Paul Theroux · 1983 · road

Paul Theroux's account of travelling round the entire coast of Britain in 1982, mostly by branch line and on foot, during the Falklands War. Having lived in London for a decade he decided to see the country by going round its edge - through the seaside towns, the caravan parks and the failing resorts, and being fairly unsparing about all of it.

1. 1
   London

   Theroux sets out to travel the whole coastline of Britain in a clockwise circuit, on the theory that the edge of a country tells you more about it than the middle - and that the British are at their most characteristic on holiday.

2. 2
   Margate

   The Kent resorts are the first stretch, and set the register for the book: boarded-up amusements, boarding houses, and a cheerful national resignation that Theroux records with an outsider's precision and no great warmth.

3. 3
   Land's End

   Along the south coast to Cornwall and the end of England, through a summer of the Falklands War being followed on hotel televisions - which gives the whole journey a background of a country arguing about what it still is.

4. 4
   Aberystwyth

   Up the Welsh coast by the little railways, through mining valleys turned toward the sea and towns whose reason for existing has quietly gone - and the language changing around him as he goes north.

5. 5
   Cape Wrath

   The far north-west corner is the emptiest place in the book and the one he likes best - a headland with a lighthouse, a bombing range and almost nobody, reached by a ferry and a minibus.

6. 6
   Aberdeen

   Down the east coast through the oil boom at Aberdeen and the fishing towns beyond it, and back toward London - having gone right round an island he had lived on for years without seeing.