Heading to Brazil for the 2014 World Cup? Apprehensive about the demonstrations and logistical nighmares that might lie in wait for you? May I make a suggestion: pack a copy of James Montague’s kaleidoscopic new book Thirty-One Nil.
It will remind you that, however trying your current circumstances, things could be worse, while articulating, in a succession of scrupulously observed national tableaux, why you made the effort in the first place.
Not that the author makes a meal of his discomfort, as travel-writers sometimes will. Au contraire. At moments such as when he starts to photograph the “smoke spinning crazily out” of a tear-gas canister that has landed at his feet in Cairo, he seems almost comically unflappable.