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As a boy in Manhattan in the early 1970s Andrew Solomon confesses himself to have been “afraid of the world”. He had nightmares about a Soviet bomb; he had fears that he might be kidnapped, and alternative fears that he had already been kidnapped without his knowing. His comfort lay in an idea of England that he discovered in fiction. This anglophilia began when his father read him AA Milne at two, and advanced through Narnia and Wonderland. He “developed a taste for marmalade and for the longer sweep of history”. He adopted, as he recalls, certain Chelsea airs: “My parents’ usual reprimand was to remind me that I was not the Prince of Wales.” It was with these kind of fantasies in mind that he travelled abroad for the first time aged 11, on a family trip that took in England, France and Switzerland. And after that he never really looked back.

This book is a collection of traveller’s tales, then, from seven continents and 83 countries. Solomon, an art historian and psychologist by training, is in the American-abroad tradition of Henry James. His voice and eye are always curious, never hurried; his sentences unspool elegantly, and are sharply alive to social cadences and cultural nuance. He travels hopefully, looking not always for tragedy or strife but for moments of commonality in extreme and conflicted places.

The tone of the best of the stories is established in a series of pieces Solomon wrote mainly for the New York Times magazine at the beginning of the 1990s from Russia. He had first gone to Moscow on commission from Harpers & Queen in 1988 to witness the definitive evidence that glasnost and perestroika were not just warm words: the first Sotheby’s auction of contemporary Russian art.

The Russian avant garde artists he encountered on that trip became something of a touchstone for him in subsequent journeys, an object lesson in travelling with an open mind. He expected them to symbolise the first rush of anticipation at long hoped-for freedom; instead he found artists toasting Brezhnev with black humour, approaching the end of censorship with trepidation, fearing – correctly as it turned out – that freedoms would make their work and their struggle quickly irrelevant. In their years of exhibiting in secrecy to each other, the artists had become like “the early Christians, or Freemasons”. In the face of political misery they had discovered “a higher truth”, which gave them a covert and “tightly shared joy”. Nothing of the future represented by Sotheby’s hype and market forces looked so attractive. Freedom would mean a loss of purpose.

Solomon reports these paradoxes – which he developed in his first book, The Irony Tower – almost as a statement of intent. The one thing a great travel writer must leave out of his baggage – and in this sense Solomon is in the company of Norman Lewis or Colin Thubron – is all traces of ideological preconception. The challenge is always to see the world not through the lens of where you have come from, but where you are now. All journalists believe that they trade in empathy, but only the best make empathy – the ability to see the world through other eyes – their defining quality.

In this sense it is easy to see how Solomon’s preoccupation with travel, his willingness to go anywhere and everywhere, has informed his development as a writer. As he documented in his unflinching book about his own depression, The Noonday Demon, he was almost undone in his efforts to report the world by the often debilitating bleakness of his internal landscape. A determination to develop the habits of looking outward at all costs was almost a piece of cognitive therapy for him. Rather than retrace his own neural pathways, he sought untrodden ways – in Zambia, Mongolia, and, inevitably, the Solomon Isles, to name but a few. These habits, as well as producing this collection, led Solomon to perhaps the most comprehensive statement of journalistic empathy by any contemporary writer – his last, monumental book, Far from the Tree, which examined extremes of physical and psychological difference in the context of families.

You can see him exploring and honing the listening habits that led to that book on almost every page here. Mostly commissioned in a time of generous editorial budgets, Solomon lives with his subjects as long as he is able – searching out the dissident artists of China and the Inuit of Greenland, 80% of whom suffer from depression. In this way Solomon builds a picture of the world we have inhabited in the last 25 years, seen from its four corners.

He tries to approach this cultural immersion from as many vantages as possible, while never quite forgetting his privileged interloper status. In a pivotal piece from Afghanistan in 2002 – after 9/11 has marked the end of the “end of history” – he collects a series of vignettes that show the first hopeful stirrings of cultural life as the Taliban lose their grip. Some of them he initiates himself – a dinner he throws to thank his hosts becomes a party. Kabul hears its first strains of live music in recent memory; he has to teach his translator Farouq the word for “hangover”. This fragment of time, like many others in the book, has become more poignant in retrospect. Each piece has an endnote, written in the knowledge of how things turned out. Farouq looks back on his hangover as a window of hope. “You were there in those beautiful days,” he tells Solomon. “All of that is gone now.”

Far and Away is published by Chatto (£25). Click here to order a copy for £20.50

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