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Murphy, Dervla

Dervla Murphy was an Irish touring cyclist and author of adventure travel books.

www.travelbooks.co.uk

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

articles by, [6] 25; [18] 49; [38] 64; Eight Feet in the Andes, [62] 25

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20220617170452 Celebrating Dervla Murphy | From the Slightly Foxed archives

Celebrating Dervla Murphy | From the Slightly Foxed archives

Greetings from a red-hot Hoxton Square, where we’ve been celebrating and remembering the adventurous spirit and prolific travel writing of Dervla Murphy, the author and explorer who famously journeyed alone from her native Ireland to India on a bicycle, armed with little more than a pistol, a notebook and a compass. Dervla died peacefully, aged 90, at her home in Lismore on 22 May 2022. Her good friend Hilary Bradt, of Bradt Travel Guides, said: ‘Dervla was a traveller who wrote, rather than a writer who travelled.’ Yet what a writer Dervla was. Her first book, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle, was published in 1965, and more than twenty other titles have followed. Not to mention several articles for Slightly Foxed. It was a pleasure to work with her, and a greater pleasure still to have been informed and entertained by her insights on people and places, bicycling and beer.
20050601123635

Feudal Afterglow

Dervla Murphy on David Thomson, Woodbrook

It is peculiarly exciting to turn a page and find a strong personal emotion exactly distilled – an emotion hitherto believed to be one’s private idiosyncrasy. Around the age of 13 most bookish children break into verse (the literary equivalent of acne) and I then wrote a ‘poem’ about corncrakes – specifically, what their crake did to me (and continued to do until farming became agribusiness and the crake was heard no more.) On p. 282 of Woodbrook David Thomson says in a few words what I failed to say in several feverishly florid verses.
20080601155354 Dervla Murphy on Nicolas Bouvier, The Way of the World - Slightly Foxed Issue 18

Ad Hoc through Afghanistan

Dervla Murphy on Nicolas Bouvier, The Way of the World

Which century are we in? Which country? Nicolas Bouvier’s vignette in The Way of the World won’t puzzle those of us (a rapidly dwindling cohort) who can remember Afghanistan during the reign of King Mohammad Zahir. And Nicolas’s response to the people and landscapes of that sternly beautiful country – undeveloped in the mid-twentieth century, but neither impoverished nor blood-soaked – made this reader’s heart ache.
20190601160403

Hoofing It

Richard Conyngham on Dervla Murphy, Eight Feet in the Andes

Unable to pedal but still able to walk, I had found inspiration in a battered copy of Eight Feet in the Andes wedged between the clothes and the spare tubes in my pannier. In the early 1980s, its author Dervla Murphy flew to Cajamarca in Peru with her 9-year-old daughter Rachel. Already a veteran of odysseys on foot, mule, donkey and bicycle, the Irish travel writer needed no justification for what came next. Putting the local grapevine to good use, she and Rachel purchased a lively young mule named Juana . . .
20130601171720 Dervla Murphy, Lady Duff Gordon, Daniel Macklin, Slightly Foxed Issue 38

Cape-bound

Dervla Murphy on Lady Duff Gordon, Letters from the Cape

Soon after my Dublin grandfather’s death in 1946 several heavy teachests were delivered by rail to our Lismore home. My father gleefully pored over the numerous bulky tomes: the Works of Samuel Richardson in seven volumes (1785), a History of Free Masonry in five volumes, a rare numbered edition (No. 775) of the works of Henry Fielding in ten volumes with an introductory essay by Leslie Stephen, etc. etc. Being then aged 14 I was unexcited until I came upon a slim volume (foolscap octavo) by a mid-Victorian Englishwoman identifiable on p.1 as a kindred spirit. Ever since, Lucie Duff Gordon’s Letters from the Cape, written to a devoted husband and a worried mother, has been among my favourite accounts of travel.

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