VS. Pritchett, master of the short story, is also the most evocative of travel writers. First published in 1967, his portrait of Dublin – its past, politics and people, its grand mansions and curious corners – is as beguiling and eloquent as the city itself, as he writes of the Dublin he knew in the 1920s, of visits to Sean O’Casey and Yeats (brandishing a teapot in his rage at Shaw) and of the changing city forty years later, facing the future but still as eccentric and engaging as ever.