It might at first appear an irony: the peak in anxieties about the end of travel coincides, almost exactly, with what has been described as the ‘renaissance of the travel book’ (see for example, Graves 2003). But this convergence in the late 1970s and 1980s is more likely an expression of a broad literary and cultural engagement with questions of travel in a world increasingly on the move, increasingly interconnected. The publication of Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia in 1977, alongside that of Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts, is often given as the literary historical moment in which travel writing was most conspicuously asserted and formally renewed (Hulme and Youngs 2002; Graves 2003; Borm 2007). The work of writers like Paul Theroux, Colin Thubron, Jonathan Raban, Robyn Davidson and Peter Matthiessen further demonstrated the vitality of the form. This reinvigoration of the travel book in Anglophone terms was prominently heralded in a 1984 edition of the influential literary magazine of new writing, Granta, which was dedicated to ‘Travel Writing’, and advertised as follows: