First published in 1982, The Art of Travel is the first collection of critical essays to be devoted to British travel writing. It attempts to give a sense of the wealth of such writing, to map some of its forms and conventions and, implicitly, to claim a place for travel writing in any revised definition of literature.

For this collection, travel includes sea voyages, European tours, commissioned enquiries into social conditions, and urban writing; travel writing ranges from works such as Sea and Sardinia by D.H. Lawrence, whose status as a novelist guarantees his travel books some attention, through the essays and books of Victorian middle-class travellers into working-class London, to the work of V.S. Naipaul, a contemporary writer who has increasingly preferred the travel book to the novel.