Travel in hope

An agreeable hotchpotch, Alan Sillitoe’s Leading the Blind (Macmillan, £15.99, ISBN 0 333 64225 2) is based on guidebooks published before 1914. It’s like watching a quick-fire show of lantern slides: here are the “sublime horrors” of Swiss mountains, dirty frescoes in Pompeii, bandits in Greece and the explorer Richard Burton riding on a crocodile. Delightful, but dip, don’t trudge.