Oxford Guide To Literary Britain And Ireland, edited by Daniel Hahn & Nicholas Robins.

Blown by the gales of finance and fashion, British sport may rise and fall. British and Irish literature yields golden returns century after century. From Hardy's Wessex to Joyce's Dublin by way of Dickens's London and Rankin's Edinburgh, the outcome is an archipelago studded from terraced street and college lawn to windswept moor with the memory of writers and works.

First published in 1977, the Oxford Guide to Literary Britain and Ireland delivers an addictive tour of the topography of the word. Region by region, country by country (with a sprawling tract for London), the editors of this third edition add new stars to a de luxe destination. From Edward Thomas's stopping train at Adlestrop in Gloucestershire to the ties that bind Edmund Spenser, William Congreve and William Trevor to Youghal, Co. Cork, they make almost every writerly site sound worth the detour.

The major monuments stand out clearer than ever. Whether you seek a literary street-plan of Liverpool or Oxford, a suburb-by-suburb hike across authors' London (from Linton Kwesi Johnson in Brixton to William Morris in Walthamstow) or period pictures of everywhere from Margate sands (where TS Eliot convalesced) to the Isle of Raasay (where Gaelic bard Sorley Maclean was born), the Guide does sterling service. New essays here connect the genius to the place, whether Kathryn Hughes on George Eliot's Midlands, or Christopher MacLachlan on Scott's romantic Scotland.

Fault-finders will nose out any signs of fogeyness, and come away disappointed. You'll find Zadie Smith's Willesden here, and Irvine Welsh's Leith. Spurred by the prominence rightly granted to WG Sebald in East Anglia, I began to notice how often these shores have hosted the creation of non-English masterworks. Verlaine wrote great poetry in Bournemouth; Rousseau drafted the Confessions in Staffordshire; Turgenev sketched Fathers and Sons on the Isle of Wight.

Here, I will carp for a moment at this beautiful, browsable book, and mention a single absentee. Italo Svevo, the Trieste friend of Joyce who refashioned Italian fiction with A Life and The Confessions of Zeno, lived at 67 Church Lane in Charlton for a pre-First World War decade. Surely he deserves a place. Hampstead or Chelsea may be flush with swanky shrines for the bookish pilgrim; SE7 still needs a helping hand.