When is a travel book not a travel book? When it’s not just about travel, of course. The best travel writers show you more than the sights, and while the late Robert Tewdwr Moss’s book is a thoroughly inadequate guide to Syria, it is, perversely, a fine piece of travel writing.

Its appeal is the more unexpected for being deeply flawed as a conventional travel book. Tewdwr Moss either ignores or mishandles the accepted elements of the genre. He is not a purposeful, self-deprecating traveller with a shimmering prose style. Rather, he is a self-indulgent tourist, less interested in Syrian history