James Morris admits that this is an old-fashioned genre--the travel essay that is also a charming mouthful of literature--and perhaps "Places," which only an Englishman could write, is one of the very last examples we shall meet of a once popular and even moderately lucrative near-art form. In the thirties, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and others were encouraged by publishers to take the wine of their temperaments to the banquet of abroad (with chlorodyne ready in the luggage), and the result was a book rather like this-- except that Huxley and Greene ground axes, and even Waugh would moralize discreetly, whereas Morris's approach is, as he puts it, "one of guileless irresponsibility."