“Once we give shoulder to shoulder,
we can turn mountains.”
~ Blue Sky Proverb
What is actually worth buying used
What is actually worth buying used? – “Figures are in US dollars, taken from live eBay listings with shipping included. Everyone says buy secondhand. Nobody says where it actually pays. We track the cheapest live eBay price for every model we follow and compare it against what that model cost new, so you can see which categories are worth the hassle and which are not.
There is also a model by model table further down showing exactly how much value each one has lost. The used column is a live eBay price, rechecked daily, last updated 30 August 2026. The new column is the recommended retail price for each model, which moves rarely and is not rechecked on that schedule, so read the saving as approximate rather than to the dollar…”
The Dire State of Non-Fiction Publishing Un-Diplomatic
Paul Theroux: ‘I’m not an angry old man.
As we wrap up the interview, Paul Theroux points a gun at me. His finger is on the trigger, so it’s lucky we’re talking on Microsoft Teams. “This is called a broomhandle Mauser,” says the 85-year-old travel writer. “Lawrence of Arabia had one. Churchill had one too.” It’s one of many artefacts from a lifetime of travel that fill Theroux’s study in Cape Cod, Massachusetts (his other home is Hawaii).
Theroux owns many guns, shoots every week, and jokes about becoming the oldest Olympic medallist. “A Swedish guy now has the record, who is 72. But I could —”
“Your time will come,” I assure him.
Theroux has had one of the longer literary careers, still going strong after publishing more than 50 books since 1967. Most are novels, but he’s best known for his travel books. His 12th, True North: On the Road in Canada, appears this month. He has also birthed a dynasty: his sons Louis and Marcel have followed him into the travel-recounting business. In his unplaceable transatlantic accent, the pioneer of modern travel writing relates how his work, the genre and travel itself have changed in his era.
He grew up in Medford, Massachusetts, one of seven children of a salesman and a schoolteacher. The family, he says, was “dysfunctional”. (His novel Mother Land stars a monster matriarch.)
“I never told my parents I was going to be a writer. If I had, they would’ve said, ‘But how are you going to make a living?’”
So how does he explain that three of his brothers are also published authors? “Reading and dysfunction. And reading and dysfunction give you one overwhelming urge: to leave. In a family of seven children, the only way you find space is by leaving.”
In 1963, inspired by John F Kennedy’s launch of the Peace Corps, he went to teach in Malawi. He arrived planning to become a doctor, but grew entranced by people’s stories. “I knew a lot of old men and women in my village, and I spoke the language. They remembered the first world war. It became very interesting to me to hear people talk about the past: the first time they saw a white man, the first time they saw a British soldier, the first time they saw a car.” I thought, ‘Well, I’m hearing this story and I can write it down. No one else is listening to it.’ It’s like the history of the common man.”
That approach became the basis of his travelling: going alone, leaving the beaten track, courting danger and prioritising people over sights. From Malawi he went to Uganda, and in 1967 published his debut novel, Waldo. When he sent a copy to his mother, she replied, “This book is trash.”
What did she mean? “It was a novel of the ’60s, of rebellion and disgust. If my mother had approved, I would have thought, ‘What am I doing wrong?’ My parents were never interested in my work, but that’s OK.”
In Uganda, Theroux met the writer who would become his mentor and frenemy, future Nobel laureate for literature VS Naipaul. The horror writer Stephen King once diagnosed Theroux with “a fabulously nasty sense of humour” and of “assassinating all of his characters”. Both characteristics describe his 1998 book on Naipaul, Sir Vidia’s Shadow. But what did the twentysomething Theroux learn from the great man?
“He was a very painstaking writer. He wasn’t a natural — he didn’t have natural fluency, let’s say. He really laboured over every sentence. And he noticed that I didn’t. But he taught me to look at every word. He taught me to avoid the cliché, and even precious writing. He thought Nabokov or Updike were too florid. Even someone like Martin Amis — somewhat precious, and clever, but there’s no heart in that writing.”
Naipaul’s basic message, says Theroux, was about “avoiding other writers, just writing your own stuff, trying not to be influenced. One of Naipaul’s things was, a writer needs a disturbing vision, and should write from a position of strength. The best thing Naipaul ever said to me was, ‘You’re going to be all right.’”
Naipaul also preached a habit that Theroux has stuck to: writing books in longhand. He holds up to the screen his latest efforts, handwritten on A4. “Somebody came to me recently and said, ‘Can I show you something I’ve written?’ And I said, ‘Well, the first chapter needs a lot of work. And the rest of the book, too. Here’s what you should do: copy out the first chapter in longhand.’ She said, ‘Are you kidding?’ I said, ‘If you do that, you’ll improve it. Anything superfluous, anything that seems boring, you’ll leave out, and you’ll improve the grammar, the perception.’ She said, ‘I could never do that.’ And I didn’t say, but I thought, ‘You will never be a writer.’ If you want to be a writer, you need to write every day. If you don’t, you’re an amateur.”
The young Theroux dismissed travel writing as written by bores for bores. He says now, “It seemed like it was always about the writer and not about the people. And there’s a certain way that English people in particular wrote about travel, which is to write about funny foreigners.”
Yet in 1972, living in London with a wife and two small boys, he sold a publisher on a book about travelling by train from Victoria Station to the Far East. He did it for the money. His wife was earning well, he recalled decades later, “but I still felt that I was the breadwinner and that I was not earning enough.” She was “very angry” to be left behind with the children. The four-and-a-half-month journey, he says, “destroyed my marriage”. He returned home to find himself “replaced in my wife’s affections by another man”. (However, Anne Theroux’s own memoir about the marriage breakdown notes he had already confessed to an affair the previous year.)
None of this is in the resulting 1975 book, The Great Railway Bazaar. Re-read now, it stands in the old tradition of painting foreigners as funny or worse. “Afghanistan is a nuisance,” he writes, a “barbarous country” that he jokingly urges Pakistanis to invade. Laos “seemed like a lower form of life”. Bengalis, Sri Lankans and Singaporeans are similarly dispatched.
When I suggest that his early work is acerbic, Theroux replies, acerbically: “You should sort of get it because a lot of what I’m writing is irony.” But he says he reserves that harshness for his writing. While travelling, “you can’t be rude. Some people are. Naipaul was.”
Rude as The Great Railway Bazaar sometimes is, it’s also the infectious story of one man’s escape from everyday life. It did more than just make Theroux’s career. “It set off a frenzy,” he says, “not only for travel but for writing travel books. Now there’s a glut of them. A lot are insufficient, selfish, uninterested in the culture. It’s about me, me, me, the parasitical thing.”
Theroux mocks today’s vogue for travel as performance. “‘Here’s my Instagram page. Here’s me eating a meal. Here’s me with a Maasai warrior.’ If you are a tourist, you’re not bringing anything back of value unless you embed yourself in culture and find something that you can’t find on the internet. And what would it be? It would be someone’s story.”
He says modern travellers often isolate themselves from the places they visit. If you’re getting WhatsApps from home, “you’re never wholly in a place”. Staying in luxury hotels is isolating, too: “When you are among wealthy people, you will see nothing. No one’s gonna talk to you. And if you’re very comfortable, you’re not going to see anything.”
He continues to take the road less travelled. True Northcompletes his trilogy about unglamorous bits of North America, after his Mexican odyssey On the Plain of Snakes and Deep South about the US.
Theroux was exploring Canada while Donald Trump was threatening to annex it, and though he notes an upsurge in flag-waving, he suggests that the country is too divided into “ethno-bubbles” to unite against American aggression. He observes Sikhs or Chinese who have immigrated en bloc, still living emotionally in the lands they left.
Theroux likes to quote local authors on the places he visits. He sees writers, in Doris Lessing’s phrase, as “almost like an organism, which has been evolved by society as a means of examining itself”. True North quotes the Indigenous Canadian writer Niigaan Sinclair on Trump’s threats: “Welcome to Indigenous life, Canada. You now get a taste of what it’s like to have one’s culture attacked, leadership demeaned, and economy undermined. Up next will be land invasion, resource exploitation, and the draconian systems that implement pain and suffering.”
Theroux’s conversations with countless Canadians, as he drives from coast to coast, add up to a portrait of the country. Yet I was struck by a passing admission: “It’s presumptuous for the wandering stranger to draw any serious conclusions on a short visit. Such intimacies are unknowable unless you’ve lived in the village for a long time . . . Now and then on Cape Cod I’ll have a visitor who, after a few days, will make a remark, attempting to sum up the village, and I’d think: You have absolutely no idea of what it’s like to live here.”
Doesn’t that argue for the long-term immersion of anthropologists, rather than drive-by travel writing? Theroux admires anthropologists such as the Briton Hugh Brody, who spent decades living among Indigenous Canadians. Shouldn’t Theroux, with his yearning to understand places, have been an anthropologist himself? He considers it. “One of the problems I would have found is that you have to stick to the complete truth. You can’t embroider anything. And I probably have a tendency to embroider a bit, or to favour one story over another.”
His sons have also become travelling storytellers, as writers and makers of TV documentaries. Theroux lights up when talking about them. “I can possibly take credit for setting them on a path, but not for the trailblazing they’ve done. And the great thing about children who write or make documentaries is that you’re seeing their private life, and you understand their life in a way that no other parent can. I’m eavesdropping on them.”
He’s now constantly identified as the father of. “‘Your name is Theroux, right? Any relation to Louis?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Marcel?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘What do you do?’ ‘I’ve written a few things.’ ‘Under your own name?’”
Older writers become “somewhat invisible”, he remarks. “People talk about identity, right? ‘He’s a Somali writer’, ‘a non-binary poet’. What’s the identity that’s not recognised? Old people.”
I remark that Theroux seems much nicer in conversation than the narrator of his early books. He admits to having “mellowed”. “I’m 85, I’m not an angry old man. I just feel very lucky that I still can travel alone, drive. I still feel vital. I was paddling my kayak the day before yesterday, and I’m thinking, ‘Well, I’m paddling here. No one else is paddling.’” And of course he’s working on a novel.
‘True North: On the Road in Canada’ is published on September 22 in the US and October 29 in the UK (Mariner Books/Penguin respectively)
Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
