The novelist Colm Tóibín was once asked whether he felt isolated growing up in rural Ireland, so far from the capitals of culture. He replied that provincials are the real cosmopolitans. With little local culture, Thomas Mann’s Lübeck and Constantine Cavafy’s Alexandria were no more foreign to him than cities such as Dublin, London or New York. Urban dwellers are the parochial ones, he went on, knowing the same people, reading the same books, having the same conversations. 

Charles Foster would surely agree with this claim. For him, edges are the sources of all creativity. ‘We are fundamentally edge-people,’ his new book claims, ‘happy and productive only when we’re on the edge.’ For Foster, peripheries produce innovation, while the centre produces disreputable things like politics, capitalism and civilisation. Humanity’s first mistake, he claims in The Edges of the World, was abandoning the edges to settle in one place.

Foster is an academic and barrister living in suburban Oxford. But he is also a relentless traveller, and his new book argues that his former life – made up of tax returns, video calls and boiler repairs – is the unnatural one. Instead we should be pinballing between the Sahara