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 ...  Read the complete review

I read this book when i was a teenager and the furthest id ever been was a family holiday to Spain and i credit it with instilling in me a desire to travel and see the world. As most people who haven't been living under a rock for the past few years Bill Bryson is an incredibly successful travel writer and as well as this book he has written about his travels through the UK, Australia and America. I have only read this and the one where he goes to Australia which i found i just couldn't get into but i think that's because I've never been to Australia and the places he described so i had a hard time imagining whereas with this book even though i ...  Read the complete review

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 ...  Read the complete review

This is the second Bill Bryson title I’ve read, the first being ‘Notes From a Small Island’. A word about the author, for the uninitiated: he was born in the United States in 1951, lived in Yorkshire with his wife and children for some years, and then moved back to the USA. He’s also travelled much of the world, and left us a series of priceless books about his wanderings. ‘Neither Here Nor There’ is an account of his odyssey throughout much of Europe. The compulsive elements of his books in general (and this is no exception) are not just his powers of observation, but his style, and a ready ability to see the funny and the serious side of everything ...  Read the complete review

'Neither Here nor There' is one of Bill Bryson's earlier 'travel writing' books, which this time focuses on his trip around Europe in the early nineties, visiting many of the places he went to when he came here in his early twenties. Much of what follows is very similar to many of Bryson's other novels - he visits a city/country, makes some observations about the places or attractions on offer, often he makes witty observational comments on what's going on at the time there, and also he will occasionally make jokes at his own expense, which is even more funny. But one thing is for sure, lots of what he writes is very interesting (in ...  Read the complete review