For all of 5 minutes. I'm talking about the Lonely Planet Guides of course and this article in the Irish Times. It appears that a travel writer who contributed over a dozen books to the LPG series never visited some of the places he wrote about, instead relying on plagiarism, hearsay and a thick neck, figuratively anyway. Obviously this is not the same writer who described my "seedy port" hometown of Waterford.
Why am I not comforted that the LPG "had reviewed Kohnstamm's guidebooks but had not found any inaccuracies in them"?