Paul Theroux · 1995 · mediterranean

Paul Theroux's eighteen-month circuit of the Mediterranean, from one Pillar of Hercules to the other. Fifteen miles separate Gibraltar from Ceuta; he went the long way round the entire shoreline, by bus, ferry, taxi, bicycle and cruise liner, through a Yugoslavia coming apart, a newly opened Albania and a Levant he could only partly enter.

1. 1
   Gibraltar

   He starts at the Rock among the apes and the tourists, whom he professes some difficulty telling apart - and sets off east along the Costa del Sol, appalled by what has been built on it since he last looked.

2. 2
   Alicante

   Up the Spanish coast by train and bus through the resorts, the package tourism and the empty interior behind it - and Theroux's habit of reading each country's own writers as he goes begins to shape the book.

3. 3
   Nice

   The French Riviera is the Grand Tour's old ground and he treats it accordingly - and then walks the paths of Corsica, which he likes considerably better than anywhere with a promenade.

4. 4
   Dubrovnik

   On the Adriatic he reaches a Croatia and Slovenia at war, with the shelling recent and the tourists gone - and finds, in the middle of it, the ordinary decency that his books usually claim not to expect.

5. 5
   Delphi

   Through Albania, just opened and bewildered by it, and into Greece - where at Delphi he is briefly and uncharacteristically impressed, and then goes back to complaining about the buses.

6. 6
   Istanbul

   Istanbul is the hinge of the whole book, and Turkey the country he warms to most - courteous, chaotic, chain-smoking, with terrible service and a genuine interest in strangers.

7. 7
   Damascus

   Bus travel through Syria and Jordan gives him the villages and the biblical landscape, and he is at his best here - unable to enter Lebanon, Libya or Algeria, and honest about the gaps that leaves in the circuit.

8. 8
   Alexandria

   In Egypt he seeks out Naguib Mahfouz, recently stabbed by an extremist and entirely unbowed by it - the kind of encounter Theroux travels for, and the passage most people remember.

9. 9
   Ceuta

   Along North Africa through Tunisia to Morocco and a long afternoon with Paul Bowles in Tangier - and then across to Ceuta, the other Pillar, fifteen miles and eighteen months from where he began.