When he became interested in literature at grammar school, it was D.H. Lawrence who fired Geoff Dyer's imagination, and it was the figure of Lawrence, the miner's son who spent his life travelling, living by his pen, who made it seem possible to him to become a writer. The work is as much a travel book as a biography, as Geoff Dyer retraces Lawrence's journeys and, using Lawrence's own writings, life, and crucially, photographs as clues, learns much about matters close to his own heart as he does about Lawrence himself.