Theroux’s enthusiasm brings his readers on many exciting adventures

Non-fiction: Figures in a Landscape: People and Places: Essays 2001-2016, By Paul Theroux, Hamish Hamilton, €21

Paul Theroux’s Wikipedia page solemnly informs us that the author of The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) and The Mosquito Coast (1981) was once a Boy Scout. But we hardly needed to be told. Theroux is still a Boy Scout: an intrepid outdoorsman, a wide-eyed respecter of nature and culture, he has never met a “bus or train ...