Writing history or biography often feels like a journey – both a journey of discovery and a dogged pursuit of historical subjects who may or may not make it easy for you. This strange and entirely unreciprocated fascination has become something of a subject in itself, described in Richard Holmes’s tellingly entitled Footsteps, for instance; while in books such as Olivia Laing’s The Trip to Echo Spring, in which Laing narrates her own travels around the US tracking some of America’s drunkest literary giants, the journey is made literal. Of course, research sometimes requires physical travel, but often it is...