Write or do: despite the best efforts of Wolfe, London and the war poets, that's still the case. Kerouac finished the best part of his novel and then abandoned it, going out to hitch a lift. No writer - apart from Mary Wollstonecraft, perhaps - would countenance telling you something they hadn't experienced, at least in some measure. Me, I once leapt from a moving train in order to recover a stolen suitcase: I can recount that only because I lived to tell the tale. But here - in '36 Views of Paris and London' - are a few more experiences...