Admirers of The Spanish Temper, Marching Spain and his wonderfully evocative books on London, Dublin and New York will need no reminding that V.S. Pritchett is one of the very great travel writers of our time, possessed of an astonishingly accurate eye and a marvellous ability to conjure up the essence of a place, and of the people who live there.

Written for the most part in the 1950s and 1960s, the essays brought together in At Home and Abroad cover South and North America, Spain, Ireland, Portugal, London, Greece, the Pyrenees, Germany, the English countryside and, above all, the Mediterranean: first published in book form in 1990, the year of Sir Victor's ninetieth birthday, they are a delight in themselves and a timely reminder of - or introduction to - this most subtle and perceptive of writers.