James (later Jan) Morris’s 1960 classic on Venice is infused with humour and affection. Footloose Bill Bryson could deliver a good line. Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, reported that he’d bumped into the great Sir Wilfred Thesiger who was tolerably pleasant until, come sundown, Eric and his chum produced inflatable mattresses. Thesiger damned them with a single word of disdain. ‘Pansies!’ Bruce Chatwin, who studied archaeology at Edinburgh University, wrote another classic, In Patagonia (1977) and, a decade later, The Song Lines, which celebrated Aboriginal Australia. His admirers included, among others, our own William Dalrymple.

Patrick Richardson gives us a portmanteau of essays which are as much exercises in personal reflection as traveller’s tales. It is dense and detailed, but so well written that the reader is soon drawn in. They are oddly reminiscent of A Traveller’s Alphabet: Partial Memoirs by Sir Stephen Runciman which your scrivener reviewed many years ago. The comparison is slight, however. Runciman, a schoolfriend of George Orwell at Eton and a pupil of Aldous Huxley, enjoyed childhood holidays in his cabinet minister father’s Rolls Royce.

Alphabet was criticised as being “not a serious contribution to travel literature” and an over-indulgent litany of name dropping and anecdotes about, for example, playing the piano with the last Emperor of China. I visited him in his vertical tower house which he’d bought against the advice of many of his friends on his retirement. The stairs, they felt, might be too much. By the time I arrived he was 89. I reviewed his book positively because it was a damned good read.

Not every journey Richardson made went to plan. Inspired by Coleridge’s Kublai Khan he set off to find Xanadu, not realising that it had been absorbed into inaccessible China and had almost certainly been totally lost. This, of course, became the story. Oddly enough William Dalrymple had a similar Xanadu experience.

Subtitled Travels Across Time: From Captain Cook to Schopenhauer and Oppenheimer Patrick Richardson would seem to have written a minor masterpiece of his own – I found the chapter on Sir Arthur Evans particularly intriguing. Christmas buy? For sure.

Crossing Paths with Giants of History by Patrick Richardson. Published by Ultima Thule Press, £18.99.