Travels with a Typewriter

This selection of Michael Frayn's travel journalism is a clear-sighted evocation of societies in flux, highlighting the ways in which the tumultuous 1960s and 70s affected the lives of ordinary people. He visited Cuba ten years after the Revolution, was in Berlin 17 years before the Wall came down; and went in search of the 'real' America in 1966 (he never found it).

He stewed in the damp Pacific heat of Japan, 'surrounded by a tight-packed mass in a state of agitated and rapid transformation'; and he watched Sweden's not entirely painless metamorphosis from an essentially agrarian society to a free-loving urban one. He also bought a flat in Notting Hill when Notting Hill was definitely not the place it is today.

Many of these pieces were first published in the Observer and they have the immediacy you would expect of a newspaper article. None of them are very long, but Frayn has the happy knack of drawing us in by picking out little details that both charm us and allow us to empathise or at least understand better the places he is wring about - a drunk Swedish woman in 'warm red socks'; a 1963 Cambridge pop group called Pineapple Truck; a Parisian nightclub that has coffins instead of tables.

It's easy to think of these articles as despatches from a lost era, and indeed there is a sense that much of what Frayn writes about has gone forever. Then again, there is the dispiriting feeling that, for all the supposed advances of the last 40 years, we're still not much further forward. Israel is still as convulsed by its birth pangs as it was when Frayn was there in 1969; many East Berliners were actually fairly content with their pre-unification lot in life; and even after the years of preparation that went into setting up the Festival of Britain, we still ended up with the Dome.