Travel writer Norman Lewis spent a whole life of writing inscrutably on the road, revealing th world in all its unspoiled beauty, also reflecting a world now totally lost to us, from Yemen of the Imams to bandit chieftains, Neapolitan men of honour and tribal chieftains in Central America, as well as darker scenes: the doomed cultures of French rule in Indo-China, Cossaks being sent home to their death and the quiet holocaust of the indigenous peoples in the jungles of South America.

Lewis (1908-2003) was the author of 15 novels and 20 works of non-fiction. The author descirbes “The reptilian mechanical gropings of a jukebox in a bar in Huehuetenango in the northern heights of Guatemala; Accra in newly independent Ghana “with an architectural bone structure of old arcaded colonial buildings, strange caramelles of bygone Ibiza songs.

Lewis made his name as an investigative journalist. The emotional heart of A Quiet Evening lies in a 40-page on the extermination of the Cintas Largas and other indigenous peoples in the Brazilian Amazon. 

His other subjects include Mafia trials the Californian grape pickers strike in 1965, and the murder bandits of a British couple in the stony mountain heart of Sardinia. 

John Hatt write “ Lewis’s instinct for important events, and moments, was infallible.” He was always restless and had the physical stamina to gratify his escape.

At one point Ian Fleming recruited him into the intelligence service.

His book Naples ’44 (1978)  the diary of his year as an intelligence officer attached to the American Fifth Army. 

Even Graham Greene regarded Lewis as “one of the best writers, not of any particular decade, but of our century”.

One article “Village of Cats” published originally as part of a full-length book – Voices of the Old Sea (1984), a portrait of Costa Brava before the tourists flocked in.

In Indulgent Burma, Lewis gets tipped by a taxi driver.A Quiet Evening: The Travels of Norman Lewis, selected and introduced by John Hatt, Eland, £25, 504 pages.