The true art of travel writing

History, people, self-deprecation - what makes a good travel book? Here's a look at a few of the essential ingredients

In September I visited Spain for the first time. Like so many others who go to some new country, I wanted to buy a book about it before I got there. And like many people I made a mistake.

After due diligence I bought the book on Spain by the late Raymond Carr, an Oxford don. It is an academic classic with a huge amount of information, written in the dry one-damned-thing-after-another mode of history writing. But it wasn’t a travel book by any stretch. I had planned to read it on the flight but soon got tired of it