En Route: A Journey Round France in the Company of Great Writers - Peter Fiennes

En Route: A Journey Round France in the Company of Great Writers - Peter Fiennes

A conversation with Ludovic Hunter-Tilney

If Jean-Paul Sartre disliked trees, he was terrified of lobsters. So observes Peter Fiennes in his delightfully unbuttoned literary travelogue. On two wheels and four, Fiennes traces a spiral, like the ‘tightening curve of a snail’s shell,’ over the map of France, pursuing writers both remembered (Sartre and de Beauvoir; Edith Wharton; Colette) and abandoned (the anti-semite Maurice Barrès).

Enjoying a second glass of wine here, a croissant-and-pain-au-chocolat binge there, Fiennes draws us unresisting into - let’s face it - the most civilised country on earth. He is joined by another lost-cause francophile, the FT’s Ludovic Hunter-Tilney.