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Lead book review

In the steppes of a warlord

Tim Cope's moving account of his 6,000-mile ride across the lands of the nomads, On the Trail of Genghis Khan, is vast, repetitive and meandering — just like his journey

30 November 2013

9:00 AM

30 November 2013

9:00 AM

On the Trail of Genghis Khan: An Epic Journey Through the Land of the Nomads Tim Cope

Bloomsbury, pp.509, £20, ISBN: 9781408825051

I suspect travel writing was once a fairly simple business: the author travelled somewhere, the reader did not; the author explained what the place was like and the reader was duly informed and even entertained. Dr Uno von Troil, for example, went to Iceland in 1772 and served up lurid descriptions of the devil holes and lairs of Beelzebub (geysers).

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