An Audience with an Elephant should appeal to any travel writing fan who has enjoyed Tony Hawks' quest to play tennis with the Moldovans and Pete McCarthy's bar - but here is no manufactured, factitious wackiness: rather a quest for genuine, magnificent eccentricity - and all without ever leaving Britain. Rogers' travels take him to Great Yarmouth, to find the only giant tortoise that is also a living veteran of Gallipoli; to Stalybridge (to travel on the ghost railway train that runs in one direction only); and even to Buckingham Palace, on an out-of-the-blue commission to write speeches for the Prince of Wales. This is a book about the sheer idiosyncratic oddity of Britain: 80-year-old triathletes; compulsive exam-takers; the last tramp in Wales; and other unusual encounters.