Travels with a Typewriter

'All writers of fiction should be required by law to go out and do a bit of reporting from time to time, just to remind them how different the real world in front of their eyes is from the invented world behind them'. This is what Frayn did in mid-career, when he took up his old trade, journalism, and wrote a series of occasional articles for the "Observer" about some of the places in the world that interested him. He wanted to describe 'not the extraordinary but the ordinary, the typical, the everyday' and his accounts became the starting-point for some of the novels and plays he wrote later. From a kibbutz in Israel to summer rains in Japan, bicycles in Cambridge to Notting Hill at the end of the 1950s, they are glimpses of a world which sometimes seems tantalisingly familar, sometimes vanished forever.

ISBN	0571240895	Pages	304
ISBN13	9780571240890 (What's this?)	Weight (grammes)	415
Publisher	Faber and Faber	Published in	London
Imprint	Faber and Faber	Height (mm)	223
Format	Hardback	Width (mm)	143
Publication date	03 Sep 2009	Spine width (mm)	25
DEWEY	910.4092	Academic level	General
DEWEY edition	DC22

		Introduction		1
		A Farewell to Money: Cuba, ten years on		17
		That First Taste of Abroad: Spring again, Paris again		50
		Anticlockwise is Best: Israel, inch by inch		60
		Capital of Nowhere: Summer in the gardens of Berlin		84
		Avalon Again: Cambridge revisited		108
		From Sea to Shining Sea: Chasing America		119
		The Music of Radishes: Japan at close quarters		156
		Wild West Eleven: On the frontier in Notting Hill		178
		House 47, Block 2, Entrance 5: In Moscow with Sofya		192
		A Pilgrimage to St Trop: Burnt offerings on the Cote d' Azur		203
		Warm Red Socks: Talking money in Sweden		212
		The End of the Dance: Forty years in a parallel England		231
		The Smiling Faces of Paradise: Forwards backwards in Vienna		241
		Rainbow over the Thames: South Bank 1951		252

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