Bruce Chatwin, the literary golden boy, was a born liar. At Sotheby's, where he was a youthful director, the expression "doing a Bruce" meant to fabricate an exotic provenance for a painting. Chatwin could make the wildest nonsense about himself credible, claiming he was the rosy cherub on the Glaxo baby food tins.

Bruce Chatwin by Nicholas Shakespeare
591pp, Harvill/Cape, £20

Bruce Chatwin, the literary golden boy, was a born liar. At Sotheby's, where he was a youthful director, the expression "doing a Bruce" meant to fabricate an exotic provenance for a painting. Chatwin could make the wildest nonsense about himself credible, claiming he was the rosy cherub on the Glaxo baby food tins.

Rarely has a British writer so elaborated his own legend. Chatwin liked to claim both a Romany and a refugee Huguenot pedigree for his grandmother. His American wife, the long-suffering Elizabeth, was fancifully descended from a New Orleans octoroon. In his last years Chatwin spread the rumour of his fatal bone-marrow disease; the cause, apparently, was a dubious slice of raw Cantonese whale. Or was it a rotten 1,000-year-old Chinese egg? Only close friends knew he had Aids. A virtuoso of mendacity, the author died in 1989 at the age of 48.

Chatwin was a marvellous writer but not always a great one. In some ways his life was his finest creation. "I once made the experiment of counting up the lies in the book I wrote about Patagonia", Chatwin confessed, adding impishly; "It wasn't in fact, too bad". His arresting appearance encouraged the mystique of a beautiful, footloose tramper. Chatwin was not especially interesting to look at (the photographer Eve Arnold said he was too boyish for real elegance or style) but many were drawn swooningly to him. And Chatwin used his periwinkle-blue eyes to seduce men as well as women.

Nicholas Shakespeare's diligent biography, Bruce Chatwin, has been eight years in the making and provides a fascinating account of the man behind the myth. Born in Sheffield in 1940, and reared in Birmingham, Chatwin was guarded about his suburban roots and his solicitor father.

The writer's progress from the West Midlands to Sotheby's Impressionist department is the Balzacian tale of a provincial boy made good. Chatwin's dandified persona first emerged at Marlborough public school, where he crooned Noël Coward lyrics and excelled as Mrs Candour in Sheridan's play School For Scandal. ("She swayed and sailed magnificently across the stage," enthused the Wiltshire Advertiser.) The schoolboy Chatwin was keen on flower-arranging, too, and won a Royal Leamington Spa Horticultural Society prize for a bowl of foliage "arranged for effect".

Nicholas Shakespeare might have anticipated in those flower displays Chatwin's own finely arranged prose. Chatwin was drawn to the glittering brilliance of Fabergé eggs and his writing has something of their bejewelled quality. His novel of Dahomeian derring-do, The Viceroy of Ouidah, was a rococo piece of candyfloss. Other Chatwin books have something of the auctioneer's flourish about them.

The English are by temperament mistrustful of reportage that reeks of craft and factual manipulation, and they have not always warmed to Chatwin. Hunter Davies objected to Chatwin's "big poncey foreign spreads" for the Sunday Times magazine (needless to say those pieces, collected in the volume What Am I Doing Here, are brilliant).

Paul Theroux enviously demoted Chatwin to "an embellisher of fact". If fact blurs into fiction in Chatwin's travel, however, it does so in the time-honoured manner of the louche antiquarian and writer Norman Douglas, who insisted: "Truth blends very nicely with untruth, my dear". Chatwin's legendary account of his involvement in a Benin coup is outrageous campery (as if Noel Coward had become a war correspondent), but it's the telling of the tale that counts. His great hosanna to nomadic culture, The Songlines, is really a series of non-fiction stories.

Chatwin's marriage to Elizabeth Chanler (apparently celibate) is explored with delicacy. A Catholic, Elizabeth remained devoted in spite of her husband's appalling behaviour and provocations. Chatwin's vanity, petulance, occasional cruelty and selfishness are unflinchingly documented here (in 23 years of marriage he never once did the washing up).

Ultimately, though, a picture emerges of an enigma who was on the run from both his homosexuality and his Englishness. Chatwin felt his British voice overlaid his personality "like a layer of slime", and looked abroad for inspiration. He had to keep moving. And he believed in the sacramental aspect of walking. Yet no one was such a delightful mimic or raconteur. "He was so colossally funny," Salman Rushdie said of Chatwin, "you'd be on the floor with pain."

This excellent if occasionally baggy biography is very far removed from Chatwin's own anecdotal concision. However, it is fantastically difficult to fashion a narrative out of the inchoate facts of someone's life. Shakespeare has managed to pull it off.

Bruce Chatwin
Nicholas Shakespeare
Vintage £7.99, pp593
Buy it at BOL

Nicholas Shakespeare's masterly biography of Bruce Chatwin charts the writer's celebrated wanderings - Patagonia, West Africa, Australia, Greece - alongside the fraught journey of his personal life. Garnering anecdotes from Chatwin's friends, including Salman Rushdie, Colin Thubron, Paul Theroux and Werner Herzog, as well as the notebooks and letters given to him by Chatwin's widow Elizabeth, Shakespeare builds a portrait of a man at once magnetic, difficult, brilliant, arrogant and troubled. 'Say almost anything of Bruce Chatwin and the opposite is also true,' Shakespeare asserts, neatly deflecting what might be the one quibble with his book - that the sheer volume of material prevents a crisper picture of the subject emerging.

Chatwin was born in 1940 to a middle-class family. While working at Sotheby's he met Elizabeth Chanler, whom he married in 1965 and remained married to until his death from Aids in 1989. His homosexual affairs continued, with Elizabeth's knowledge, throughout his marriage.

By a bizarre twist of fate, Chatwin's memorial service was held in Santa Sophia, Bayswater (he had converted to the Greek Orthodox Church) on the day the fatwa was announced on Rushdie. Halfway through the service, Paul Theroux leaned over and whispered: 'Well, Salman, I guess we'll be here for you next week.' By the end of the service, the world's press was clustered outside the church, the kind of irony you feel Chatwin might have appreciated.

The greatest success of this biography is that it kindles a desire to return to Chatwin's books, while illuminating those parts of his nomadic, unorthodox life that remained hidden to all but his closest friends.

Bruce Chatwin made his name as a hugely talented writer but, as his widow Elizabeth tells Stuart Jeffries, he was also a prolific photographer.

Bruce Chatwin was a best-selling author, travel writer, art collector, journalist, a married man and an active homosexual. Only after Chatwin's death from Aids in 1989, though, did it become clear that he was also a prolific photographer, with a collection of more than 3,000 images built up during his restless travelling.

In 1966, he told his bosses at Sotheby's that he would no longer be their connoisseur of impressionist art because appraising paintings had made him temporarily blind. He needed, he told them, to view distant horizons to help him see again, so went to the Sudan to live with nomadic tribes. Photography helped him to see again, and to use his painterly sensibility to create pictures. "The amazing thing was that you rarely saw him take a photograph," recalls Elizabeth Chatwin, his wife in a difficult marriage that lasted from 1965 until his death. "He was very quiet about it. He would whip out his Leica - which was the only camera he had - quickly take the picture, slip the camera into his pocket and walk on.

"I was the one who brought the film out to some remote place. I would join him somewhere where there wasn't film or there wasn't money or something and I would collect all these exposed films. They were developed way later. He didn't really look after them or put them in order. I did that."

Chatwin was more meticulous when he wrote. "Bruce was always cutting and cutting his writing. He always read out aloud to see if it read all right. It makes his stories awfully easy to read but awfully hard to write. The photographs were much less apparently considered."

She reckons that of the 3,000, "there are probably 200 which are terrific and another 1,200 which are OK and a lot of duds and there's no point keeping them". The colour photographs were shot on ASA 64-slide film.

Fifty prints, many of which have never been exhibited, go on show at the National Theatre in London later this month. Which is his widow's favourite? "I guess the one of the stupa [Buddhist monument] with the flags, outside Katmandu in Nepal. I went there with Bruce and I try to go back there regularly. Look at the bronze and copper tiles on the tower. The tower represents the connection to heaven and below is the round dome which represents the earth. We're looking up to heaven. He had a great eye - which isn't surprising for someone who was an expert on painting. In fact he often said he wanted to give up writing to become a painter.

"He never took happy snaps," says Elizabeth, who met her husband at Sotheby's, where she was a secretary. "He never thought of using the camera for recording domestic events. He never took pictures of friends or me. He'd take a picture of a flower, but never of me, not that I particularly wanted him to."

Chatwin took photographs of buildings, walls, planks, fabric, in remote parts of Mauritania, Greece, Nepal, Mali. "Even when he took a photograph of a group of west African tribal people, what interested him was the beauty of their robes. You see that picture?" she asks of a photograph of some Tuareg nomads taken in west Africa. "He's covering his face [with his hand] for the same reason that the Tuareg men, and not women, often wear veils that they never take off. Even there I think Bruce was more interested in the forms the people made rather than their culture."

Mostly Chatwin was interested in photographing buildings, often transforming modest homes into beautiful, formalist compositions. According to the critic David Sylvester: "Chatwin is a specialist, his subject architecture, and within that domain a sub-specialist. Chatwin's real passion is to reveal the beauty of more elemental structures." He loved to take pictures showing the nearest wall of a building at a precise right-angle to the line of vision, like the photographer Walker Evans. Sylvester wrote: "This frontality serves Chatwin to great effect in his characteristic close-ups of multicoloured walls. Much of the world's best photography has had a strong, often reciprocal, relationship to the painting of its time."

That, at least, is what one might see in one of the pictures to be exhibited of a house in a courtyard called Mali, Pise House. "I guess he just snuck his camera out and snapped that without asking permission," says Elizabeth. "He loved photography but felt the camera was a weapon, and so was careful not to be invasive. He needed to behave like that when he was taking pictures in Muslim countries where the attitude to photography is more suspicious."

Chatwin's writings and photographs have been dismissed as glibly exotic by some, and a Times Higher Education Supplement reviewer, under the headline The Fake with the Pert Rump, wrote: "All that self-love, arrogance, affectation, the whipped-up feeling for things - a mix of Jay Gatsby and Princess Diana with a designer rucksack."

His lover, Jasper Conran, said: "Probably there was no one Bruce loved more than himself." Possibly. But then Chatwin never turned that Leica on himself. Many others, though, were seduced to take photographs of this beautiful man. Susan Sontag wrote of him: "There are few people in this world who have the kind of looks which enchant and enthrall ... It isn't just beauty, it's a glow, something in the eyes. And it works on both sexes."

"I don't know why he didn't take pictures of anybody he knew," says Elizabeth, who is now a sheep farmer in Oxfordshire. "It's a conundrum, a paradox. Even the pictures I have of his parents were taken by other people." Did he really never photograph you? "Well, I remember him taking a picture of my back. But he was only interested in it at a formal level."

· The Alternative Nomad, photographs by Bruce Chatwin, is at the Olivier Theatre foyer, National Theatre, London SE1, from January 27 to March 29, 10am-11pm except Sundays.

Friend and confidant of Bruce Chatwin, Jean Rhys, VS Naipaul and Bruce Chatwin, Francis Wyndham has moved in English literature's most exalted circles. Now, as his own deliciously precise and funny writings are being republished, he talks to Rachel Cooke about his meetings with remarkable men and women

Praise a certain kind of novelist and he will smile in a way that says: 'Well, of course you enjoyed my book; it's by me.' Francis Wyndham is not this kind of novelist. Tell him that you enjoyed his slim novel, or his short stories, and his wide, rectangular face, which can look lugubrious in repose, will split in two in a delight so genuine you could almost warm your hands on it. 'Oh, I'm glad you thought that was funny!' he says, when I tell him that a line of his made me cry with laughter. 'It's so important for writing to be funny. Don't you think that, in life, things are sad and funny almost at the same time?' His hands flutter momentarily in the air, like tiny birds. 'In a kind of way, something doesn't exist until it is read. So I am always pleased if I hear someone did like it.' A pause. 'But then, I can also completely understand if someone doesn't get it.' Another pause. 'Though I don't think anyone's actually going to hate it.'

It's not only innate modesty that enables him to talk of his work in so politely halting a way. The unlikely arc of a long writing career has lent him what you might call perspective. Wyndham, who was born in 1924, wrote his first collection of stories, Out of the War, as a teenager but, rejected for publication, he put them away and forgot all about them until 1974, when they finally appeared between hard covers. Another decade passed. In 1985, a second collection appeared, Mrs Henderson. Then, in 1987, he published The Other Garden and, at the somewhat mature age of 63, he won the Whitbread First Novel Prize.

He followed this with a collection of his journalism, The Theatre of Embarrassment but, thereafter, silence reigned. The fiction fell slowly out of print. Until now. Next month, Picador will publish it again, in a single volume with an introduction by Wyndham's friend Alan Hollinghurst ('Exceptionally accomplished... a writer who never wastes a word or puts one wrong...'). How does this new - I refuse to say final - twist make Wyndham feel? 'Oh, I am terribly grateful. Things mostly don't get reprinted these days, unless they're famous and important. There could be something melancholy about it, but there isn't. So I'm just very grateful.'

Did the writing leave him or did he leave the writing? Neither, really. 'It would be lovely to think that I'd written a lot of books, instead of just these. But I believe that a lot of writers write too much. I don't mean that they shouldn't, but... I had jobs, you see. I had to sort of make a living. I had a few ideas. One or two things. Occasionally, I did try. But I didn't feel that I owed it to myself or to anyone else. When nothing happened, I didn't feel guilty about it.' While he concedes that 'it's rather embarrassing that The Other Garden remains my only novel', he also likes 'sitting still' far too much to do anything about it. A few years ago, his old friend Lucian Freud asked Wyndham to sit for him. 'He suddenly rang me up and said, "I want to see you." He came round at once in his Rolls and took me off to a restaurant. He was nervous. I thought it might be some histoire with David [Sylvester, the art critic, who was also a friend]. But then he said, "Will you sit for me?" I said of course. And I loved it. It was terribly interesting. We've plenty to talk about. He's wonderful company and the only way to see Lucian unless you're a beautiful young girl is to be painted by him. But it's also that I like sitting for a painting more than anything. I love sitting still, and that's what you have to do, and by doing it, you're helping this very talented person.'

In the gaps between his writing, Wyndham has made something of a career out of helping talented people. Over the years, it has fallen to him to be a first reader of manuscripts by, among others, VS Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Bruce Chatwin and, more recently, Edward St Aubyn. This, a literary career that has so far spanned six decades, and the fact that his maternal grandmother was Ada Leverson, the writer Oscar Wilde called 'the Sphinx', means that talking to him is not only fascinating but ghostly, too; he connects you to a past that you've previously heard about only via fat biographies. He is not a name dropper, but the names, nevertheless, tumble out: Henrietta Moraes, Sonia Orwell, Diana Melly...

At one point, I ask him about Rhys, whose literary executor he eventually became. A notorious drunk, was she as difficult as they say? 'People say she was always drunk, but she wasn't when I knew her. She had a ... light head. We'd have a cocktail, put Piaf on the gramophone and then we'd gossip. She was very egotistical, but since I was interested in her, that didn't matter. She'd talk about Ford or being a chorus girl.' It takes me a moment to grasp that when he says Ford, he means Ford Madox Ford, the author of The Good Soldier, with whom Rhys had a brief but seismic love affair. See what I mean? It's enough to give anyone goose bumps.

Francis Wyndham lives above a dry cleaner's on a busy road in west London, surrounded by books and pictures. It's not exactly where you expect him to live - he comes from rather posh stock - but his attitude to it is of a piece with his personality, which is to say that he sees the good in everything: 'I am rather deaf, so I don't notice the noise.' He grew up in Wiltshire, in the dreamy rural isolation that he describes so beautifully in The Other Garden. His father, a retired colonel, came from a grand family (he was connected to the Wyndhams who owned Petworth House in Sussex, though I'm not sure exactly how) and was much older than his mother, with the result that everything is 'a bit lopsided in my family'.

His father's first wife, who died in the flu epidemic that followed the First World War, had given her husband a family long before Francis and his brother came along: two sons, one of whom had been killed in the war, and a daughter, thanks to whom he had met Francis's mother; the two young women were friends, having both been nurses in the war. In Mrs Henderson, a rather revelatory book, I think, he tells the stories of this half-brother and sister. The brother was a painter ('a bit Bohemian; he drank') whose elder daughter was writer Joan Wyndham, and whose younger daughter, Ingrid, married first a Guinness, then Paul Channon, the Tory politician. The sister fell in love with a well-known black actress of the day, and went to live with her in connubial bliss in Harlem.

'My father was more like a grandfather, really,' he says. 'He died when I was about 16. But I was very fond of him.' But it was his mother's side of the family that had the greater influence on him, especially Ada, who was difficult and yet always so alive to the world, even as she grew older (after the death of her friend Wilde, a generation of younger men - Harold Acton, Osbert Sitwell, Ronald Firbank - sought her out, seeing her as a fascinating survivor of the faded Yellow Book past).

'I was very glamoured by the fact that she was a writer. I was only nine when she died, but I do remember her, and I adored her - and later, I slithered into that literary world, which she was in, too.'

After Eton - 'I wasn't bullied, it wasn't David Copperfield; I just didn't want to be there' - he went up to the desolate, empty Oxford of the war, spending just a year there before he was called up. Was he full of dread at what would happen next? 'Not really. One didn't allow oneself to think about what was happening on various fronts. Occasionally, when one was in London, and there were buzz bombs, it was rather exciting, though it sounds awful to say.' Besides, in the end, he saw no action. 'I was at the Britannia Barracks in Norwich, where the army doctor, I discovered later, was known as the Butcher. I kept on going sick. He thought I was pretending. Then I fell off the bars in the gym and broke my ankle. In the convalescent home, they found I had pleurisy and that it was of tubercular origin, at which point I was out.'

He thinks he may have caught the infection from the woman on whom he based the mysterious Kay, heroine of The Other Garden, a painting of whom hangs on his wall to this day; a woman who is more than the narrator's friend, yet less than her lover, and who, thanks to her own TB, dies tragically young.

Though he never went back to Oxford, soon after he began writing reviews for the TLS, whose fiction editor was Anthony Powell. 'It was a very Grub Street-George Gissing sort of a life - you know, selling your review copies. There was this place on the Strand we all went to. It was very embarrassing; sometimes - you'd see the author of the book you were selling.' Then, in 1953, he made a resolution that he should get a proper job. So he did, in publishing. First, he worked for a man called Derek Verschoyle, a character straight out of Muriel Spark's A Far Cry From Kensington (i.e. a fly-by-night), and later for André Deutsch. He was a reader. One day, he was sitting in his reading room when Diana Athill, then an editor at Deutsch, came in and asked him to look at something by one VS Naipaul. 'Yes, I made friends with Vidia, and with Jean,' he says, now. 'But I don't want to go on boasting about this.' Oh, go on. Boast away! 'Well, in the case of Jean, I thought she was dead. I'd shown her books to Diana, who had loved them, but said we couldn't reprint. Why did I think she was dead? Julian Maclaren-Ross [Soho diarist and dandy] had told me she was dead - she'd died in an asylum or sanitorium or something - and stupidly, I believed him. Then she was discovered! [By Athill, in the Radio Times, improbable as this may sound.] So I wrote to her and she wrote back and said she was writing something, and this was Wide Sargasso Sea. She would send it to me as she was writing it, bit by bit. It was so exciting. I know that she was difficult, that she had her rages, but I only ever witnessed one rage and that was about being old. I was very moved by it. She knew I was a great fan of her writing. I think she knew, too, that she was good and that quite a lot of people couldn't see that she was good. So we had all that unspoken between us. She was a bit frail, like an actress. Sonia Orwell and I used to stay in a hotel near where she lived in Devon and take her out. She lived in a prefab kind of house. She didn't want a biography but, in the end, I betrayed her and allowed one.' He sighs. 'I know why she didn't. She didn't come out of it well.'

Wyndham left Deutsch to join Queen magazine (Mark Boxer, its art editor, was a friend); he was its theatre critic, then its literary editor. Then, in 1964, he followed Boxer to the Sunday Times magazine and began a new life editing juicy journalism and writing interviews; he often worked with Snowdon, still a friend. Uh oh. I reviewed the new biography of Snowdon; he sounds awful.

'Yes, I saw your review,' says Wyndham, sweetly. 'It's hard to explain. He's fascinating to be with, though it's true that he never reads a book. Often, we used to go on assignments and he'd never heard of the person. "Do tell me who this Tolkien is," he'd say. But I rather loved that.'

It was Wyndham who brought Bruce Chatwin, then just a 'brilliant young person at Sotheby's', to the magazine as its artistic adviser and it was Wyndham who encouraged him to write, commissioning him to write a piece about Madame Vionnet. What was he like? 'I absolutely loved him. I found him life-enhancing. You wouldn't see him for ages, then he would just turn up. He was a bit like Jean; he would talk about what he wanted to talk about. It was a monologue, but it was a monologue that I wanted to hear.'

Did Wyndham know when Chatwin, now famous for his exaggerations, was telling the truth? 'Well, I don't really like travel books and Bruce is famous as a travel writer. So when people say he invented a lot of In Patagonia - that's probably why I liked it.'

His other great friend from this time, though he can't remember exactly when he met her, was Henrietta Moraes, the model whom Francis Bacon painted 16 times. During her period as an unsuccessful cat burglar (she was also a drug addict and alcoholic), it fell to Wyndham to guarantee her bail. 'I met her at a party. When I first knew her, she was beautiful, adventurous, but vulnerable. She became a liability after a time. She and her boyfriend burgled a house in Hampstead, and then passed out on the Heath with what they'd stolen. But when she appeared in court, she came over all Francis Bacon to the judge. [He adopts a camp Cockney sort of voice]. "Ooh, I don't like you, dear! I don't fancy you!" Once, she was on a shoplifting charge. She'd taken something from Wallis. Well, she was outraged. "As if anyone would hoist from there!" But she had, of course. It did get...' A bit much? 'Yes. But she was sensitive. She gave me a holiday in the end. We remained friends to the end, and I helped her with her book [of memoirs]. I went on loving Henrietta.'

Did he know Bacon? 'Yes, but I wasn't at the heart of that scene. I don't think Bacon liked me and I didn't buy the whole thing. I'm not certain of his greatness.'

Wyndham finally left the Sunday Times in 1980. He was ready to leave; he had ideas for more of the stories that eventually became Mrs Henderson. But still, this was a difficult time. His mother died and he gave up smoking. He entered a kind of thoughtful retirement - sometimes writing, but mostly not - which has continued ever since. He lives alone, but his unerring capacity for friendship seems to have protected him from the things that sometimes happen to those who live alone; he is still resolutely in the world, awake to its possibilities in a way that many older people are not. Does he despise being old? 'I think I always was! I think it rather suits me. For some people, the point of them is that they are young: Jean, Henrietta. But not me. Some people get very bitter when they get older; they hate modern painting or whatever. Not me. And I like an excuse for not doing things. I've always been one for saying, "Oh, shall we just not bother?"' He laughs.

I don't know if there have been love affairs, unrequited or otherwise. Probably. But there is a marvellous story in Mrs Henderson in which the narrator becomes so desperate to avoid the concerned yet needy phone calls of his pals following the death of his mother that he absents himself temporarily from their incessant ringing by pretending to be involved in an affair. For the benefit of the friend who thinks he's gay, he makes up a male lover; for the friend who believes him to be straight, he invents a girl. With funny results. Does he look back at his life, so amazingly rich and full, with astonishment? 'Oh, yes. I have been very lucky. Of course, there have been long periods of my life when nothing seemed to happen at all. But I tried to put those in my work. Rather a lot of life is spent in a kind of limbo. '

For the first time since we have been talking, his hands are now still, clasped prayerfully, perhaps in thanks that, with the publication of his collected work, the latest of these periods has now been triumphantly punctuated.

· The Other Garden and Collected Stories will be published by Picador on 5 September

Francis Wyndham: A life

Born Francis Guy Percy Wyndham in London, 1924. Worked as a staff writer at the Sunday Times (1964-1980) and as an editor at André Deutsch. Credited in the 1950s with the rediscovery of Jean Rhys, whose letters he also published after her death.

Key works Out of the War (1974), a short-story collection written during his teens; Mrs Henderson and Other Stories (1985); The Other Garden (1987), which won the Whitbread First Novel Award; The Theatre of Embarrassment (1991), a collection of essays.

He says: 'What I've always wanted to do in fiction is to write about the hours and hours and hours, the enormous proportion of life which is spent in a kind of limbo, even in people's active years. It seems to me that it isn't sufficiently celebrated.'

They say: 'He belongs in a tradition of social comedy going back through Henry James to Jane Austen' - Alan Hollinghurst
Imogen Carter

Bruce Chatwin's letters are as much a performance as anything else he wrote, says Blake Morrison

Does anyone read Bruce Chatwin these days? His friend and biographer Nicholas Shakespeare reports a conversation in Australia in 2001, when a young journalist asked: "Who was Bruce Chatwin?" And another generation has since emerged who are even less likely to have heard of him.

In the late 80s, such a fate would have been unthinkable. Blond, good-looking and charismatic, Chatwin was at the height of his reputation. The Songlines (17 years in the making) topped the bestseller list in 1987; Utz (completed in a few months) was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1988. His mysterious death the following year, at 48, only added to the allure. Tom Maschler, who also published Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Martin Amis, thought him a greater talent than any of them.

Why has Chatwin's star faded so quickly? Allegations of coldness, snobbery, humourlessness and fabrication haven't helped. Nor have the disavowals of those, like Barry Humphries, who were once his friends. Shakespeare is baffled, nevertheless, that a man whose work was a precursor of the internet – "a connective superhighway without boundaries" – should have fallen into neglect. His hope is that this collection of letters – put together with Chatwin's widow, Elizabeth – can turn things round.

"Chatwin's correspondence reveals much more about himself than he was prepared to expose in his books," he says. Elizabeth agrees: "The letters are the only unreworked writing of his." An unguarded writer certainly ought to be a more knowable writer. But Chatwin enjoyed being an enigma ("I don't believe in coming clean"), and his letters are as much a performance as anything else he wrote, just less polished. When he does let the mask slip to reveal, for example, how eager a socialite he was ("lunch with Noël Coward on Friday", "Escorting Mrs Onassis to the opera next Thursday"), the effect isn't very endearing. Born in a well-to-do Midlands family, Chatwin was sent to boarding school at the age of seven, and the first letters here, to his parents, date from that time. Though he was no precocious literary talent, there are already signs of his consuming passions: a demand for a Romany travel book and an anthology called The Open Road at eight; enthusiasm for a film about Australian cattle-drivers; and later, at 17, the purchase of a Louis XVI chair. More surprising is his talent for boxing. But then Chatwin was always tougher than he appeared, not least in matters of the heart.

He was a tough bargainer, too, "a rather hard-nosed business pro", as he put it; that and his love of objets d'art made Sotheby's a logical career choice. He worked there for seven years, travelling widely while he did. When he isn't gushing over his latest acquisition, his idiom might be that of any other gilded youth. "Had an amusing time in Paris & Rome"; "Weather marvellous"; "This island is absolute paradise". Only in an account of a trip to Afghanistan is there a hint that travel writing might be his forte.

It was at Sotheby's that he met Elizabeth. He proposed to her in Paris, in the Louvre, a romantic gesture. But there isn't much romance in the letter he sent telling a friend about it ("The deed is done and in about three months I'll no longer be a free man"), or in his letters to Elizabeth herself: "My dearest Liz" is about as amorous as he gets. "You do not find pining lovers among the Gypsies," he once wrote, and even during their engagement his approach was briskly practical: "Give up all this nonsense of a deep freeze, do not deprive me of the pleasure of eating fresh food in its due season," he urged, letting her know whose job it would be to run the kitchen.

The marriage came as a shock to friends and colleagues, some of whom supposed that the affluence of Elizabeth's American family must be a factor: as a wedding present, her mother gave them £17,000, enough to buy a Gloucestershire farmhouse set in 47 acres. But Chatwin himself wasn't poor, and his friends were full of largesse ("We are invited to Glenveagh for the stalking in Oct. Or would you prefer Sir James Dundas's fishing lodge opposite Mull?"). Perhaps the real attraction was the emotional security she offered: like his mother, she loved listening to the stories he told when he returned from gallivanting about the globe. "People used to ask me how I felt about his endless absences from home," she writes, "but I knew he was working; he had to be free."

Within a year of marrying he'd quit Sotheby's to read archaeology at Edinburgh University: "Change is the only thing worth living for," he explained, before abandoning the degree halfway through. He couldn't stick anywhere for long, not even London: "I find it fine for three weeks, but thereafter WHAT IS THERE TO DO?" Until Francis Wyndham found Chatwin a place on the Sunday Times magazine he was (as one friend put it) a compass without a needle. He left that job, too, after three years. But in the meantime he learned to write. "He is running away from himself by travelling," his archaeology professor, Stuart Piggott, wrote. But in running away Chatwin was also being true to himself and true to his vision of the nomadic nature of human beings. Travel didn't mean roughing it or embracing an alternative lifestyle. "I am fed [sic] to the back teeth by happy hippie hashish culture (jail is the answer)," he wrote, dismissing 60s dropouts as mere vagrants. He was a home-owner, after all, with a country farm and a London flat, and when travelling he liked to be put up in style: whether Tuscan towers, Greek villas or Indian palaces didn't matter so long as he was properly catered for. "When's lunch?" he'd ask, and when he moved on would offer some token sum to cover his expensive telephone bills.

More serious offence was caused when he stayed with his cousin Monica in Peru and copied pages of her father's journal for his book In Patagonia; he claimed, with some justice, that she had given him permission, but he knew a good story when he saw it and wasn't altogether frank in telling her how much of it he'd lifted.

By 1980, Elizabeth's patience with him had also worn thin ("I was furious with him, totally fed up and exasperated that he took me for granted") and they separated. How much she knew of his affairs with men isn't touched on. Nor do we learn anything about them here: his letters to lovers were either destroyed, or were never written, or where they've survived are blandly circumspect. Sex is the great void here, along with passion. Which isn't to say that Chatwin lacked feelings: his grief at the death of his friend Penelope Betjeman was genuine, as was his attachment to his parents. As for Elizabeth, theirs has not been an easy marriage, he told her mother, "but it survives everything because neither of us has loved anyone else".

In 1986 he was diagnosed with Aids. In letters to friends he claimed to have caught a rare fungus of the bone marrow "known only among 10 Chinese peasants and the corpse of a killer whale cast up on the shores of Arabia". Much less was known about Aids in those days, and Chatwin was desperate to protect his parents from the truth. But what also terrified him was the thought of dying a stereotypical death, one that would identify him as just one more casualty of the Aids epidemic. His frantic tales about killer whale corpses or fungal dust inhaled in a Yunnan bats' cave were a way of exoticising himself, much as his books exoticise the places he visited and the people he met.

At best, a disdain for ordinariness strengthens his writing. But at worst it just seems silly, as when he reports what he's been up to in Patagonia: "I have sung 'Hark the Herald Angels Sing' in Welsh . . . I have dined with a man who knew Butch Cassidy . . . I have discussed the poetics of Mandelstam with a Ukrainian doctor missing both legs." Would discussing Mandelstam with someone who isn't a double-amputee be any less interesting? For Chatwin, clearly, it would.

This is a handsome book, full of informative passages from Shakespeare, illuminating quotes from friends and wonderfully laconic and deflating footnotes from Elizabeth. But the Chatwin who wrote the letters is no truer or more candid than the Chatwin who wrote travel books and fiction. And the books are more engaging and more alive.

Blake Morrison's The Last Weekend is published by Chatto & Windus.

My Father's Fortune by Michael Frayn, Shades of Greene by Jeremy Lewis and the Letters of Bruce Chatwin

"Often funny, sometimes painful, but always exquisitely well written, it reveals the extraordinariness that can lurk in even the most ordinary of lives." Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in the Sunday Telegraph enjoyed Michael Frayn's memoir My Father's Fortune, "a fitting tribute to the sort of figure who usually slips between the cracks of the historical record". "This is a slightly unusual book – a kind of print version of . . . Who Do You Think You Are?", according to Anthony Howard in the New Statesman. "It is, as one would expect from so accomplished a writer, beautifully done. Yet, what matters in a book of this kind is not just the domestic detail, but the general background of the lost world against which it is written. Here, the author is remarkably strong." Peter Kemp in the Sunday Times was laudatory: "The book, for all its allusions to the mistiness of memory, is a masterpiece of stylistic, emotional, psychological and sociological exactness . . . it adroitly modulates between humour and tragedy, ruefulness and celebration, intellectual keenness and elegiac depths of feeling . . . Frayn has never written with more searching brilliance."

"There are obvious problems in writing a group biography if the group covers a wide range of success and failure, including one figure of international reputation." Patrick Marnham in the Spectator had a mixed reaction to Jeremy Lewis's Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English Family. "It's a massive undertaking," wrote John Walsh in the Independent, "a fluent sociopolitical history of the British intelligentsia in the 20th century's most turbulent years . . . this hugely detailed, exhaustively researched family saga makes you marvel, again and again, at the strangeness of this very English family, while leaving you fervently grateful you're not actually related to them." "The drawback to Lewis's painstaking work is that it can become tedious," suggested Hugh MacDonald in the Herald. "He is conscientious but his enviable briskness can desert him in certain chapters. However, Lewis has on occasions stepped back to look at the big picture in a book that is strange, oddly engaging and breathtaking in its uncovering of the magnificently trivial and the deeply profound."

"Chatwin's conversation was entirely unrehearsed, but he was best on ground of his own choosing, uninterrupted" remembered Robin Lane Fox in the Financial Times reviewing Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin, compiled and edited by Nicholas Shakespeare and Elizabeth Chatwin. "I am quoted in the book as saying to Shakespeare: 'I absolutely deny to the end of my days that Bruce was a fraud, a poseur and a sham.' After reading all these letters I will go on denying it. He had a penetrating mind, fast-moving like a magpie." "For all his absurdity, his books remain highly readable," decided Philip Hensher in the Spectator. "He was a reporter of considerable talent, who had the wit to go to some very interesting places. These letters are performances, as they were always intended to be, and there is not much separating the style of those to his wife or intimates from those to his agent or publisher . . . What emerges from this self-portrait is not the intellectual giant he was often thought to be – his knowledge was extensive and abstruse, but unsystematic and frequently cranky. Rather, he looks like that very familiar figure whom we ought to regard with forbearance: the young man on the make".

This collection reveals how hard Bruce Chatwin worked to create an aura of effortlessness, says Adam Mars-Jones

Bruce Chatwin lived by a myth of effortlessness which in some respects worked against him. It was tempting to think that someone so reliant on flair had come to the compound genre – not fiction nor travelogue nor memoir nor anthropological treatise – of his most characteristic works, In Patagonia and The Songlines, with the same unerring instinct that led him, in an antique shop in Ludlow, to zero in on an unimpressive object resembling a walking stick. It turned out to be one of the flagpoles from a doge's barge.

The main service this collection of letters does is to dispel that idea. Chatwin worked hard at his effortlessness, and felt his way over numerous drafts to the hybrid forms that satisfied him. He had joined Sotheby's straight from school in 1959, though he tried to make up for his lack of further education by studying archaeology at Edinburgh in his late 20s; he didn't finish the course there. Colleagues at Sotheby's had no inkling of any literary ambition, one of them saying: "He didn't appear to be able to string two words together on paper." Thanks to Francis Wyndham's intuition in 1972 that he would be an asset to the Sunday Times, then having one of its adventurous phases, he was encouraged to spread his wings journalistically.

So what came first in his development was a romance and a rapport with objects: he bought his first piece of antique French furniture in his teens. Then the object became something whose uniqueness must be properly distilled for the purposes of an auction house catalogue. At Edinburgh, he improved his historical sense and his technical knowledge, though academic frameworks were never allowed to inhibit leaps of faith. Finally, at the Sunday Times, he had to confront the reality of deadlines and a mass readership. It all adds up to an enviable apprenticeship, though Chatwin never felt entirely at ease with his portfolio of accomplishments.

Many of these letters fed into Nicholas Shakespeare's 1999 authorised biography and were quoted there, to the point of suggesting the assessment, deadly in its Johnsonian symmetry, that most of what is good here is not new, while what is new is not good. The description Chatwin gives his mother in 1963 of a market in Herat, in Afghanistan, selling vintage western dresses is the liveliest thing in the volume: "Gowns that could have been worn by Mary Pickford, shiny black velvet with no back, or by Clara Bow, red lace and bead fringes, Jean Harlow, flamingo pink crepe off the shoulder with sequin butterflies on the hips, Shirley Temple, bows and pink lace, the folk weave skirts they square-danced in, the crinolines they waltzed in, fiery sheaths they tangoed in, utility frocks they won the war in, the New Look, the A line, the H line, the X line, all are there, just waiting for some Afghan lady to descend from her mud-built mountain village and choose the dress of her dreams all to be concealed under her yashmak." It appeared, though, in the biography. Conversely, the little trove of letters and postcards to Susan Sontag, which was recovered just as the manuscript of this book was being delivered to its publisher, doesn't tell us how he managed to put a spell on Sontag (what a coup to captivate that chatelaine of seriousness!), only how he kept the magic ticking over.

Chatwin had already proposed a book about nomadism to Tom Maschler, his eventual editor, before his stint at the Sunday Times, though he hadn't been able to get the tone right at that time; in effect this was the first draft, or anti-draft, of The Songlines. It's something of a cheat to include this 1970 proposal in a book of correspondence, since it was Maschler's tactic to reassure inexperienced writers by asking them to describe a book in letter form; nevertheless, this is a valuable document. It shows that there was a personal element from the start of the project ("Why do I become restless after a month in a single place, unbearable after two?"), and also that Chatwin still had plenty of academic pseudo-objectivity to shed. He says of nomads that "much of their time is passed in gross idleness, particularly the Australian Aborigines whose dialectic arguments know no bounds of complication". He didn't make his first visit to Australia for another dozen years.

Both of the editors of this book have a large stake in Chatwin's legacy. His wife, Elizabeth, the child of two prominent American clans, met him at Sotheby's in late 1961. It's hard to shake off the feeling that for him she had a provenance as well as a value. She seems to have accepted her husband's bisexuality, although they had a three-year separation from 1980. Their marriage wasn't a failure, but perhaps only because she wouldn't allow it to be. She corrects facts in Chatwin's letters, which is, of course, part of an editor's duties, but when she insists that he didn't spend a week decorating their house, only two days, or that he has retrospectively appropriated a lung infection she had in India, she seems still to be caught up in the marriage, understandably preferring wrangling to silence.

Nicholas Shakespeare met Chatwin in 1983, inviting him to appear on Frank Delaney's highbrow chat show. His admiration has survived that drastic test – the writing of a biography – and he describes Chatwin in his introduction as "a precursor of the internet: a connective super-highway without boundaries, with instant access to different cultures", which seems a little strained.

The profoundest letter in the book was not written by Chatwin but to him, and it's anyone's guess how it was received. In July 1988, Chatwin, very ill with what he didn't want to think was Aids, was in a state described as hypomanic. Michael Ignatieff wrote to him after a visit which left him full of "dark and strange thoughts… It's quite possible that you experience this apparent frenzy from inside some deep calm… But those who love you…and see only the outside… see someone haunted and in breathless pursuit…. I'm not sure it is among the offices of friendship to convey my sense of foreboding & disquiet at how I saw you. I may just be expressing a friend's regret at losing you to a great wave of conviction, to some gust of certainty, that leaves me here, rooted to the spot, and you carried far away."

It's doubtful that any such letter can succeed in making someone see himself from the outside, but it's an infinitely honourable attempt. If it seems impossible at this distance to capture the personal impact that Bruce Chatwin made, it's just as impossible to dismiss it.

Paul Theroux, William Dalrymple, Kari Herbert, Colin Thubron and many more writers tell us about the travel book that most influenced their own life and work

Colin Thubron

Ionia: a Quest, by Freya Stark
Travel books, like others, change perspective as we grow older, and I can see now that Freya Stark's Ionia: a Quest is an enchanting but disturbingly moralistic account of a journey that this remarkable woman took in the early 1950s along the west coast of Turkey. In those days these ancient Greek cities were virtually unvisited. In 55 sites Stark encountered only one other tourist. Relying largely on the witness of ancient writers, she mused among the ruins, deducing their cities' character from them as if the stones themselves might speak. It all sounds too dreadful. But such was the beauty of her writing, and the delicacy of her thought, that the result is captivating. It persuaded me, at the start of my career, how richly landscape and history may interfuse, and how deeply (and sometimes dangerously) a quiet attention can fire the imagination.
• Colin Thubron's latest book is To a Mountain in Tibet (Chatto, £16.99)

William Dalrymple

In Patagonia, by Bruce Chatwin
When Bruce Chatwin died in 1989, at 48, he had published just five books: a small yet dazzling output. His first, In Patagonia, is a metaphysical exploration of "the uttermost part of the earth". It is in the eyes of many his best, though it was not his most commercially successful (Songlines outsold it many times over). But it is probably the most influential travel book written since the war. Its opening page – telling of Bruce's childhood discovery of a piece of dinosaur skin in his grandmother's cupboard – is possibly the most imitated passage in modern travel literature.

Chatwin had three matchless gifts: he was a thinker of genuine originality; a reader of astonishing erudition; and a writer of breathtaking prose. All three talents shine brightly on almost every page of In Patagonia, but it is his bleak chiselled prose that remains his most dazzling: he had a quite remarkable ability to evoke place, to bring to life a whole world of strange sounds and smells in a single unexpected image, to pull a perfect sentence out the air with the ease of a child netting a butterfly.

The pendulum of fashion has swung against Chatwin, and it is now unhip to admire his work. Yet to his fans, Chatwin remains like a showy bird of paradise amid the sparrows of the present English literary scene, and it is impossible to reread In Patagonia without a deep stab of sadness that we have lost the brightest and most profound writer of his generation. He also knew and loved the Islamic world – and such writers are now badly in demand. God only knows what Chatwin might have produced had he still been writing, now when we need him most.
• William Dalrymple's latest book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (Bloomsbury, £8.99), won the first Asia House Literature Award, in 2010

Sara Wheeler

A Winter in Arabia, by Freya Stark
A Winter in Arabia describes Freya Stark's 1937 journey through the Hadhramaut, a region in today's Yemen. A guest of the tribes, she conjures little girls in magenta silk trousers, their silver anklets frilled with bells; the drumbeats of the Sultan's procession; and veiled women bearing gifts of salted melon seeds. The book is a heady mix of hardship and luxury, scholarship and mischief, loneliness and intimacy, and the oppositions give the prose its strength.

Stark glittered in the drawing rooms of London and loved a party; having drunk her fill, she'd run off to peek out at the world from a solitary tent. Isn't that the best kind of life imaginable? She did not try to be an honorary man in a field still woefully dominated by that species. "There are few sorrows," she wrote, "through which a new dress or hat will not send a little gleam of pleasure, however furtive." Indeed.
• Sara Wheeler's latest book is Access all Areas (Jonathan Cape, £18.99)

Paul Theroux

The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
This was Cherry-Garrard's only book: it thrilled me when I first read it, and it still inspires me, for its quiet power to evoke a place and time, for its correction of history (the unsparing portrait of Captain Scott), most of all for its heroism. Cherry was only 23 when he joined the Scott Antarctic Expedition in 1912. Scott and four of his men (but not Cherry) died on the way back from the Pole. But in the Antarctic winter of 1911 Cherry trudged through the polar darkness and cold (-60C) to find an Emperor penguin rookery. This was "the worst journey". He wrote: "If you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore. If you are a brave man you will do nothing; if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery. Some will tell you that you are mad … And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal. If you march your winter journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg."
• Paul Theroux's latest book is The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99)

Kapka Kassabova

The Global Soul, by Pico Iyer
Pico Iyer was the writer who showed me how to take the Open Road (also the title of his sublime study of the Dalai Lama). Iyer's cultural and spiritual quest is driven by his own hybridity. Of all his books, it was The Global Soul that felt like the blow to the head I needed in 2001, when grappling with my own cultural and spiritual alienation. It's a book that launches the 21st century, and if this sounds grand, he is grand. In The Global Soul he goes to "in-between" places – airports, malls, the no-place of jet lag – and introduces the species of soul who has multiple passports, lives in several countries, and has nightmares not of the "Where am I?" variety, but of the more neurotically advanced "Who am I?" kind.
• Kapka Kassabova's latest book, Twelve Minutes of Love is out in November (Portobello Books, £18.99)

William Blacker

Works of Patrick Leigh Fermor
It was not just the books of Patrick Leigh Fermor – notably Between the Woods and the Water about Romania – that inspired me, but also the man. He was the quintessential free spirit. He didn't bother with university, but at the age of 18 set off, on foot, across Europe, hoping for the best. His journey lasted five years and led to extraordinary wartime adventures and a series of breathtaking books, which are among the masterpieces of 20th-century literature. The success he made of his brand of non-conformity should fill all would-be wanderers with hope. Read about his life, read his books, and if you are not similarly inspired and exhilarated then, as Kim said, "Run to your mothers' laps, and be safe."
• William Blacker's latest book is Along the Enchanted Way: A Story of Love and Life in Romania (John Murray, £10.99)

Richard Grant

Great Plains, by Ian Frazier
Reading this book for the first time, in London in 1989, inspired me to spend a summer rambling around the American west. The second time I read it 12 years later, I was stuck trying to write my first book. The subject was American nomadism. I had a box of notebooks about my encounters with modern-day nomads – freight train riders, cowboys, tramps, hippies, footloose retirees in motorhomes – and three shelves of research books about nomads in American history. How to connect all this into a whole? I saw that Frazier had solved a similar problem by using himself as a character – something I'd been resisting – and infusing his book with a sense of wonder. I sat down again with something to strive for.
• Richard Grant's latest book is Bandit Roads: Into the Lawless Heart of Mexico (Abacus, £9.99)

Pico Iyer

Destinations, by Jan Morris
Suddenly you're not just seeing but hearing, feeling, sensing Washington, Panama, South Africa, as they look today but also as they may seem a hundred years from now. How many writers have been able to take a place and weave a thousand details and feelings and moments into a single near-definitive portrait, which almost seems to stand outside of time? Exactly one: Jan Morris. For 60 years she's been blending acute insights and warm intuitions into uniquely fluent, imperturbable and evocative descriptions. She's not so much traveller as historian, witness, master of classical English prose and impressionist all at once.

You can find these graces in all of her books, of course, but for me the long-form essays in Destinations: Essays from Rolling Stone offer the best (biggest) space in which her eloquence, shrewdness and wisdom can take flight. Read her on Los Angeles, Manhattan or New Delhi and you'll never want to read anyone else on those places again.
• Pico Iyer wrote the foreword to 100 Journeys for the Spirit, a collection of writings from authors including Michael Ondaatje, Alexander McCall Smith and Andrew Motion (Watkins £14.99)

Jason Webster

The Colossus of Maroussi, by Henry Miller
As the second world war was breaking out, Henry Miller visited Greece at the invitation of his friend Lawrence Durrell and travelled around it for several months. The result was The Colossus of Maroussi, at once a love letter to a great world civilisation and a poetic expression of Miller's mystical musings. There is little in the way of traditional "travel" here: the sights, smells and sounds are present only inasmuch as they trigger feelings and emotions. This book taught me that real travel writing must involve an "inner" element, either by detailing an inner journey or by creating a resonance to which the reader can respond. Take that away and you're left with either reportage or a guidebook.
• Jason Webster's most recent travel book is Sacred Sierra: A Year on a Spanish Mountain (Vintage, £8.99)

Robert Penn

Full Tilt, by Dervla Murphy
I started reading Full Tilt (Eland, £12.99) on a grey morning, wearing a grey suit, in a crowd of grey faces on the London Underground. Several Central Line stops later, I'd raced with Dervla Murphy and her bicycle, Rosinante, from Dunkirk to Delhi, and made the decision to quit my career as a lawyer and cycle round the world.

Funny, ingenuous, gently erudite and intrepid (she kept a .25 revolver in her saddlebag) Full Tilt is the best kind of adventure story, and a clarion call to "travel for travel's sake". I realised that you don't need a wealth of knowledge and experience to embark on a journey like this. If you believe human wisdom may be measured by the respect we pay to the unattainable, the mysterious or simply the different, and have a flair for getting on with people, you're ready.
• Robert Penn's book, It's All About the Bike (Penguin, £8.99), is out now

Tim Butcher

Journey Without Maps, by Graham Greene
Graham Greene's first travel book, Journey Without Maps, inspired me to risk my life – by following in his footsteps. Greene was only 30 in 1935 when he chose Liberia for his first trip outside Europe. It was a wonderfully Greene-ian choice: foreboding, distant and richly seedy. The result is a twin helix of a travel book – combining the account of a fantastically hard 350-mile trek through the Liberian jungle, with a metaphysical journey back to where he came from, to primeval feelings both good and bad. Greene, travelling with his cousin Barbara, left behind his medicine chest and when he caught a fever he almost died. Unsettling in its rawness, it taught me much not just about the author but about myself, surely a hallmark of the best writing.
• Chasing The Devil (Vintage, £8.99) is Tim Butcher's recreation of Greene's trip

Isabella Tree

A Visit to Don Otavio, by Sybille Bedford
This account of a journey taken in the 1950s, rediscovered in the 1980s by Eland Press, encapsulates, for me, the essence of good travel writing. Never shying away from describing the frustrations and discomforts of travel, Sybille Bedford is nonetheless quick as a hummingbird to suck the sweetness from every experience. She confesses she chose Mexico because she wanted "to be in a country with a long nasty history in the past, and as little present history as possible", but it's her stay with Don Otavio, a bankrupt squire living in a backwater, that becomes the highlight. Her hilarious, pithy dialogues are pure genius.
• Isabella Tree's book, Sliced Iguana: Travels in Mexico, is out now (Tauris Parke, £11.99)

Tahir Shah

Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger
I first read Arabian Sands as a teenager. As I came to the last page, I knew that the course of my life had been altered. Thesiger had taken me on a journey through the fearful void, the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Desert, and left me desperate to embark on a great journey of my own. Sir Wilfred never intended to write the book. He told me later that he'd spent years with the Bedouin of Rub' al Khali, existing with them on their own terms. Without them, he said, "the journeys would have been a meaningless penance".

A good travel book is a treasury of wisdom that seeps into your blood as you follow the author on their quest. And that's exactly what Arabian Sands achieves so well. It doesn't preach, but allows the reader to gently absorb the essence of the desert. Through fragments of description, the odd random fact, snippet of conversation, or observation, Thesiger conjured the interleaving layers of a bewitching land.
• Tahir Shah's latest book, Travels with Myself (Mosaïque Books, £11.99), is out next month

Michael Jacobs

Exterminate All the Brutes, by Sven Lindqvist
This book inspires by upholding the dignity of the travel genre. Taking its title and principle inspiration from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it is written as a series of short sections entwining the author's diary of a Saharan journey with a devastating thesis on the origins of the Nazi holocaust in 19th-century colonialism. Some might think of it as essentially a tract rather than a travel book. Yet Lindqvist's beautifully sparse accounts of bus journeys and dusty hotels help build up a mood of fear and isolation that enhances the intellectual argument. The book is a necessary reminder of the way travel can open up not only the mind but also the heart.
• Michael Jacobs's latest book is Andes (Granta, £12.99)

Rory MacLean

The Way of the World, by Nicolas Bouvier
Nicolas Bouvier's passionate and exhilarating stories inspired waves of young Europeans on to the road. "I dropped this wonderful moment into the bottom of my memory, like a sheet-anchor that one day I could draw up again," he wrote while travelling across Asia in the early 1950s. "The bedrock of existence is not made up of the family, or work, or what others say and think of you, but of moments like this when you are exalted by a transcendent power that is more serene than love."

Even Patrick Leigh Fermor considered the book a masterpiece. For me, it makes any journey, any traveller's dream, seem possible. Yet be warned, writes Bouvier, you may "think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you, or unmaking you".
• Rory MacLean's new book, Gift of Time: A Family's Diary of Cancer, is out this month (Constable, £12.99)

Kari Herbert

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, by Eric Newby
My father's well-loved copy of Eric Newby's classic came to me in the late 1990s. My parents, both accomplished travellers and authors, had spent the past 28 years trying to convince me that I could and should do anything but follow in their footsteps, wanting to spare me the rejection letters and overdrawn bank balances. The gift of Newby's book signalled a change of heart in my father, who then became a fierce advocate for my writing.

It came at just the right moment. Like Newby, I was in a soulless job, desperate for change and adventure. Reading A Short Walk was a revelation. The superbly crafted, eccentric and evocative story of his Afghan travels was like a call to arms. I quit my job, secured a book contract with Penguin, and headed to the Arctic. Newby's book continues to be my endlessly inspiring companion.
• Kari Herbert's latest book, In Search of the South Pole, co-written with Huw Lewis-Jones, is out next month (Anova Conway £20)

Jasper Winn

Bound For Glory, by Woody Guthrie
As a teenager in rural 1970s Ireland, I found books unsettling. From Ernest Hemingway's Fiesta to Laurie Lee's As I Walked Out One Midsummer's Morning, books suggested that "life" lay elsewhere. The puzzling "how" of travel came from Woody Guthrie's Bound For Glory. On his hitchhiking, train-hopping, Model-A Ford-riding adventures through Depression America, Guthrie survived by being a sign-writer, sailor and fruit-picker. And a musician and writer. His songs ranged from ballads to anthems, agit-prop, love lays and lullabies. Bound for Glory was written in a rich, demotic, playful and stirring vocabulary, as if James Joyce and John Steinbeck had collaborated with Kerouac on On The Road. Apparently an ability to turn one's hand to any job and strum a few chords on the guitar was the key to eating and moving, and to romance and romances. And to writing, as well. Within a month of reading Bound for Glory, at 17, I was away with a guitar, a sleeping bag and a notebook.
• Jasper Winn's book, Paddle: A long way around Ireland, is out now (Sort Of Books, £8.99)

John Gimlette

Love and War in the Apennines, by Eric Newby
For sheer charm, there's nothing quite like Eric Newby's Love and War in the Apennines. I first read it years ago, but it's still a favourite. At one level it's a celebration of Italy, and the title says it all (Newby, a POW, escapes to the mountains and, amid many distractions, meets Wanda, and … well, you'll see). At a more profound level, it's a beautifully philanthropic yet unsentimental work. However miserable the times and awkward the place, Newby's characters are usually endearing, and often complex. That's much how I feel about travel: that it's more about people than places (I'd hate the Antarctic).

Happily, I met Newby once: he was shopping in Stanfords with Wanda. She still spoke the "fractured English" of their first encounter, but they were both as warm and thoughtful in real life as they are in the text. When I clumsily explained that LAWITA was my favourite book, Newby even had the modesty to blush, as if no one had ever told him that before.
• John Gimlette's latest book is Wild Coast: Travels on South America's Untamed Edge (Profile, £15)

No, despite what you may have heard, Bruce Chatwin never used them but they are still the best notebooks money can buy

It's the promise held in that unbroken spine, the smooth oilskin cover, the comforting rounded corners. But most of all in the pristine ivory blankness, ready to be filled with the beginnings of your first bestseller and sketches so groundbreaking they will require new ways of thinking about art. This notebook, the Moleskine pocketone you just paid £8.99 for, will deliver it all.

Apparently Van Gogh used one, and Picasso, and Hemingway – this history now rests in your hands. So long as you can find a spot in Caffe Nero and get to work. "It's a masterful bit of excavation of the human psyche," says Stephen Bayley, the design critic and writer – and user of Moleskines. "The stuff you're writing in it could be the most brainless trivia, but it makes you feel connected to Hemingway."

Except there is no real connection to Hemingway. Moleskine was created in 1997, based on a description of the beautiful, bound notebooks the travel writer Bruce Chatwin bought from a French bookbinder before it closed down. An Italian company Modo & Modo recreated it, sold it at a premium price and describes it as a "legendary notebook". "It's an exaggeration," Francesco Franceschi, co-owner of Modo & Modo told the New York Times in 2004. "It's marketing, not science. It's not the absolute truth."

But it has worked. In the last 10 years, sales have grown, last year's profits were €28.5m and there are plans to float Moleskine, which could value it at £240m (to further remove it from its artistic aspirations, it was acquired by a private equity firm in 2006). Interestingly, in this old-fashioned notebook's lifetime, it has been the internet and bloggers (not least its own blog and Flickr group), which helped turn it into a cult product.

"Somebody saw a fabulous opportunity and exploited it brilliantly," says Bayley of Moleskine's "heritage", pointing out other manufacturers such as Leuchtturm, a German manufacturer of similar notebooks that has been going since 1917. But does any of this matter? The notebooks are good quality and a pleasure to write in and, as Bayley says, "there aren't many things you can buy for £10 that are the best of their kind. I buy them compulsively. It makes you think you are just about to write, for once, something brilliant."

Ahead of a new Patrick Leigh Fermor biography, our writer visits the Mani peninsula, home of the great man and unsung resting place of another British travel writing giant, Bruce Chatwin

To read an extract from Leigh Fermor's book, Mani, Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, click here

Old Mr Fotis turned my question over in his mind while sipping his morning coffee. Below the veranda some youths had been playing noisily on the harbour wall, but now they all dived into the turquoise sea and set off on the long swim to the rocky island in the bay. It had a fragment of crenellated wall on top of it, the ruins of a Venetian fortress. Fotis watched them go, half-smiling.

"We do seem to attract a lot of writers," said the old man eventually. "But that's a name I don't remember."

"Bruce Chatwin, Baroose Chit-win, Chaatwing." I tried a few variations but none struck a chord. "His ashes are scattered somewhere in the hills."

"No, I never heard of him."

"What about Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor? You must know about him."

I'd first heard of Kardamyli because of Leigh Fermor, who had made the place his home. I'd always hoped we might meet, but then the grand old man of British travel writing had died in June 2011 (leaving the literary world praying that he had finished the final volume of his Time of Gifts trilogy). I'd come to the Mani on a sort of literary homage, hoping to find a little of the magic that had attracted first Leigh Fermor and later Chatwin.

The old man shook his head. "No, I don't think so. There was a writer called Robert. Now he was famous – cured himself of cancer by walking around Crete. [Former South Africa cricketer Bob Crisp wrote of his walk around Crete in the 1970s.] He was very famous."

This felt all wrong. Was I in the right place? How annoying that the locals should raise this unknown above the two giants of travel literature.

Fotis leaned back and shouted in Greek to his wife in the kitchen. She came through, cloth in hand. "Robert Crisp," she said, smiling. "What a wonderful man! So handsome! I remember him sitting up at Dioskouri's taverna drinking and talking with Paddy. They were always laughing."

My ears pricked up. Fotis's face underwent a transformation. "Ah Paddy! That is him – your English writer. Of course, Paddy – or Michali we called him. Yes, Paddy was here for years and years. When I was young we used to say he was a British spy and had a tunnel going out to sea where submarines would come."

It didn't surprise me. Leigh Fermor had been, by all accounts, extremely old school, endlessly curious and an accomplished linguist – all well-known attributes of British spies. He produced a clutch of good books and two classics of the genre, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, detailing his journey as an 18-year-old on foot to Constantinople.

"Did you see a lot of him?" I asked.

Fotis shrugged. "Sometimes. He liked to walk a lot. Now Robert Crisp – I used to see him. What a character!"

"Is Paddy's house still empty?" I persisted. "I heard it was now a museum."

Fotis shook his head. "No, no. He left it to the Benaki Museum in Athens (benaki.gr) and they're supposed to turn it into a writers' centre. My guess is nothing will happen for a while."

I could hardly complain about Greek tardiness: Leigh Fermor himself had taken 78 years over his trilogy, and even then no one seemed very sure if he had completed the task. There was, I decided, only one way to get close to the spirit of these colossi of travel-writing: to walk.

"Which paths did Paddy like best?"

Fotis fetched a map and gave me directions. It was already hot when I left him on his veranda. I could see the youths lazing on the harbour wall again, tired by their long swim. Was this really the time of year for walking?

I headed through the ruined village, as instructed, and found a narrow steep path rising up the hillside. Before too long I came across the stone tomb that locals say is the grave of Castor and Pollux, heavenly twins and brothers to Helen of Troy. Kardamyli is mentioned in Homer's Iliad as one of the seven towns that Agamemnon gave to Achilles.

Sweat was pouring off me now, but I kept going. Scents of thyme and sage rose from the undergrowth. Fotis had said there were lots of snakes up here, but I didn't see any. The views of the bay below, however, were becoming more and more magnificent.

The Mani is the middle finger of the three-pronged southern Peloponnese, a 40-mile long skeletal digit that was almost inaccessible, except by sea, until recently. When Leigh Fermor first came here in 1951, it was by a marathon mountain hike across the Taygetus range, whose slopes seem always to be either burned dry by summer sun, or weighted with winter snow.

The people here were different. For a start they had turned vengeance into a lifelong passion, building war towers to threaten their neighbours and generally making life on a stony mountain even grimmer than it needed to be and clinging to weird atavistic beliefs. No wonder that in the 1950s most of the younger people abandoned it for places not as badly infested with saltwater ghouls and blood-sucking phantoms – Melbourne and Tottenham were particularly popular.

Fotis himself had been one of them, settling in Australia for many years before coming home and opening a hotel. Nowadays some parts of the Mani are thick with holiday homes and development, but Kardamyli remains delightfully quiet and understated, the sort of Greek village where old widows in black sit out every morning watching the world go by.

Having reached a good height on the mountain I started to follow the contours, dipping in and out of the shade of walnut trees and cypress, drinking clear cold water from a spring. Further on I came to the village of Proastio, where Fotis had told me there was a church for every family, the ancestors having been sailors, and very superstitious. At the gorgeous little basilica of Agios Nikolaos in the main street I got the priest to come and unlock the door, revealing a gallery of perfect 17th-century Byzantine murals.

I tried the name Chatwin on him, and wondered how to mime death, cremation and scattering of ashes. But the Orthodox Church does not approve of cremation and his face told me I would not get far.

Returning to Kardamyli by a steep cobbled donkey trail, a kalderimi, I passed Fotis's veranda once again.

"Who was that writer?" he called. "My wife thinks she knows."

Anna came out. "Paddy himself scattered the ashes of a writer friend of his, up in Exochori."

That was where I had just been walking, only higher. Next morning I started much earlier and with a water bottle. Fotis was already up and about when I passed his house.

"Exochori is my home village," he said. "But what you see now is just old people up there. The old Maniati culture is gone. We used to grow silkworms and our mothers made all our underclothes from it. Can you believe it? We were peasants in the most remote part of Europe, but we wore silk."

He tried to give me directions to the church, but it got so confusing that I just pretended to understand and resolved to ask along the way. As it happened, this was a useless strategy since the few old people I bumped into spoke no English, and my phrasebook was inexplicably silent on the important line, "Where are scattered the remains of the travel writer?"

In the end I came across a small white-washed shrine with a view of the sea. There was just room to enter, and inside a votive candle burned on a tray with some fresh flowers. A white dog appeared. I elected to call it the Chatwin Church. After a few minutes of contemplation I set off again, southwards past one of the war towers, a gorgeous forest monastery and finally the unspoilt hamlet of Castania, where the taverna owner marched me into the kitchen, pointed out the various dishes and then served a vast quantity of delicious food with a jug of rough wine. It took several strong coffees to get me moving again for the long tramp home.

Back in Kardamyli late that afternoon, Fotis was keen to hear of my walk, but he scoffed at my description of the Chatwin Church. "No, no! That is not it. Come on – I'll take you there."

"I'm a bit tired."

"Good God, we're not walking! In my car."

Soon we were on a longer, twisting route. Fotis pointed out landmarks and patches of land that his family owned. I asked about his ancestors.

"The Mani was always where people came to hide," he said. "Our family are said to have arrived when Byzantium fell to the Ottomans in 1453."

"They came from Constantinople?"

He nodded. "Our family tradition is that we were clowns for the Byzantine emperor." He smiled. "But I've no idea if that is true."

He slowed the car down. "Look. This is where you turn off the main road, between the school and the cemetery."

We pulled up in the shade of two pine trees then set off walking. We picked our way through some old stone houses, their walls overgrown with vines, their shutters closed.

"Holiday homes now," said Fotis. "Exochori people working in Athens."

Then we were on a grassy rill of land and I could see the church, a tiny Byzantine basilica, its rough stone walls and ancient pantiles crusted with lichens. Laid out before it was a wonderful tranquil panorama of the sea, its surface smooth as a sheet of silk. It was obvious why a traveller would want to come to rest here, overlooking the sea Homer's heroes had sailed.

I stood there for a long time. Fotis was searching for the key to the church, normally left in a crack or niche, but there was no sign of it and we gave up. Back in the car, I asked Fotis to point out the house of Paddy Leigh Fermor and glimpsed a low pantiled roof almost submerged in trees on a crag next to the sea.

"Is there no way to see it?"

He shrugged. "It's all shut up."

"Is there a beach?"

"Yes – a tiny one."

I memorised the spot. When Leigh Fermor came to the Mani he did some impressive wild swimming. To honour his adventurous spirit I felt I should swim around to his house and take a look. So next morning, before the heat of day, I entered the sea by the harbour and swam south down the rocky coast hunting for that tiny beach. I swam for what seemed a long time and had given up and turned back when I saw it: a little shingly beach with a single-storey house above. I swam closer until I could stand in the water.

It was a lovely place: deep verandas and stone walls under a pantile roof. Mosaics of pebbles had been made on a flight of steps. I called out but got no answer. The house was shuttered and quiet as though still in mourning. I waded up the beach and sat at the foot of the pebble path. I could see a colonnade with rooms off it, then a larger living room.

I thought of the years that Leigh Fermor had spent here: by all accounts he was a great host and storyteller. When I'd asked one old lady in the village if she had read any of his books, she'd laughed, "Why would any of us read his books? He told us all the stories himself!"

The last story had been that third volume of his epic walk across Europe, but he had never finished it, perhaps never would have. And now a great peace had descended on the place, a peace I didn't want to disturb. I walked back down to the water and swam out into the bay. Without thinking, I found myself heading for the island of Meropi, the one that those youths had swum to. I would explore the ruins of that Venetian castle.

How to do it
The trip was provided by Sunvil (020-8758 4758, sunvil.co.uk/greece), which has seven nights self-catering in a studio at Liakoto Apartments in Kardamyli, including flights from Gatwick to Kalamata and transfers, from £699pp. Walking tours of the Mani with guide Anna Butcher can be booked through Sunvil, which also has a nine-day all-inclusive walking tour of the Mani for £1,755pp

What to read
Artemis Cooper's biography, Patrick Leigh Fermor, An Adventure, will be published by John Murray on 11 October, price £25. To buy a copy for £20, including shipping, go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. Leigh Fermor never did fully finish writing the third part of his epic walk across pre-second-world-war Europe but John Murray will publish an uncompleted version of the book in 2013

"I felt like staying there forever" – Patrick Leigh Fermor on the Mani peninsula

Beyond the bars of my window the towers descended, their walls blazoned with diagonals of light and shade; and, through a wide gap, castellated villages were poised above the sea on coils of terraces. Through another gap our host's second daughter, wide-hatted and perched on the back of a wooden sledge and grasping three reins, was sliding round and round a threshing floor behind a horse, a mule and a cow – the first cow I had seen in the Mani – all of them linked in a triple yoke. On a bank above this busy stone disc, the rest of the family were flinging wooden shovelfuls of wheat in the air for the grain to fall on outstretched coloured blankets while the husks drifted away. Others shook large sieves. The sun which climbed behind them outlined this group with a rim of gold and each time a winnower sent up his great fan, for long seconds the floating chaff embowered him in a gold mist.
The sun poured into this stone casket through deep embrasures. Dust gyrated along the shafts of sunlight like plankton under a microscope, and the room was full of the aroma of decay. There was a rusty double-barrelled gun in the corner, a couple of dog-eared Orthodox missals on the shelf, and, pinned to the wall above the table, a faded oleograph of King Constantine and Queen Sophia, with King George and the Queen Mother, Olga Feodorovna, smiling with time-dimmed benevolence through wreaths of laurel. Another picture showed King Constantine's entry into re-conquered Salonika at the end of the Balkan war. On a poster, Petro Mavromichalis, the ex-war minister, between a pin-up girl cut-out from the cover of Romantzo and a 1926 calendar for the Be Smart Tailors of Madison Avenue, flashed goodwill from his paper monocle. Across this, in a hand unaccustomed to Latin script, Long live Uncle Truman was painstakingly inscribed. I felt like staying there
for ever.
• Extracted from Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, by Patrick Leigh Fermor (John Murray, £9.99) which is available from the Guardian Bookshop (guardianbookshop.co.uk) for £7.99, including P&P

The late author's beloved Moleskine seems to be having a profound influence on its tablet computer-based cousins

Bruce Chatwin has a lot to answer for. Specifically, he's responsible for a forthcoming initial public offering (IPO) on the Italian stock market. It all goes back to something he wrote in his book The Songlines. He had arrived in Australia and was setting up a work space in a caravan. "With the obsessive neatness that goes with the beginning of a project," he wrote, "I made three neat stacks of my 'Paris' notebooks. In France, these notebooks are known as carnets moleskines: 'moleskine', in this case, being its black oilcloth binding. Each time I went to Paris, I would buy a fresh supply from a papeterie in the Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie."

Chatwin goes on to relate how the notebooks were made by a small firm in Tours, the owner of which had died and whose heirs had sold the business. So he assumed that the source of his beloved notebooks had dried up. What he didn't know was that the business had been bought by a Milanese stationer who eventually began producing the notebooks again. And what he could not have known was that the business would one day be floated on the stock market (3 April, to be precise). The IPO could value the company at up to €560m (£473m).

Regular users of its products will find the information in the pre-IPO filings interesting. The price of a Moleskine notebook, for example, is at least double that of comparable products, which is why the company enjoys an operating margin – 41.7% – that would impress even the boys and girls at Apple. The explanation, of course, is that the basic ingredient of a Moleskine notebook – paper – is dirt cheap. (And it shows – as fountain-pen users discover very quickly.)

The reason Moleskine gets away with charging so much for such an indifferent artefact is that is it not so much selling a product as an ethos. Call it the Chatwin syndrome: the delusion that possessing the kind of notebook that Hemingway, Oscar Wilde or Picasso might have used bestows elan, panache and other desirable qualities upon the proud owner. And – who knows? – maybe they're right.

But before you rush out to buy the stock next month, consider this. There is another chic, expensive product out there which is likewise seen as conferring exalted status upon its proud owner. I refer to the Apple iPad. Granted, it is a lot more expensive than a Moleskine notebook. But on the other hand, when was the last time you saw a notebook that could allow you to watch YouTube videos, listen to Rolling Stones records, do your email and play Angry Birds?

What brings this to mind is the realisation that whereas everywhere I used to go in the course of what is laughingly called my work I met people who were toting Moleskine notebooks, now most of them have iPads. And – shock, horror! – they appear to be using them as notebooks! Sacre Bleu! as Hemingway (or was it Gertrude Stein?) used to say.

Worse still, some of the note-taking apps on this infernal device appear to be mimicking the Moleskine genre. Penultimate, for example, even has the temerity to reproduce the squared paper that is one of the Moleskine's specialities, not to mention the soft covers of the smaller Moleskine notebooks. And it enables one to have squared, lined and plain paper in the same virtual notebook!

Then there's the enigmatically named Paper app, which allows one to open an unlimited number of virtual notebooks, each of them with a virtual elastic band in classic Moleskine style.

And so it goes on. I've lost count of the number of note-taking apps that, in one way or another, draw their inspiration from the ancient paper notebooks that so entranced Chatwin. They all have the advantages of virtuality – the ability to expand a notebook on demand, for example, or to have different kinds of page-template in the same notebook. But they also have the disadvantages of a computing device, namely that – unless you're David Hockney – scribbling, writing or drawing on a glass slab is much more difficult than doing the same things on paper.

Maybe that is why the killer note-taking iPad app avoids all this skeuomorphic stuff and goes straight to what digital technology does best. SoundNote just puts up a lined page on which one can type notes, say, the discussion in a meeting. But it also provides a "record" button that creates an audio file which is synchronised with the notes. It's the one app I use all the time. And it does something that no Moleskine will ever be able to do.

Bruce Chatwin, the literary golden boy, was a born liar. At Sotheby's, where he was a youthful director, the expression "doing a Bruce" meant to fabricate an exotic provenance for a painting. Chatwin could make the wildest nonsense about himself credible, claiming he was the rosy cherub on the Glaxo baby food tins.

Bruce Chatwin by Nicholas Shakespeare
591pp, Harvill/Cape, £20

Bruce Chatwin, the literary golden boy, was a born liar. At Sotheby's, where he was a youthful director, the expression "doing a Bruce" meant to fabricate an exotic provenance for a painting. Chatwin could make the wildest nonsense about himself credible, claiming he was the rosy cherub on the Glaxo baby food tins.

Rarely has a British writer so elaborated his own legend. Chatwin liked to claim both a Romany and a refugee Huguenot pedigree for his grandmother. His American wife, the long-suffering Elizabeth, was fancifully descended from a New Orleans octoroon. In his last years Chatwin spread the rumour of his fatal bone-marrow disease; the cause, apparently, was a dubious slice of raw Cantonese whale. Or was it a rotten 1,000-year-old Chinese egg? Only close friends knew he had Aids. A virtuoso of mendacity, the author died in 1989 at the age of 48.

Chatwin was a marvellous writer but not always a great one. In some ways his life was his finest creation. "I once made the experiment of counting up the lies in the book I wrote about Patagonia", Chatwin confessed, adding impishly; "It wasn't in fact, too bad". His arresting appearance encouraged the mystique of a beautiful, footloose tramper. Chatwin was not especially interesting to look at (the photographer Eve Arnold said he was too boyish for real elegance or style) but many were drawn swooningly to him. And Chatwin used his periwinkle-blue eyes to seduce men as well as women.

Nicholas Shakespeare's diligent biography, Bruce Chatwin, has been eight years in the making and provides a fascinating account of the man behind the myth. Born in Sheffield in 1940, and reared in Birmingham, Chatwin was guarded about his suburban roots and his solicitor father.

The writer's progress from the West Midlands to Sotheby's Impressionist department is the Balzacian tale of a provincial boy made good. Chatwin's dandified persona first emerged at Marlborough public school, where he crooned Noël Coward lyrics and excelled as Mrs Candour in Sheridan's play School For Scandal. ("She swayed and sailed magnificently across the stage," enthused the Wiltshire Advertiser.) The schoolboy Chatwin was keen on flower-arranging, too, and won a Royal Leamington Spa Horticultural Society prize for a bowl of foliage "arranged for effect".

Nicholas Shakespeare might have anticipated in those flower displays Chatwin's own finely arranged prose. Chatwin was drawn to the glittering brilliance of Fabergé eggs and his writing has something of their bejewelled quality. His novel of Dahomeian derring-do, The Viceroy of Ouidah, was a rococo piece of candyfloss. Other Chatwin books have something of the auctioneer's flourish about them.

The English are by temperament mistrustful of reportage that reeks of craft and factual manipulation, and they have not always warmed to Chatwin. Hunter Davies objected to Chatwin's "big poncey foreign spreads" for the Sunday Times magazine (needless to say those pieces, collected in the volume What Am I Doing Here, are brilliant).

Paul Theroux enviously demoted Chatwin to "an embellisher of fact". If fact blurs into fiction in Chatwin's travel, however, it does so in the time-honoured manner of the louche antiquarian and writer Norman Douglas, who insisted: "Truth blends very nicely with untruth, my dear". Chatwin's legendary account of his involvement in a Benin coup is outrageous campery (as if Noel Coward had become a war correspondent), but it's the telling of the tale that counts. His great hosanna to nomadic culture, The Songlines, is really a series of non-fiction stories.

Chatwin's marriage to Elizabeth Chanler (apparently celibate) is explored with delicacy. A Catholic, Elizabeth remained devoted in spite of her husband's appalling behaviour and provocations. Chatwin's vanity, petulance, occasional cruelty and selfishness are unflinchingly documented here (in 23 years of marriage he never once did the washing up).

Ultimately, though, a picture emerges of an enigma who was on the run from both his homosexuality and his Englishness. Chatwin felt his British voice overlaid his personality "like a layer of slime", and looked abroad for inspiration. He had to keep moving. And he believed in the sacramental aspect of walking. Yet no one was such a delightful mimic or raconteur. "He was so colossally funny," Salman Rushdie said of Chatwin, "you'd be on the floor with pain."

This excellent if occasionally baggy biography is very far removed from Chatwin's own anecdotal concision. However, it is fantastically difficult to fashion a narrative out of the inchoate facts of someone's life. Shakespeare has managed to pull it off.

Bruce Chatwin
Nicholas Shakespeare
Vintage £7.99, pp593
Buy it at BOL

Nicholas Shakespeare's masterly biography of Bruce Chatwin charts the writer's celebrated wanderings - Patagonia, West Africa, Australia, Greece - alongside the fraught journey of his personal life. Garnering anecdotes from Chatwin's friends, including Salman Rushdie, Colin Thubron, Paul Theroux and Werner Herzog, as well as the notebooks and letters given to him by Chatwin's widow Elizabeth, Shakespeare builds a portrait of a man at once magnetic, difficult, brilliant, arrogant and troubled. 'Say almost anything of Bruce Chatwin and the opposite is also true,' Shakespeare asserts, neatly deflecting what might be the one quibble with his book - that the sheer volume of material prevents a crisper picture of the subject emerging.

Chatwin was born in 1940 to a middle-class family. While working at Sotheby's he met Elizabeth Chanler, whom he married in 1965 and remained married to until his death from Aids in 1989. His homosexual affairs continued, with Elizabeth's knowledge, throughout his marriage.

By a bizarre twist of fate, Chatwin's memorial service was held in Santa Sophia, Bayswater (he had converted to the Greek Orthodox Church) on the day the fatwa was announced on Rushdie. Halfway through the service, Paul Theroux leaned over and whispered: 'Well, Salman, I guess we'll be here for you next week.' By the end of the service, the world's press was clustered outside the church, the kind of irony you feel Chatwin might have appreciated.

The greatest success of this biography is that it kindles a desire to return to Chatwin's books, while illuminating those parts of his nomadic, unorthodox life that remained hidden to all but his closest friends.

Bruce Chatwin made his name as a hugely talented writer but, as his widow Elizabeth tells Stuart Jeffries, he was also a prolific photographer.

Bruce Chatwin was a best-selling author, travel writer, art collector, journalist, a married man and an active homosexual. Only after Chatwin's death from Aids in 1989, though, did it become clear that he was also a prolific photographer, with a collection of more than 3,000 images built up during his restless travelling.

In 1966, he told his bosses at Sotheby's that he would no longer be their connoisseur of impressionist art because appraising paintings had made him temporarily blind. He needed, he told them, to view distant horizons to help him see again, so went to the Sudan to live with nomadic tribes. Photography helped him to see again, and to use his painterly sensibility to create pictures. "The amazing thing was that you rarely saw him take a photograph," recalls Elizabeth Chatwin, his wife in a difficult marriage that lasted from 1965 until his death. "He was very quiet about it. He would whip out his Leica - which was the only camera he had - quickly take the picture, slip the camera into his pocket and walk on.

"I was the one who brought the film out to some remote place. I would join him somewhere where there wasn't film or there wasn't money or something and I would collect all these exposed films. They were developed way later. He didn't really look after them or put them in order. I did that."

Chatwin was more meticulous when he wrote. "Bruce was always cutting and cutting his writing. He always read out aloud to see if it read all right. It makes his stories awfully easy to read but awfully hard to write. The photographs were much less apparently considered."

She reckons that of the 3,000, "there are probably 200 which are terrific and another 1,200 which are OK and a lot of duds and there's no point keeping them". The colour photographs were shot on ASA 64-slide film.

Fifty prints, many of which have never been exhibited, go on show at the National Theatre in London later this month. Which is his widow's favourite? "I guess the one of the stupa [Buddhist monument] with the flags, outside Katmandu in Nepal. I went there with Bruce and I try to go back there regularly. Look at the bronze and copper tiles on the tower. The tower represents the connection to heaven and below is the round dome which represents the earth. We're looking up to heaven. He had a great eye - which isn't surprising for someone who was an expert on painting. In fact he often said he wanted to give up writing to become a painter.

"He never took happy snaps," says Elizabeth, who met her husband at Sotheby's, where she was a secretary. "He never thought of using the camera for recording domestic events. He never took pictures of friends or me. He'd take a picture of a flower, but never of me, not that I particularly wanted him to."

Chatwin took photographs of buildings, walls, planks, fabric, in remote parts of Mauritania, Greece, Nepal, Mali. "Even when he took a photograph of a group of west African tribal people, what interested him was the beauty of their robes. You see that picture?" she asks of a photograph of some Tuareg nomads taken in west Africa. "He's covering his face [with his hand] for the same reason that the Tuareg men, and not women, often wear veils that they never take off. Even there I think Bruce was more interested in the forms the people made rather than their culture."

Mostly Chatwin was interested in photographing buildings, often transforming modest homes into beautiful, formalist compositions. According to the critic David Sylvester: "Chatwin is a specialist, his subject architecture, and within that domain a sub-specialist. Chatwin's real passion is to reveal the beauty of more elemental structures." He loved to take pictures showing the nearest wall of a building at a precise right-angle to the line of vision, like the photographer Walker Evans. Sylvester wrote: "This frontality serves Chatwin to great effect in his characteristic close-ups of multicoloured walls. Much of the world's best photography has had a strong, often reciprocal, relationship to the painting of its time."

That, at least, is what one might see in one of the pictures to be exhibited of a house in a courtyard called Mali, Pise House. "I guess he just snuck his camera out and snapped that without asking permission," says Elizabeth. "He loved photography but felt the camera was a weapon, and so was careful not to be invasive. He needed to behave like that when he was taking pictures in Muslim countries where the attitude to photography is more suspicious."

Chatwin's writings and photographs have been dismissed as glibly exotic by some, and a Times Higher Education Supplement reviewer, under the headline The Fake with the Pert Rump, wrote: "All that self-love, arrogance, affectation, the whipped-up feeling for things - a mix of Jay Gatsby and Princess Diana with a designer rucksack."

His lover, Jasper Conran, said: "Probably there was no one Bruce loved more than himself." Possibly. But then Chatwin never turned that Leica on himself. Many others, though, were seduced to take photographs of this beautiful man. Susan Sontag wrote of him: "There are few people in this world who have the kind of looks which enchant and enthrall ... It isn't just beauty, it's a glow, something in the eyes. And it works on both sexes."

"I don't know why he didn't take pictures of anybody he knew," says Elizabeth, who is now a sheep farmer in Oxfordshire. "It's a conundrum, a paradox. Even the pictures I have of his parents were taken by other people." Did he really never photograph you? "Well, I remember him taking a picture of my back. But he was only interested in it at a formal level."

· The Alternative Nomad, photographs by Bruce Chatwin, is at the Olivier Theatre foyer, National Theatre, London SE1, from January 27 to March 29, 10am-11pm except Sundays.

Friend and confidant of Bruce Chatwin, Jean Rhys, VS Naipaul and Bruce Chatwin, Francis Wyndham has moved in English literature's most exalted circles. Now, as his own deliciously precise and funny writings are being republished, he talks to Rachel Cooke about his meetings with remarkable men and women

Praise a certain kind of novelist and he will smile in a way that says: 'Well, of course you enjoyed my book; it's by me.' Francis Wyndham is not this kind of novelist. Tell him that you enjoyed his slim novel, or his short stories, and his wide, rectangular face, which can look lugubrious in repose, will split in two in a delight so genuine you could almost warm your hands on it. 'Oh, I'm glad you thought that was funny!' he says, when I tell him that a line of his made me cry with laughter. 'It's so important for writing to be funny. Don't you think that, in life, things are sad and funny almost at the same time?' His hands flutter momentarily in the air, like tiny birds. 'In a kind of way, something doesn't exist until it is read. So I am always pleased if I hear someone did like it.' A pause. 'But then, I can also completely understand if someone doesn't get it.' Another pause. 'Though I don't think anyone's actually going to hate it.'

It's not only innate modesty that enables him to talk of his work in so politely halting a way. The unlikely arc of a long writing career has lent him what you might call perspective. Wyndham, who was born in 1924, wrote his first collection of stories, Out of the War, as a teenager but, rejected for publication, he put them away and forgot all about them until 1974, when they finally appeared between hard covers. Another decade passed. In 1985, a second collection appeared, Mrs Henderson. Then, in 1987, he published The Other Garden and, at the somewhat mature age of 63, he won the Whitbread First Novel Prize.

He followed this with a collection of his journalism, The Theatre of Embarrassment but, thereafter, silence reigned. The fiction fell slowly out of print. Until now. Next month, Picador will publish it again, in a single volume with an introduction by Wyndham's friend Alan Hollinghurst ('Exceptionally accomplished... a writer who never wastes a word or puts one wrong...'). How does this new - I refuse to say final - twist make Wyndham feel? 'Oh, I am terribly grateful. Things mostly don't get reprinted these days, unless they're famous and important. There could be something melancholy about it, but there isn't. So I'm just very grateful.'

Did the writing leave him or did he leave the writing? Neither, really. 'It would be lovely to think that I'd written a lot of books, instead of just these. But I believe that a lot of writers write too much. I don't mean that they shouldn't, but... I had jobs, you see. I had to sort of make a living. I had a few ideas. One or two things. Occasionally, I did try. But I didn't feel that I owed it to myself or to anyone else. When nothing happened, I didn't feel guilty about it.' While he concedes that 'it's rather embarrassing that The Other Garden remains my only novel', he also likes 'sitting still' far too much to do anything about it. A few years ago, his old friend Lucian Freud asked Wyndham to sit for him. 'He suddenly rang me up and said, "I want to see you." He came round at once in his Rolls and took me off to a restaurant. He was nervous. I thought it might be some histoire with David [Sylvester, the art critic, who was also a friend]. But then he said, "Will you sit for me?" I said of course. And I loved it. It was terribly interesting. We've plenty to talk about. He's wonderful company and the only way to see Lucian unless you're a beautiful young girl is to be painted by him. But it's also that I like sitting for a painting more than anything. I love sitting still, and that's what you have to do, and by doing it, you're helping this very talented person.'

In the gaps between his writing, Wyndham has made something of a career out of helping talented people. Over the years, it has fallen to him to be a first reader of manuscripts by, among others, VS Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Bruce Chatwin and, more recently, Edward St Aubyn. This, a literary career that has so far spanned six decades, and the fact that his maternal grandmother was Ada Leverson, the writer Oscar Wilde called 'the Sphinx', means that talking to him is not only fascinating but ghostly, too; he connects you to a past that you've previously heard about only via fat biographies. He is not a name dropper, but the names, nevertheless, tumble out: Henrietta Moraes, Sonia Orwell, Diana Melly...

At one point, I ask him about Rhys, whose literary executor he eventually became. A notorious drunk, was she as difficult as they say? 'People say she was always drunk, but she wasn't when I knew her. She had a ... light head. We'd have a cocktail, put Piaf on the gramophone and then we'd gossip. She was very egotistical, but since I was interested in her, that didn't matter. She'd talk about Ford or being a chorus girl.' It takes me a moment to grasp that when he says Ford, he means Ford Madox Ford, the author of The Good Soldier, with whom Rhys had a brief but seismic love affair. See what I mean? It's enough to give anyone goose bumps.

Francis Wyndham lives above a dry cleaner's on a busy road in west London, surrounded by books and pictures. It's not exactly where you expect him to live - he comes from rather posh stock - but his attitude to it is of a piece with his personality, which is to say that he sees the good in everything: 'I am rather deaf, so I don't notice the noise.' He grew up in Wiltshire, in the dreamy rural isolation that he describes so beautifully in The Other Garden. His father, a retired colonel, came from a grand family (he was connected to the Wyndhams who owned Petworth House in Sussex, though I'm not sure exactly how) and was much older than his mother, with the result that everything is 'a bit lopsided in my family'.

His father's first wife, who died in the flu epidemic that followed the First World War, had given her husband a family long before Francis and his brother came along: two sons, one of whom had been killed in the war, and a daughter, thanks to whom he had met Francis's mother; the two young women were friends, having both been nurses in the war. In Mrs Henderson, a rather revelatory book, I think, he tells the stories of this half-brother and sister. The brother was a painter ('a bit Bohemian; he drank') whose elder daughter was writer Joan Wyndham, and whose younger daughter, Ingrid, married first a Guinness, then Paul Channon, the Tory politician. The sister fell in love with a well-known black actress of the day, and went to live with her in connubial bliss in Harlem.

'My father was more like a grandfather, really,' he says. 'He died when I was about 16. But I was very fond of him.' But it was his mother's side of the family that had the greater influence on him, especially Ada, who was difficult and yet always so alive to the world, even as she grew older (after the death of her friend Wilde, a generation of younger men - Harold Acton, Osbert Sitwell, Ronald Firbank - sought her out, seeing her as a fascinating survivor of the faded Yellow Book past).

'I was very glamoured by the fact that she was a writer. I was only nine when she died, but I do remember her, and I adored her - and later, I slithered into that literary world, which she was in, too.'

After Eton - 'I wasn't bullied, it wasn't David Copperfield; I just didn't want to be there' - he went up to the desolate, empty Oxford of the war, spending just a year there before he was called up. Was he full of dread at what would happen next? 'Not really. One didn't allow oneself to think about what was happening on various fronts. Occasionally, when one was in London, and there were buzz bombs, it was rather exciting, though it sounds awful to say.' Besides, in the end, he saw no action. 'I was at the Britannia Barracks in Norwich, where the army doctor, I discovered later, was known as the Butcher. I kept on going sick. He thought I was pretending. Then I fell off the bars in the gym and broke my ankle. In the convalescent home, they found I had pleurisy and that it was of tubercular origin, at which point I was out.'

He thinks he may have caught the infection from the woman on whom he based the mysterious Kay, heroine of The Other Garden, a painting of whom hangs on his wall to this day; a woman who is more than the narrator's friend, yet less than her lover, and who, thanks to her own TB, dies tragically young.

Though he never went back to Oxford, soon after he began writing reviews for the TLS, whose fiction editor was Anthony Powell. 'It was a very Grub Street-George Gissing sort of a life - you know, selling your review copies. There was this place on the Strand we all went to. It was very embarrassing; sometimes - you'd see the author of the book you were selling.' Then, in 1953, he made a resolution that he should get a proper job. So he did, in publishing. First, he worked for a man called Derek Verschoyle, a character straight out of Muriel Spark's A Far Cry From Kensington (i.e. a fly-by-night), and later for André Deutsch. He was a reader. One day, he was sitting in his reading room when Diana Athill, then an editor at Deutsch, came in and asked him to look at something by one VS Naipaul. 'Yes, I made friends with Vidia, and with Jean,' he says, now. 'But I don't want to go on boasting about this.' Oh, go on. Boast away! 'Well, in the case of Jean, I thought she was dead. I'd shown her books to Diana, who had loved them, but said we couldn't reprint. Why did I think she was dead? Julian Maclaren-Ross [Soho diarist and dandy] had told me she was dead - she'd died in an asylum or sanitorium or something - and stupidly, I believed him. Then she was discovered! [By Athill, in the Radio Times, improbable as this may sound.] So I wrote to her and she wrote back and said she was writing something, and this was Wide Sargasso Sea. She would send it to me as she was writing it, bit by bit. It was so exciting. I know that she was difficult, that she had her rages, but I only ever witnessed one rage and that was about being old. I was very moved by it. She knew I was a great fan of her writing. I think she knew, too, that she was good and that quite a lot of people couldn't see that she was good. So we had all that unspoken between us. She was a bit frail, like an actress. Sonia Orwell and I used to stay in a hotel near where she lived in Devon and take her out. She lived in a prefab kind of house. She didn't want a biography but, in the end, I betrayed her and allowed one.' He sighs. 'I know why she didn't. She didn't come out of it well.'

Wyndham left Deutsch to join Queen magazine (Mark Boxer, its art editor, was a friend); he was its theatre critic, then its literary editor. Then, in 1964, he followed Boxer to the Sunday Times magazine and began a new life editing juicy journalism and writing interviews; he often worked with Snowdon, still a friend. Uh oh. I reviewed the new biography of Snowdon; he sounds awful.

'Yes, I saw your review,' says Wyndham, sweetly. 'It's hard to explain. He's fascinating to be with, though it's true that he never reads a book. Often, we used to go on assignments and he'd never heard of the person. "Do tell me who this Tolkien is," he'd say. But I rather loved that.'

It was Wyndham who brought Bruce Chatwin, then just a 'brilliant young person at Sotheby's', to the magazine as its artistic adviser and it was Wyndham who encouraged him to write, commissioning him to write a piece about Madame Vionnet. What was he like? 'I absolutely loved him. I found him life-enhancing. You wouldn't see him for ages, then he would just turn up. He was a bit like Jean; he would talk about what he wanted to talk about. It was a monologue, but it was a monologue that I wanted to hear.'

Did Wyndham know when Chatwin, now famous for his exaggerations, was telling the truth? 'Well, I don't really like travel books and Bruce is famous as a travel writer. So when people say he invented a lot of In Patagonia - that's probably why I liked it.'

His other great friend from this time, though he can't remember exactly when he met her, was Henrietta Moraes, the model whom Francis Bacon painted 16 times. During her period as an unsuccessful cat burglar (she was also a drug addict and alcoholic), it fell to Wyndham to guarantee her bail. 'I met her at a party. When I first knew her, she was beautiful, adventurous, but vulnerable. She became a liability after a time. She and her boyfriend burgled a house in Hampstead, and then passed out on the Heath with what they'd stolen. But when she appeared in court, she came over all Francis Bacon to the judge. [He adopts a camp Cockney sort of voice]. "Ooh, I don't like you, dear! I don't fancy you!" Once, she was on a shoplifting charge. She'd taken something from Wallis. Well, she was outraged. "As if anyone would hoist from there!" But she had, of course. It did get...' A bit much? 'Yes. But she was sensitive. She gave me a holiday in the end. We remained friends to the end, and I helped her with her book [of memoirs]. I went on loving Henrietta.'

Did he know Bacon? 'Yes, but I wasn't at the heart of that scene. I don't think Bacon liked me and I didn't buy the whole thing. I'm not certain of his greatness.'

Wyndham finally left the Sunday Times in 1980. He was ready to leave; he had ideas for more of the stories that eventually became Mrs Henderson. But still, this was a difficult time. His mother died and he gave up smoking. He entered a kind of thoughtful retirement - sometimes writing, but mostly not - which has continued ever since. He lives alone, but his unerring capacity for friendship seems to have protected him from the things that sometimes happen to those who live alone; he is still resolutely in the world, awake to its possibilities in a way that many older people are not. Does he despise being old? 'I think I always was! I think it rather suits me. For some people, the point of them is that they are young: Jean, Henrietta. But not me. Some people get very bitter when they get older; they hate modern painting or whatever. Not me. And I like an excuse for not doing things. I've always been one for saying, "Oh, shall we just not bother?"' He laughs.

I don't know if there have been love affairs, unrequited or otherwise. Probably. But there is a marvellous story in Mrs Henderson in which the narrator becomes so desperate to avoid the concerned yet needy phone calls of his pals following the death of his mother that he absents himself temporarily from their incessant ringing by pretending to be involved in an affair. For the benefit of the friend who thinks he's gay, he makes up a male lover; for the friend who believes him to be straight, he invents a girl. With funny results. Does he look back at his life, so amazingly rich and full, with astonishment? 'Oh, yes. I have been very lucky. Of course, there have been long periods of my life when nothing seemed to happen at all. But I tried to put those in my work. Rather a lot of life is spent in a kind of limbo. '

For the first time since we have been talking, his hands are now still, clasped prayerfully, perhaps in thanks that, with the publication of his collected work, the latest of these periods has now been triumphantly punctuated.

· The Other Garden and Collected Stories will be published by Picador on 5 September

Francis Wyndham: A life

Born Francis Guy Percy Wyndham in London, 1924. Worked as a staff writer at the Sunday Times (1964-1980) and as an editor at André Deutsch. Credited in the 1950s with the rediscovery of Jean Rhys, whose letters he also published after her death.

Key works Out of the War (1974), a short-story collection written during his teens; Mrs Henderson and Other Stories (1985); The Other Garden (1987), which won the Whitbread First Novel Award; The Theatre of Embarrassment (1991), a collection of essays.

He says: 'What I've always wanted to do in fiction is to write about the hours and hours and hours, the enormous proportion of life which is spent in a kind of limbo, even in people's active years. It seems to me that it isn't sufficiently celebrated.'

They say: 'He belongs in a tradition of social comedy going back through Henry James to Jane Austen' - Alan Hollinghurst
Imogen Carter

Bruce Chatwin's letters are as much a performance as anything else he wrote, says Blake Morrison

Does anyone read Bruce Chatwin these days? His friend and biographer Nicholas Shakespeare reports a conversation in Australia in 2001, when a young journalist asked: "Who was Bruce Chatwin?" And another generation has since emerged who are even less likely to have heard of him.

In the late 80s, such a fate would have been unthinkable. Blond, good-looking and charismatic, Chatwin was at the height of his reputation. The Songlines (17 years in the making) topped the bestseller list in 1987; Utz (completed in a few months) was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1988. His mysterious death the following year, at 48, only added to the allure. Tom Maschler, who also published Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Martin Amis, thought him a greater talent than any of them.

Why has Chatwin's star faded so quickly? Allegations of coldness, snobbery, humourlessness and fabrication haven't helped. Nor have the disavowals of those, like Barry Humphries, who were once his friends. Shakespeare is baffled, nevertheless, that a man whose work was a precursor of the internet – "a connective superhighway without boundaries" – should have fallen into neglect. His hope is that this collection of letters – put together with Chatwin's widow, Elizabeth – can turn things round.

"Chatwin's correspondence reveals much more about himself than he was prepared to expose in his books," he says. Elizabeth agrees: "The letters are the only unreworked writing of his." An unguarded writer certainly ought to be a more knowable writer. But Chatwin enjoyed being an enigma ("I don't believe in coming clean"), and his letters are as much a performance as anything else he wrote, just less polished. When he does let the mask slip to reveal, for example, how eager a socialite he was ("lunch with Noël Coward on Friday", "Escorting Mrs Onassis to the opera next Thursday"), the effect isn't very endearing. Born in a well-to-do Midlands family, Chatwin was sent to boarding school at the age of seven, and the first letters here, to his parents, date from that time. Though he was no precocious literary talent, there are already signs of his consuming passions: a demand for a Romany travel book and an anthology called The Open Road at eight; enthusiasm for a film about Australian cattle-drivers; and later, at 17, the purchase of a Louis XVI chair. More surprising is his talent for boxing. But then Chatwin was always tougher than he appeared, not least in matters of the heart.

He was a tough bargainer, too, "a rather hard-nosed business pro", as he put it; that and his love of objets d'art made Sotheby's a logical career choice. He worked there for seven years, travelling widely while he did. When he isn't gushing over his latest acquisition, his idiom might be that of any other gilded youth. "Had an amusing time in Paris & Rome"; "Weather marvellous"; "This island is absolute paradise". Only in an account of a trip to Afghanistan is there a hint that travel writing might be his forte.

It was at Sotheby's that he met Elizabeth. He proposed to her in Paris, in the Louvre, a romantic gesture. But there isn't much romance in the letter he sent telling a friend about it ("The deed is done and in about three months I'll no longer be a free man"), or in his letters to Elizabeth herself: "My dearest Liz" is about as amorous as he gets. "You do not find pining lovers among the Gypsies," he once wrote, and even during their engagement his approach was briskly practical: "Give up all this nonsense of a deep freeze, do not deprive me of the pleasure of eating fresh food in its due season," he urged, letting her know whose job it would be to run the kitchen.

The marriage came as a shock to friends and colleagues, some of whom supposed that the affluence of Elizabeth's American family must be a factor: as a wedding present, her mother gave them £17,000, enough to buy a Gloucestershire farmhouse set in 47 acres. But Chatwin himself wasn't poor, and his friends were full of largesse ("We are invited to Glenveagh for the stalking in Oct. Or would you prefer Sir James Dundas's fishing lodge opposite Mull?"). Perhaps the real attraction was the emotional security she offered: like his mother, she loved listening to the stories he told when he returned from gallivanting about the globe. "People used to ask me how I felt about his endless absences from home," she writes, "but I knew he was working; he had to be free."

Within a year of marrying he'd quit Sotheby's to read archaeology at Edinburgh University: "Change is the only thing worth living for," he explained, before abandoning the degree halfway through. He couldn't stick anywhere for long, not even London: "I find it fine for three weeks, but thereafter WHAT IS THERE TO DO?" Until Francis Wyndham found Chatwin a place on the Sunday Times magazine he was (as one friend put it) a compass without a needle. He left that job, too, after three years. But in the meantime he learned to write. "He is running away from himself by travelling," his archaeology professor, Stuart Piggott, wrote. But in running away Chatwin was also being true to himself and true to his vision of the nomadic nature of human beings. Travel didn't mean roughing it or embracing an alternative lifestyle. "I am fed [sic] to the back teeth by happy hippie hashish culture (jail is the answer)," he wrote, dismissing 60s dropouts as mere vagrants. He was a home-owner, after all, with a country farm and a London flat, and when travelling he liked to be put up in style: whether Tuscan towers, Greek villas or Indian palaces didn't matter so long as he was properly catered for. "When's lunch?" he'd ask, and when he moved on would offer some token sum to cover his expensive telephone bills.

More serious offence was caused when he stayed with his cousin Monica in Peru and copied pages of her father's journal for his book In Patagonia; he claimed, with some justice, that she had given him permission, but he knew a good story when he saw it and wasn't altogether frank in telling her how much of it he'd lifted.

By 1980, Elizabeth's patience with him had also worn thin ("I was furious with him, totally fed up and exasperated that he took me for granted") and they separated. How much she knew of his affairs with men isn't touched on. Nor do we learn anything about them here: his letters to lovers were either destroyed, or were never written, or where they've survived are blandly circumspect. Sex is the great void here, along with passion. Which isn't to say that Chatwin lacked feelings: his grief at the death of his friend Penelope Betjeman was genuine, as was his attachment to his parents. As for Elizabeth, theirs has not been an easy marriage, he told her mother, "but it survives everything because neither of us has loved anyone else".

In 1986 he was diagnosed with Aids. In letters to friends he claimed to have caught a rare fungus of the bone marrow "known only among 10 Chinese peasants and the corpse of a killer whale cast up on the shores of Arabia". Much less was known about Aids in those days, and Chatwin was desperate to protect his parents from the truth. But what also terrified him was the thought of dying a stereotypical death, one that would identify him as just one more casualty of the Aids epidemic. His frantic tales about killer whale corpses or fungal dust inhaled in a Yunnan bats' cave were a way of exoticising himself, much as his books exoticise the places he visited and the people he met.

At best, a disdain for ordinariness strengthens his writing. But at worst it just seems silly, as when he reports what he's been up to in Patagonia: "I have sung 'Hark the Herald Angels Sing' in Welsh . . . I have dined with a man who knew Butch Cassidy . . . I have discussed the poetics of Mandelstam with a Ukrainian doctor missing both legs." Would discussing Mandelstam with someone who isn't a double-amputee be any less interesting? For Chatwin, clearly, it would.

This is a handsome book, full of informative passages from Shakespeare, illuminating quotes from friends and wonderfully laconic and deflating footnotes from Elizabeth. But the Chatwin who wrote the letters is no truer or more candid than the Chatwin who wrote travel books and fiction. And the books are more engaging and more alive.

Blake Morrison's The Last Weekend is published by Chatto & Windus.

My Father's Fortune by Michael Frayn, Shades of Greene by Jeremy Lewis and the Letters of Bruce Chatwin

"Often funny, sometimes painful, but always exquisitely well written, it reveals the extraordinariness that can lurk in even the most ordinary of lives." Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in the Sunday Telegraph enjoyed Michael Frayn's memoir My Father's Fortune, "a fitting tribute to the sort of figure who usually slips between the cracks of the historical record". "This is a slightly unusual book – a kind of print version of . . . Who Do You Think You Are?", according to Anthony Howard in the New Statesman. "It is, as one would expect from so accomplished a writer, beautifully done. Yet, what matters in a book of this kind is not just the domestic detail, but the general background of the lost world against which it is written. Here, the author is remarkably strong." Peter Kemp in the Sunday Times was laudatory: "The book, for all its allusions to the mistiness of memory, is a masterpiece of stylistic, emotional, psychological and sociological exactness . . . it adroitly modulates between humour and tragedy, ruefulness and celebration, intellectual keenness and elegiac depths of feeling . . . Frayn has never written with more searching brilliance."

"There are obvious problems in writing a group biography if the group covers a wide range of success and failure, including one figure of international reputation." Patrick Marnham in the Spectator had a mixed reaction to Jeremy Lewis's Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English Family. "It's a massive undertaking," wrote John Walsh in the Independent, "a fluent sociopolitical history of the British intelligentsia in the 20th century's most turbulent years . . . this hugely detailed, exhaustively researched family saga makes you marvel, again and again, at the strangeness of this very English family, while leaving you fervently grateful you're not actually related to them." "The drawback to Lewis's painstaking work is that it can become tedious," suggested Hugh MacDonald in the Herald. "He is conscientious but his enviable briskness can desert him in certain chapters. However, Lewis has on occasions stepped back to look at the big picture in a book that is strange, oddly engaging and breathtaking in its uncovering of the magnificently trivial and the deeply profound."

"Chatwin's conversation was entirely unrehearsed, but he was best on ground of his own choosing, uninterrupted" remembered Robin Lane Fox in the Financial Times reviewing Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin, compiled and edited by Nicholas Shakespeare and Elizabeth Chatwin. "I am quoted in the book as saying to Shakespeare: 'I absolutely deny to the end of my days that Bruce was a fraud, a poseur and a sham.' After reading all these letters I will go on denying it. He had a penetrating mind, fast-moving like a magpie." "For all his absurdity, his books remain highly readable," decided Philip Hensher in the Spectator. "He was a reporter of considerable talent, who had the wit to go to some very interesting places. These letters are performances, as they were always intended to be, and there is not much separating the style of those to his wife or intimates from those to his agent or publisher . . . What emerges from this self-portrait is not the intellectual giant he was often thought to be – his knowledge was extensive and abstruse, but unsystematic and frequently cranky. Rather, he looks like that very familiar figure whom we ought to regard with forbearance: the young man on the make".

This collection reveals how hard Bruce Chatwin worked to create an aura of effortlessness, says Adam Mars-Jones

Bruce Chatwin lived by a myth of effortlessness which in some respects worked against him. It was tempting to think that someone so reliant on flair had come to the compound genre – not fiction nor travelogue nor memoir nor anthropological treatise – of his most characteristic works, In Patagonia and The Songlines, with the same unerring instinct that led him, in an antique shop in Ludlow, to zero in on an unimpressive object resembling a walking stick. It turned out to be one of the flagpoles from a doge's barge.

The main service this collection of letters does is to dispel that idea. Chatwin worked hard at his effortlessness, and felt his way over numerous drafts to the hybrid forms that satisfied him. He had joined Sotheby's straight from school in 1959, though he tried to make up for his lack of further education by studying archaeology at Edinburgh in his late 20s; he didn't finish the course there. Colleagues at Sotheby's had no inkling of any literary ambition, one of them saying: "He didn't appear to be able to string two words together on paper." Thanks to Francis Wyndham's intuition in 1972 that he would be an asset to the Sunday Times, then having one of its adventurous phases, he was encouraged to spread his wings journalistically.

So what came first in his development was a romance and a rapport with objects: he bought his first piece of antique French furniture in his teens. Then the object became something whose uniqueness must be properly distilled for the purposes of an auction house catalogue. At Edinburgh, he improved his historical sense and his technical knowledge, though academic frameworks were never allowed to inhibit leaps of faith. Finally, at the Sunday Times, he had to confront the reality of deadlines and a mass readership. It all adds up to an enviable apprenticeship, though Chatwin never felt entirely at ease with his portfolio of accomplishments.

Many of these letters fed into Nicholas Shakespeare's 1999 authorised biography and were quoted there, to the point of suggesting the assessment, deadly in its Johnsonian symmetry, that most of what is good here is not new, while what is new is not good. The description Chatwin gives his mother in 1963 of a market in Herat, in Afghanistan, selling vintage western dresses is the liveliest thing in the volume: "Gowns that could have been worn by Mary Pickford, shiny black velvet with no back, or by Clara Bow, red lace and bead fringes, Jean Harlow, flamingo pink crepe off the shoulder with sequin butterflies on the hips, Shirley Temple, bows and pink lace, the folk weave skirts they square-danced in, the crinolines they waltzed in, fiery sheaths they tangoed in, utility frocks they won the war in, the New Look, the A line, the H line, the X line, all are there, just waiting for some Afghan lady to descend from her mud-built mountain village and choose the dress of her dreams all to be concealed under her yashmak." It appeared, though, in the biography. Conversely, the little trove of letters and postcards to Susan Sontag, which was recovered just as the manuscript of this book was being delivered to its publisher, doesn't tell us how he managed to put a spell on Sontag (what a coup to captivate that chatelaine of seriousness!), only how he kept the magic ticking over.

Chatwin had already proposed a book about nomadism to Tom Maschler, his eventual editor, before his stint at the Sunday Times, though he hadn't been able to get the tone right at that time; in effect this was the first draft, or anti-draft, of The Songlines. It's something of a cheat to include this 1970 proposal in a book of correspondence, since it was Maschler's tactic to reassure inexperienced writers by asking them to describe a book in letter form; nevertheless, this is a valuable document. It shows that there was a personal element from the start of the project ("Why do I become restless after a month in a single place, unbearable after two?"), and also that Chatwin still had plenty of academic pseudo-objectivity to shed. He says of nomads that "much of their time is passed in gross idleness, particularly the Australian Aborigines whose dialectic arguments know no bounds of complication". He didn't make his first visit to Australia for another dozen years.

Both of the editors of this book have a large stake in Chatwin's legacy. His wife, Elizabeth, the child of two prominent American clans, met him at Sotheby's in late 1961. It's hard to shake off the feeling that for him she had a provenance as well as a value. She seems to have accepted her husband's bisexuality, although they had a three-year separation from 1980. Their marriage wasn't a failure, but perhaps only because she wouldn't allow it to be. She corrects facts in Chatwin's letters, which is, of course, part of an editor's duties, but when she insists that he didn't spend a week decorating their house, only two days, or that he has retrospectively appropriated a lung infection she had in India, she seems still to be caught up in the marriage, understandably preferring wrangling to silence.

Nicholas Shakespeare met Chatwin in 1983, inviting him to appear on Frank Delaney's highbrow chat show. His admiration has survived that drastic test – the writing of a biography – and he describes Chatwin in his introduction as "a precursor of the internet: a connective super-highway without boundaries, with instant access to different cultures", which seems a little strained.

The profoundest letter in the book was not written by Chatwin but to him, and it's anyone's guess how it was received. In July 1988, Chatwin, very ill with what he didn't want to think was Aids, was in a state described as hypomanic. Michael Ignatieff wrote to him after a visit which left him full of "dark and strange thoughts… It's quite possible that you experience this apparent frenzy from inside some deep calm… But those who love you…and see only the outside… see someone haunted and in breathless pursuit…. I'm not sure it is among the offices of friendship to convey my sense of foreboding & disquiet at how I saw you. I may just be expressing a friend's regret at losing you to a great wave of conviction, to some gust of certainty, that leaves me here, rooted to the spot, and you carried far away."

It's doubtful that any such letter can succeed in making someone see himself from the outside, but it's an infinitely honourable attempt. If it seems impossible at this distance to capture the personal impact that Bruce Chatwin made, it's just as impossible to dismiss it.

Paul Theroux, William Dalrymple, Kari Herbert, Colin Thubron and many more writers tell us about the travel book that most influenced their own life and work

Colin Thubron

Ionia: a Quest, by Freya Stark
Travel books, like others, change perspective as we grow older, and I can see now that Freya Stark's Ionia: a Quest is an enchanting but disturbingly moralistic account of a journey that this remarkable woman took in the early 1950s along the west coast of Turkey. In those days these ancient Greek cities were virtually unvisited. In 55 sites Stark encountered only one other tourist. Relying largely on the witness of ancient writers, she mused among the ruins, deducing their cities' character from them as if the stones themselves might speak. It all sounds too dreadful. But such was the beauty of her writing, and the delicacy of her thought, that the result is captivating. It persuaded me, at the start of my career, how richly landscape and history may interfuse, and how deeply (and sometimes dangerously) a quiet attention can fire the imagination.
• Colin Thubron's latest book is To a Mountain in Tibet (Chatto, £16.99)

William Dalrymple

In Patagonia, by Bruce Chatwin
When Bruce Chatwin died in 1989, at 48, he had published just five books: a small yet dazzling output. His first, In Patagonia, is a metaphysical exploration of "the uttermost part of the earth". It is in the eyes of many his best, though it was not his most commercially successful (Songlines outsold it many times over). But it is probably the most influential travel book written since the war. Its opening page – telling of Bruce's childhood discovery of a piece of dinosaur skin in his grandmother's cupboard – is possibly the most imitated passage in modern travel literature.

Chatwin had three matchless gifts: he was a thinker of genuine originality; a reader of astonishing erudition; and a writer of breathtaking prose. All three talents shine brightly on almost every page of In Patagonia, but it is his bleak chiselled prose that remains his most dazzling: he had a quite remarkable ability to evoke place, to bring to life a whole world of strange sounds and smells in a single unexpected image, to pull a perfect sentence out the air with the ease of a child netting a butterfly.

The pendulum of fashion has swung against Chatwin, and it is now unhip to admire his work. Yet to his fans, Chatwin remains like a showy bird of paradise amid the sparrows of the present English literary scene, and it is impossible to reread In Patagonia without a deep stab of sadness that we have lost the brightest and most profound writer of his generation. He also knew and loved the Islamic world – and such writers are now badly in demand. God only knows what Chatwin might have produced had he still been writing, now when we need him most.
• William Dalrymple's latest book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (Bloomsbury, £8.99), won the first Asia House Literature Award, in 2010

Sara Wheeler

A Winter in Arabia, by Freya Stark
A Winter in Arabia describes Freya Stark's 1937 journey through the Hadhramaut, a region in today's Yemen. A guest of the tribes, she conjures little girls in magenta silk trousers, their silver anklets frilled with bells; the drumbeats of the Sultan's procession; and veiled women bearing gifts of salted melon seeds. The book is a heady mix of hardship and luxury, scholarship and mischief, loneliness and intimacy, and the oppositions give the prose its strength.

Stark glittered in the drawing rooms of London and loved a party; having drunk her fill, she'd run off to peek out at the world from a solitary tent. Isn't that the best kind of life imaginable? She did not try to be an honorary man in a field still woefully dominated by that species. "There are few sorrows," she wrote, "through which a new dress or hat will not send a little gleam of pleasure, however furtive." Indeed.
• Sara Wheeler's latest book is Access all Areas (Jonathan Cape, £18.99)

Paul Theroux

The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
This was Cherry-Garrard's only book: it thrilled me when I first read it, and it still inspires me, for its quiet power to evoke a place and time, for its correction of history (the unsparing portrait of Captain Scott), most of all for its heroism. Cherry was only 23 when he joined the Scott Antarctic Expedition in 1912. Scott and four of his men (but not Cherry) died on the way back from the Pole. But in the Antarctic winter of 1911 Cherry trudged through the polar darkness and cold (-60C) to find an Emperor penguin rookery. This was "the worst journey". He wrote: "If you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore. If you are a brave man you will do nothing; if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery. Some will tell you that you are mad … And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal. If you march your winter journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg."
• Paul Theroux's latest book is The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99)

Kapka Kassabova

The Global Soul, by Pico Iyer
Pico Iyer was the writer who showed me how to take the Open Road (also the title of his sublime study of the Dalai Lama). Iyer's cultural and spiritual quest is driven by his own hybridity. Of all his books, it was The Global Soul that felt like the blow to the head I needed in 2001, when grappling with my own cultural and spiritual alienation. It's a book that launches the 21st century, and if this sounds grand, he is grand. In The Global Soul he goes to "in-between" places – airports, malls, the no-place of jet lag – and introduces the species of soul who has multiple passports, lives in several countries, and has nightmares not of the "Where am I?" variety, but of the more neurotically advanced "Who am I?" kind.
• Kapka Kassabova's latest book, Twelve Minutes of Love is out in November (Portobello Books, £18.99)

William Blacker

Works of Patrick Leigh Fermor
It was not just the books of Patrick Leigh Fermor – notably Between the Woods and the Water about Romania – that inspired me, but also the man. He was the quintessential free spirit. He didn't bother with university, but at the age of 18 set off, on foot, across Europe, hoping for the best. His journey lasted five years and led to extraordinary wartime adventures and a series of breathtaking books, which are among the masterpieces of 20th-century literature. The success he made of his brand of non-conformity should fill all would-be wanderers with hope. Read about his life, read his books, and if you are not similarly inspired and exhilarated then, as Kim said, "Run to your mothers' laps, and be safe."
• William Blacker's latest book is Along the Enchanted Way: A Story of Love and Life in Romania (John Murray, £10.99)

Richard Grant

Great Plains, by Ian Frazier
Reading this book for the first time, in London in 1989, inspired me to spend a summer rambling around the American west. The second time I read it 12 years later, I was stuck trying to write my first book. The subject was American nomadism. I had a box of notebooks about my encounters with modern-day nomads – freight train riders, cowboys, tramps, hippies, footloose retirees in motorhomes – and three shelves of research books about nomads in American history. How to connect all this into a whole? I saw that Frazier had solved a similar problem by using himself as a character – something I'd been resisting – and infusing his book with a sense of wonder. I sat down again with something to strive for.
• Richard Grant's latest book is Bandit Roads: Into the Lawless Heart of Mexico (Abacus, £9.99)

Pico Iyer

Destinations, by Jan Morris
Suddenly you're not just seeing but hearing, feeling, sensing Washington, Panama, South Africa, as they look today but also as they may seem a hundred years from now. How many writers have been able to take a place and weave a thousand details and feelings and moments into a single near-definitive portrait, which almost seems to stand outside of time? Exactly one: Jan Morris. For 60 years she's been blending acute insights and warm intuitions into uniquely fluent, imperturbable and evocative descriptions. She's not so much traveller as historian, witness, master of classical English prose and impressionist all at once.

You can find these graces in all of her books, of course, but for me the long-form essays in Destinations: Essays from Rolling Stone offer the best (biggest) space in which her eloquence, shrewdness and wisdom can take flight. Read her on Los Angeles, Manhattan or New Delhi and you'll never want to read anyone else on those places again.
• Pico Iyer wrote the foreword to 100 Journeys for the Spirit, a collection of writings from authors including Michael Ondaatje, Alexander McCall Smith and Andrew Motion (Watkins £14.99)

Jason Webster

The Colossus of Maroussi, by Henry Miller
As the second world war was breaking out, Henry Miller visited Greece at the invitation of his friend Lawrence Durrell and travelled around it for several months. The result was The Colossus of Maroussi, at once a love letter to a great world civilisation and a poetic expression of Miller's mystical musings. There is little in the way of traditional "travel" here: the sights, smells and sounds are present only inasmuch as they trigger feelings and emotions. This book taught me that real travel writing must involve an "inner" element, either by detailing an inner journey or by creating a resonance to which the reader can respond. Take that away and you're left with either reportage or a guidebook.
• Jason Webster's most recent travel book is Sacred Sierra: A Year on a Spanish Mountain (Vintage, £8.99)

Robert Penn

Full Tilt, by Dervla Murphy
I started reading Full Tilt (Eland, £12.99) on a grey morning, wearing a grey suit, in a crowd of grey faces on the London Underground. Several Central Line stops later, I'd raced with Dervla Murphy and her bicycle, Rosinante, from Dunkirk to Delhi, and made the decision to quit my career as a lawyer and cycle round the world.

Funny, ingenuous, gently erudite and intrepid (she kept a .25 revolver in her saddlebag) Full Tilt is the best kind of adventure story, and a clarion call to "travel for travel's sake". I realised that you don't need a wealth of knowledge and experience to embark on a journey like this. If you believe human wisdom may be measured by the respect we pay to the unattainable, the mysterious or simply the different, and have a flair for getting on with people, you're ready.
• Robert Penn's book, It's All About the Bike (Penguin, £8.99), is out now

Tim Butcher

Journey Without Maps, by Graham Greene
Graham Greene's first travel book, Journey Without Maps, inspired me to risk my life – by following in his footsteps. Greene was only 30 in 1935 when he chose Liberia for his first trip outside Europe. It was a wonderfully Greene-ian choice: foreboding, distant and richly seedy. The result is a twin helix of a travel book – combining the account of a fantastically hard 350-mile trek through the Liberian jungle, with a metaphysical journey back to where he came from, to primeval feelings both good and bad. Greene, travelling with his cousin Barbara, left behind his medicine chest and when he caught a fever he almost died. Unsettling in its rawness, it taught me much not just about the author but about myself, surely a hallmark of the best writing.
• Chasing The Devil (Vintage, £8.99) is Tim Butcher's recreation of Greene's trip

Isabella Tree

A Visit to Don Otavio, by Sybille Bedford
This account of a journey taken in the 1950s, rediscovered in the 1980s by Eland Press, encapsulates, for me, the essence of good travel writing. Never shying away from describing the frustrations and discomforts of travel, Sybille Bedford is nonetheless quick as a hummingbird to suck the sweetness from every experience. She confesses she chose Mexico because she wanted "to be in a country with a long nasty history in the past, and as little present history as possible", but it's her stay with Don Otavio, a bankrupt squire living in a backwater, that becomes the highlight. Her hilarious, pithy dialogues are pure genius.
• Isabella Tree's book, Sliced Iguana: Travels in Mexico, is out now (Tauris Parke, £11.99)

Tahir Shah

Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger
I first read Arabian Sands as a teenager. As I came to the last page, I knew that the course of my life had been altered. Thesiger had taken me on a journey through the fearful void, the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Desert, and left me desperate to embark on a great journey of my own. Sir Wilfred never intended to write the book. He told me later that he'd spent years with the Bedouin of Rub' al Khali, existing with them on their own terms. Without them, he said, "the journeys would have been a meaningless penance".

A good travel book is a treasury of wisdom that seeps into your blood as you follow the author on their quest. And that's exactly what Arabian Sands achieves so well. It doesn't preach, but allows the reader to gently absorb the essence of the desert. Through fragments of description, the odd random fact, snippet of conversation, or observation, Thesiger conjured the interleaving layers of a bewitching land.
• Tahir Shah's latest book, Travels with Myself (Mosaïque Books, £11.99), is out next month

Michael Jacobs

Exterminate All the Brutes, by Sven Lindqvist
This book inspires by upholding the dignity of the travel genre. Taking its title and principle inspiration from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it is written as a series of short sections entwining the author's diary of a Saharan journey with a devastating thesis on the origins of the Nazi holocaust in 19th-century colonialism. Some might think of it as essentially a tract rather than a travel book. Yet Lindqvist's beautifully sparse accounts of bus journeys and dusty hotels help build up a mood of fear and isolation that enhances the intellectual argument. The book is a necessary reminder of the way travel can open up not only the mind but also the heart.
• Michael Jacobs's latest book is Andes (Granta, £12.99)

Rory MacLean

The Way of the World, by Nicolas Bouvier
Nicolas Bouvier's passionate and exhilarating stories inspired waves of young Europeans on to the road. "I dropped this wonderful moment into the bottom of my memory, like a sheet-anchor that one day I could draw up again," he wrote while travelling across Asia in the early 1950s. "The bedrock of existence is not made up of the family, or work, or what others say and think of you, but of moments like this when you are exalted by a transcendent power that is more serene than love."

Even Patrick Leigh Fermor considered the book a masterpiece. For me, it makes any journey, any traveller's dream, seem possible. Yet be warned, writes Bouvier, you may "think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you, or unmaking you".
• Rory MacLean's new book, Gift of Time: A Family's Diary of Cancer, is out this month (Constable, £12.99)

Kari Herbert

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, by Eric Newby
My father's well-loved copy of Eric Newby's classic came to me in the late 1990s. My parents, both accomplished travellers and authors, had spent the past 28 years trying to convince me that I could and should do anything but follow in their footsteps, wanting to spare me the rejection letters and overdrawn bank balances. The gift of Newby's book signalled a change of heart in my father, who then became a fierce advocate for my writing.

It came at just the right moment. Like Newby, I was in a soulless job, desperate for change and adventure. Reading A Short Walk was a revelation. The superbly crafted, eccentric and evocative story of his Afghan travels was like a call to arms. I quit my job, secured a book contract with Penguin, and headed to the Arctic. Newby's book continues to be my endlessly inspiring companion.
• Kari Herbert's latest book, In Search of the South Pole, co-written with Huw Lewis-Jones, is out next month (Anova Conway £20)

Jasper Winn

Bound For Glory, by Woody Guthrie
As a teenager in rural 1970s Ireland, I found books unsettling. From Ernest Hemingway's Fiesta to Laurie Lee's As I Walked Out One Midsummer's Morning, books suggested that "life" lay elsewhere. The puzzling "how" of travel came from Woody Guthrie's Bound For Glory. On his hitchhiking, train-hopping, Model-A Ford-riding adventures through Depression America, Guthrie survived by being a sign-writer, sailor and fruit-picker. And a musician and writer. His songs ranged from ballads to anthems, agit-prop, love lays and lullabies. Bound for Glory was written in a rich, demotic, playful and stirring vocabulary, as if James Joyce and John Steinbeck had collaborated with Kerouac on On The Road. Apparently an ability to turn one's hand to any job and strum a few chords on the guitar was the key to eating and moving, and to romance and romances. And to writing, as well. Within a month of reading Bound for Glory, at 17, I was away with a guitar, a sleeping bag and a notebook.
• Jasper Winn's book, Paddle: A long way around Ireland, is out now (Sort Of Books, £8.99)

John Gimlette

Love and War in the Apennines, by Eric Newby
For sheer charm, there's nothing quite like Eric Newby's Love and War in the Apennines. I first read it years ago, but it's still a favourite. At one level it's a celebration of Italy, and the title says it all (Newby, a POW, escapes to the mountains and, amid many distractions, meets Wanda, and … well, you'll see). At a more profound level, it's a beautifully philanthropic yet unsentimental work. However miserable the times and awkward the place, Newby's characters are usually endearing, and often complex. That's much how I feel about travel: that it's more about people than places (I'd hate the Antarctic).

Happily, I met Newby once: he was shopping in Stanfords with Wanda. She still spoke the "fractured English" of their first encounter, but they were both as warm and thoughtful in real life as they are in the text. When I clumsily explained that LAWITA was my favourite book, Newby even had the modesty to blush, as if no one had ever told him that before.
• John Gimlette's latest book is Wild Coast: Travels on South America's Untamed Edge (Profile, £15)

No, despite what you may have heard, Bruce Chatwin never used them but they are still the best notebooks money can buy

It's the promise held in that unbroken spine, the smooth oilskin cover, the comforting rounded corners. But most of all in the pristine ivory blankness, ready to be filled with the beginnings of your first bestseller and sketches so groundbreaking they will require new ways of thinking about art. This notebook, the Moleskine pocketone you just paid £8.99 for, will deliver it all.

Apparently Van Gogh used one, and Picasso, and Hemingway – this history now rests in your hands. So long as you can find a spot in Caffe Nero and get to work. "It's a masterful bit of excavation of the human psyche," says Stephen Bayley, the design critic and writer – and user of Moleskines. "The stuff you're writing in it could be the most brainless trivia, but it makes you feel connected to Hemingway."

Except there is no real connection to Hemingway. Moleskine was created in 1997, based on a description of the beautiful, bound notebooks the travel writer Bruce Chatwin bought from a French bookbinder before it closed down. An Italian company Modo & Modo recreated it, sold it at a premium price and describes it as a "legendary notebook". "It's an exaggeration," Francesco Franceschi, co-owner of Modo & Modo told the New York Times in 2004. "It's marketing, not science. It's not the absolute truth."

But it has worked. In the last 10 years, sales have grown, last year's profits were €28.5m and there are plans to float Moleskine, which could value it at £240m (to further remove it from its artistic aspirations, it was acquired by a private equity firm in 2006). Interestingly, in this old-fashioned notebook's lifetime, it has been the internet and bloggers (not least its own blog and Flickr group), which helped turn it into a cult product.

"Somebody saw a fabulous opportunity and exploited it brilliantly," says Bayley of Moleskine's "heritage", pointing out other manufacturers such as Leuchtturm, a German manufacturer of similar notebooks that has been going since 1917. But does any of this matter? The notebooks are good quality and a pleasure to write in and, as Bayley says, "there aren't many things you can buy for £10 that are the best of their kind. I buy them compulsively. It makes you think you are just about to write, for once, something brilliant."