Life at Full Tilt

Between these covers we follow in the slipstream of the indefatigable Irish travel writer Dervla Murphy (1931–2022). Here we find descriptions of her beloved Afghanistan from her 1963 masterpiece Full Tilt, with accounts from the Peruvian Andes, of bicycling in South and East Africa and most recently of the journeys she made in the troubled territories of Palestine and Israel, published when she was eighty-five. Editor Ethel Crowley has dug into the archive to unearth her first published journalism – about her cycle through Spain in 1956 when she was just twenty-four – and has selected extracts from each of the twenty-four books which were to follow. Dervla's style of travel, to go somewhere that interested her and see who she met, made for fresh encounters every day, recorded faithfully each evening in her journal. She read hungrily to prepare for these journeys and folded her learning seamlessly into her books. What shines through is her passionate engagement both with those she encountered and the injustices they faced, and her utter independence of mind.