“A good traveller does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveller does not know where he came from.” This quote from Chinese writer Lin Yutang (1895-1976) is one of the cleverest things ever written or said. It effectively means that it doesn’t really matter where you travel to. What does matter, however, is what you find. And your vision becomes much sharper if you are lost and not sure where you are going. Becoming a ‘perfect’ traveller, in the sense of being totally unbiased, is much harder; it requires complete eradication from memory of one’s background and past impressions to the point when the traveller’s mind becomes a tabula rasa, capable of perceiving the world as it really is.

Let us ask ourselves: what makes Albert Einstein’s travel diaries so important that a respected international publisher has just released the second volume of them? This is a sequel to the superbly revealing ‘The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein: The Far...