From the late 1960s onwards, Bruce Chatwin was fashioning the tools of his future trade in the columns of a variety of magazines and journals. He continued to do so through every twist and turn of his career, from art expert to archaeologist, to journalist and author, right up to his death in 1989. These previously neglected or unpublished pieces - short stories, travel sketches, essays, articles and criticism - gathered together here in paperback for the first time, cover every aspect of the writer's career and reflect the abiding themes of his work: roots and rootlessness, exile and the exotic, possession and renunciation.