More Tales from the Travellers

Behind its discreet if imposing facade in London's Pall Mall, the Travellers Club has long been known to the wits of nearby Whitehall as the Foreign Office canteen. And suspected by some to be a meeting-place of MI5. Or is it MI6? This quintessential English gentleman's club counts however amongst its twelve hundred-odd members not only foreign officers accredited or covert but also statesmen, businessmen, newsmen and explorers, lawyers, judges, academics and clerics, archeologists and art experts, soldiers, sailors, authors, accountants, bankers, doctors and a dental surgeon. And, as this collection shows, many part-time men of letters. Their tales cover every continent - from the Arctic to Antarctica; from Australia, Arabia and America to Oxford and Savile Row; the Far East and the Middle East, Eastern Europe, East Africa and the East End; atop Everest or Etna and (frequently) under arrest. Former ambassadors, consuls and foreign correspondents provide behind-the-scenes insights into some of the twentieth century's most memorable events. Its personalities are the subject of tales by Club members with enviable, top-level access. From Beijing to Barking the authors' adventures are multifarious - and often hilarious. There is here, as one contributor writes, high-life, low-life and no-life. Banquets contrast with the bleakness of life under Communism, the boredom of post-colonial Aden. Romance glows in highly unromantic places. Travellers are trussed like chickens and tossed into trains; command armies, record Maria Callas and edit Evelyn Waugh; encounter gunmen in Moscow and guerillas in Dhofar, risque security risks, recalcitrant vehicles and implacable officialdom . . . From Patrick Leigh Fermor's evocations of antiquity to a near-assassination in Iraq, More Tales from the Travellers is a celebration of that very British being, a gentleman abroad. This collection is a sequel to Travellers' Tales which was published in 1999.