The word ‘journey’ occupies several columns in the Oxford English Dictionary. Among the meanings: a day’s travel; a continued course of going, with a beginning and end in place or time; a pilgrimage or passage through life; a round of travel. I shall speak of the journey first as a round of travel, then as a pilgrimage, and then as something more sinister.

The journey as a round of travel takes us out into the world to a far-off point and brings us home again, there and back: the kind of journey made by Alice in Wonderland, by Ulysses and by Dante in The Divine Comedy—the idea of going there and coming back, perhaps wiser, with some new knowledge, that has shaped our experience, our psychology and our literature.