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Norman Lewis – a restless adventurer with a passion for broken-down places

John Hatt’s latest selection of the travel writer’s journalism includes articles on Castro’s Havana, the Yemen of the Imams, Batista’s Cuba, French Indo-China and Neapolitan men of honour

11 January 2025

9:00 AM

11 January 2025

9:00 AM

A Quiet Evening: The Travels of Norman Lewis selected and introduced by John Hatt

Eland, pp.502, 25

The travel writer Norman Lewis, the son of a Welsh psychic medium, died in Essex in 2003 at the age of 94. In his darkly comic autobiography, Jackdaw Cake, he relates how, in 1937, his mother built a spiritualist church in the north London suburb of Enfield as a sort of Taj Mahal memorial to her late husband (who was a retail pharmacist as well as a psychic).

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