Books By Ruth Blackmore, James McConnachie, Sam Cook - Author

James McConnachie was born and brought up in south London, and was a scholar at Jesus College, Oxford, where he studied English. Touring the Loire in the back seat of a Citroën DS, as a child, inspired an early love of travel, but his first trips for Rough Guides were to Spain and Italy - and he remains passionate about both countries. Then, in 2002, James joined Dave Reed as co-author of the Rough Guide to Nepal. As a student, he had spent nine months teaching in a village in the Everest foothills, but travelling all over the country, in the middle of a Maoist insurrection, really put his knowledge of Nepali culture and language to the test - and never more urgently than when persuading a local Maoist that he was not in fact a CIA spy. After Nepal, James returned to his Francophile roots. He was commissioned to rewrite the Rough Guide to Paris, alongside Ruth Blackmore, and then headed back to the Loire valley to write his own, new guidebook: the Rough Guide to the Loire. Meanwhile, trav