An educative advantage of writing regular columns for publications in distant countries (an educative advantage for me, that is, not necessarily for the distant countries) is that it encourages me to learn at least a little about them, which I might otherwise not do. I try to make some slight or passing local reference in what I write for them, bearing in mind how easy it is in journalism to appear to know much more than one does.

The latest national beneficiary, or victim, of my technique is Brazil. Recently I retrieved from the recycling bin of my memory the fact that, as a child, I read a book titled Billy Bunter in Brazil, by Frank Richards. It was published in the year of my birth, 1949, and I read it when I was ten. Until I came across Exploration Fawcett a couple of years later, it was my only source of knowledge of Brazil, and between these two books I gained the impression that Brazil was a land teeming with jaguars, bandits, and anacondas, the latter up to eighty feet long and with a poisonous breath that it was death to inhale. My knowledge of Argentina at the time was, by contrast, entirely derived from postage stamps, with the result that I thought Eva Perón was the most beautiful woman who had ever lived.

Billy Bunter was a character in a long-running series of stories (from 1908 to 1961), first in a weekly magazine called