Neither Here Nor There - Bill Bryson

One Sunday morning a few years ago, I came downstairs to the sound of tittering in the front room. On entering, I found my father sat in a chair with a copy of The Mail on Sunday's 'Night and Day' magazine, a smile on his face and chuckling at regular intervals. My father has emitted laughter easily enough at the cinema or watching TV, but I'd never seen him tickled so much by the written word so naturally I had just to find out what he was reading. His source of amusement was at the back of the magazine - an article written by the American traveller and journalist Bill Bryson. For about eighteen months in the late nineties Bryson wrote ...

This is a review of Neither Here nor There only; not of the dual volume with the Lost Continent, so please no comments about the Lost Continent being lost from this op.... It retails for £7.99, although you can now purchase it as mentioned in a double volume with the Lost Continent, another of Brysons works. Bill Bryson, a short, tubby bearded American hailing from Des Moines, has a penchant for travelling and has become world famous (and very rich, one suspects) as a result of documenting his many travels in a series of humorous travel books. The New Statesman refers to his books as 'the Animal House of the genre', and I have to agree - not for ...

In 1972, a young Bill Bryson came to Europe, and spent an enjoyable four months traipsing hither and thither across the continent, becoming thoroughly smitten with the countries he encountered. Such was his enjoyment, he came back the following summer accompanied by his high-school friend Stephen Katz (later to be seen in A Walk in the Woods), which he acknowledges was 'a serious mistake'. However, he managed to shut his mind to Katz's more tedious idiosyncracies, and had himself a jolly enough time nonetheless. Nearly twenty years later, he came back for a third visit; although he had been living in Europe for the majority of his adult life, he had rarely ...