Where do authors’ ideas come from? Even Stephen King finds that a difficult question to answer. One possible answer might be ‘Everything they see on their travels’, because as Roland Barthes once suggested, writers are never truly on holiday – not when everything they see is grist to the mill, so to speak.

Serving up biographical information on an astonishing range of writers, Journey... examines their various travels in detail, alongside maps and illustrations. Thus, we discover that many of Bashō’s haiku were directly influenced by his extensive peregrinations; learn how the inspiration for Harry Potter first came to J. K. Rowling during an interminable train journey; and are shown how Jane Austen’s experiences of seaside towns found their way into her fiction.

The Writer’s Journey contains a wealth of interesting background information for English Literature students, let down only by the too-often pointless inclusion of the aforementioned maps.