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Dervla Murphy

Full Tilt

When Dervla Murphy was ten, she was given a bicycle and an atlas, and within days she was secretly planning a trip to India. At the age of thirty-one, in 1963, she finally set off and this book is based on the daily diary she kept while riding through Persia, Afghanistan and over the Himalayas to Pakistan and India. A lone woman on a bicycle (with a revolver in her trouser pocket) was an almost unknown occurrence and a focus of enormous interest wherever she went. Undaunted by snow in alarming quantities, and using her .25 pistol on starving wolves in Bulgaria and to scare lecherous Kurds in Persia, her resourcefulness and the blind eye she turned to personal danger and extreme discomfort were remarkable.
325 printed pages
Copyright owner
Bookwire
Original publication
2011
Publication year
2011
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Quotes

  • Ночь нежнаhas quoted4 years ago
    So far I haven’t noticed any of the dire poverty one expects in India; but then the Punjab is the country’s most prosperous state – partly because of its natural resources and partly because Sikhs are in general more on the ball than Hindus. An FAO official I met today told me that their work in the Punjab is much more productive than elsewhere in India because of greater and more intelligent co-operation from the locals.
  • Ночь нежнаhas quoted4 years ago
    But ten years ago it would have stirred more often and more vigorously; by now it seems to me that prosperity as the West knows it today and poverty on an Eastern scale are equally harmful to the soul of Man.
  • Ночь нежнаhas quoted4 years ago
    At last the monsoon seems to be breaking here. I saw my first electric storm this evening and it was a sight of such beauty that I couldn’t take my eyes off the sky for a moment. Then the rain came so forcefully that no one who hasn’t witnessed such a spectacle could imagine it; yet they tell me that this is only a curtain-raiser, not the real thing!

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