This paper will sketch a brief dramatis personae of the public drama of travel, and go on to offer an even sketchier account of the  making of the ardent sensibility which even the armchair  traveller spontaneously acquires from history , art and their narratives. It will reject the too-easy victory awarded in the literature to the traveller over the tourist, and enlist TS Eliot and Nelson Goodman as guides to the many worlds which the best because most artful travel writers teach us to imagine , and to do such imagining on behalf, it may be, of a better world.

Fred Inglis is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Sheffield and Honorary Professor of Cultural History at the University of Warwick.  He has been a member of the School of Social Science at the  Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute in Wassenaar,  and visited the HRC as a Fellow in 1984 and 2008. He has been a member of the British Labour Party all his adult life and has stood four times for the British Parliament.His most recent books include People’s Witness: the Journalist in Modern Politics(Yale 2002), Culture (Polity 2004), History Man: the life of RG Collingwood (2009) and A Short History of Celebrity(2010)

All Welcome
Convenors: Ken Taylor and Alastair MacLachlan