SOURCE: Mortimer, Molly. “A Writer Who Travels.” Contemporary Review 266, no. 1553 (June 1995): 334-35.

In the following review, Mortimer praises Thubron's “picturesque prose” in The Lost Heart of Asia.

There are travellers who write and writers who travel. Between them lies a river of reality. Colin Thubron belongs to the second class. He is no Thessiger or Post. He has an excellent mixture [in The Lost Heart of Asia] as before which teases out into gobbets of history and chats with the natives, heavily larded with epithet and adjective of which he has a large and original variety; and uses deftly. But like an over rich cake, scintillation can sicken and so die like gorgeous palaces of the ‘Tempest.’ There is a certain egoism which informs us that his first book was written in a monastery; the second in a brothel. For travel books he needs the conscious eccentricity of...