AA Gill
Irreverent, irritable and irritating to some, Gill is best known as a columnist for the UK’s The Sunday Times who goes on assignment around the world. AA Gill is Away (2003) compiles 21 of his essays on destinations ranging from Ethiopia to Russia, and on activities as varied as making a porn film in the San Fernando Valley to covering the civil war in Sudan. He subsequently abused Brits in The Angry Island (2005) and put London’s eateries on the chopping board in Table Talk (2007), a collection of his controversial restaurant reviews in The Sunday Times, which have produced such bon mots as ‘fishy, liverfilled condoms’. 

Bill Bryson
Born in Iowa, United States, Bryson is technically not British, but by virtue of having lived in the UK for longer than he did in the States, he is very much a local. In 2005, he was appointed Chancellor of Durham University, a post formerly held by Sir Peter Ustinov, and in 2006, he received an Order of the British Empire for literary contribution. All this for a man with a flair for turning crisis into comedy, seen in travel books such as Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe (1991), Notes from a Small Island (1995), Down Under (2000) and Bill Bryson’s African Diary (2002). 

James Morris/Jan Morris
Before reaching his mid-thirties, Morris had already written descriptions of some 70 cities around the world, compiled as a collection of essays, Cities (1963). This astute postwar journalist and historian brought to life events in such places as Trieste (Italy), Pretoria (South Africa), and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). It was also during the ’60s that Morris underwent a pioneering sex-change operation in Morocco; she started publishing under the name Jan Morris after 1974, and adopted a softer tone. Her oeuvre is almost incomparable for a writer born in the 1920s – Morris has written more than 30 great travel-related books, and the last collection, Locations (1992), revisits the places she has been to, having run out of new countries to write about. She has announced her final book will be published posthumously. 

Peter Mayle
Moving from educational sex books to A Year in Provence (1989), Mayle became a travel writer famous for his forays into the bucolic world of southern France. Born in forward-looking Brighton, the advertising executive slipped easily into waxing lyrical about lavender fields and the Mediterranean sun for an eager and appreciative English audience looking for similar escapes from the rat race. With several more books under his belt, Mayle was awarded the Knight of the French Legion of Honour – the highest honour in France – in 2002. 

Pico Iyer
Oxford-born Iyer began his academic career with scholarships to Eton College, Oxford University and Harvard (also a good way to start travelling). After joining Time magazine, he became famous for his observations on Asia, notably in his fi rst eloquent, timeless travel book, Video Night in Kathmandu and Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East (1988). Becoming the voice of wry, postmodern tourism, Iyer chose Japan as his base for further adventures such as The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls and the Search for Home (2000), and his latest, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (2008), just out last month. JL