Bingham, James; Brooksbank, Quentin; Wynne, Mark (2012). "A Short Winter in the Hindu Kush" (PDF). British Mountaineering Council . Retrieved 23 April 2013.

urn:oclc:867469805 Republisher_date 20120831082856 Republisher_operator [email protected] Scandate 20120825044406 Scanner scribe1.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Worldcat (source edition)Kari Herbert noted in The Guardian 's list of travel writer's favourite travel books that she had inherited a "well-loved copy" of the book from her father, the English polar explorer Wally Herbert. "Like Newby, I was in a soulless job, desperate for change and adventure. Reading A Short Walk was a revelation. The superbly crafted, eccentric and evocative story of his Afghan travels was like a call to arms." [34] Outside magazine includes A Short Walk among its "25 essential books for the well-read explorer", [39] while Salon.com has the book in its list of "top 10 travel books of the [20th] century". [40] The Daily Telegraph too enjoyed the English humour of the book, including it in a list of favourite travel books, and describing Newby and Carless's meeting with the explorer Wilfred Thesiger as a "hilarious segment". It quotes "We started to blow up our air-beds. 'God, you must be a couple of pansies,' said Thesiger." [41] The Swedish journalist and travel writer Tomas Löfström [ sv] noted that the meeting with Thesiger represented, in Newby's exaggerated account, a collision between two generations of travel writers who travelled, wrote, and related to strangers quite differently. [42] From 1973 until 1977, Carless headed the FCO's Latin-American department before his ministerial appointment as chargé d'affaires in Buenos Aires, where he monitored the disputed sovereignty of islands in the Beagle Channel, and the Falklands. He was appointed CMG in 1976. Following a secondment to Northern Engineering Industries, Carless served until his retirement, in 1985, as ambassador in Caracas.

Curiously, the famed explored Wilfred Thesiger, author of classic travel books like Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs, makes an unexpected cameo in the final chapter of A Short Walk as the amateurish Newby and Carless come upon his caravan. Thesiger serves as a final counterpoint–the final foil of sorts–to illustrate how unprepared and inept Newby and Carless were throughout their journey. Indeed, Thesiger calls them “a couple of pansies” in the final line of the book for inflating their air-beds (had they been carrying air-beds this entire time?).His style of writing is like building a straight road, and every now and then build a kink in it, then continue to build the straight road, and add another kink at a random spot, then keep building the straight road, and so on. a b Chwascinski, Boleslaw (1966). "The Exploration of the Hindu Kush" (PDF). Alpine Journal: 199–214. I’m only adding this note because I recently re-encountered that wonderful incident Newby tells against himself where they happen to meet Wilfred Thesiger, the legendary solo explorer of the Middle East; and I’d recently read in Among the Mountains that Thesiger wrote of the same incident (and how very English for the two to meet like that!) a b c Frater, Alexander (29 October 2006). "Eric Newby | 'I remember the hum of excitement he created' ". The Guardian . Retrieved 20 February 2018.