I’m doing a talk about my life as a travel writer this Thursday night in York. It’s on at 8 pm at Vanbrugh College, University of York, Heslington, YO10 5DD and everyone is welcome, not just students. Anyway, as the good folk of the York Union are putting me up for the night, I thought [...]

One of the things that bugs me as an author about the reader review sections on Amazon is that I don’t get the right to reply. When someone slags me off I’d like the opportunity to at least argue my case. To be fair, most of the reviews of my books put up on Amazon [...]

As you guys probably already know there’s another travel writer out there with the same surname as me. His name is Tim. He writes humorous travel books too. Indeed, his publishers, Vintage, even go as far as calling him ‘the next Bill Bryson.’ I’m sure over the years people have bought my books thinking they [...]

With the US edition of Vroom with a View coming out in May I’ve been looking at various ways of raising my profile in the States. I’ve tried contacting Oprah, but until she lifts the restraining order I’m having to resort to the less spectacular options of signing up to Amazon Connect and MySpace.com. MySpace.com [...]

Philipp Lenssen is a German guy who quit his job last September to concentrate on his blogging. His specialist area of expertise is the search engine Google which he regards as the ‘key to human knowledge and global consciousness.’ To that end he set out to find out what we all thought of each other. [...]