Forty years ago Peter Hitchens stepped outside the conventional daily round of journalism and began reporting from abroad. Many of the resulting articles were collected in a previous book Short Breaks In Mordor. He believes that this experience gave him a new and different perspective on his own country and on almost every major issue in the modern world. he thinks that once you have travelled extensively in different civilisations, you are inevitably more curious and so less ready to accept the standard version of events. Here are some of the results, dissenting discussions of many topics where the consensus is strong and seldom questioned. Read them and you may experience an unwelcome desire to change your mind. The cover picture, showing Peter Hitchens as a revolutionary socialist in the summer 1969, is a reminder of just how much our minds can change in the course of a lifetime, if only we are willing to let this happen.