"Why do people travel? Is it only, as Philip Larkin suggested, 'a deliberate step backwards' in order to create a new objective, namely homecoming?" - Christopher Galtenberg

"Despite its promotion into the serious league of literature, travel writing has remained something like the opera of letters: inherently bourgeois, faintly redolent of its imperialist past. The traveler here is emphatically not a tourist; he (usually not she) is a connoisseur of place whose aesthetic is other people’s lives. Contemporary travel writing still has the occasional reek of leather armchairs and gin, of old colonial maps." - Christopher Galtenberg