedict Allen finds this lost corner of Afghanistan little changed - and comes away full of admiration for the author. Newby failed to reach the summit, but for all his sardonic understatement and self-deprecation, he was just a hair's breadth away. And all with the aid of a map drawn on the back of an envelope.

Explorer, writer and broadcaster Benedict Allen retraces some of author Laurie Lee's journey across Spain in 1935, which became the basis for his celebrated travelogue As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. Lee thought of himself first and foremost as a poet, and the book reveals a poet's sensibility in its meticulous, distilled observations of the country and people he quickly came to love. Allen tries to find out whether Lee's evocative prose actually works as travel writing and Lee is revealed as an enigmatic, mercurial figure in the tradition of the wandering minstrel or troubadour, with a huge array of talents and an astonishing facility to charm.

Benedict Allen follows Patrick Leigh Fermor's epic 1931 quest across Europe as he traces the inns, haystacks and castles the young adventurer stayed in, as he foot-slogged his way through Holland, Germany, Hungary and Romania towards Byzantium. With his academic career punctuated by numerous school expulsions, the young Patrick Leigh Fermor put aside his troubles and set out across Europe to reach Constantinople in Turkey. It was the original backpacker journey, but also a quest in the romantic tradition of Lord Byron - that of the Man of Action and the intellectual combined. His two accounts of that journey, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and Water, are a masterly portrait of a Europe about to be swept aside by war, and also an insight into the brilliant, classically-educated mind of the author. It is in remotest Greece that Benedict Allen finally tracks down the great man himself to discuss the nature, purpose and future of travel writing.