Hugh Thomson

Between woods and water

10 June 2023 9:00 am

Patrick Barkham pays tribute to the much-missed nature writer, whose core response to the call of the wild animated everything he did

Living with the Xingu in deepest Amazonia

11 March 2023 9:00 am

The Brazilian journalist Eliane Brum moves from São Paulo to ‘reforest’ herself in the Amazon, and slowly gains the trust of a wary, isolated tribal people

Pico Iyer finds peace even in lost paradises

18 February 2023 9:00 am

The novelist and travel writer reflects on the resilience of the human spirit in countries whose staggering beauty has largely been trashed

Bogs, midges and blinding rain: the joys of trekking in the Highlands

5 November 2022 9:00 am

Raynor Winn’s first book, The Salt Path, was a genuine phenomenon. Having been evicted from their farm after 20 years,…

Tales of the riverbank: the power of the Po

16 July 2022 9:00 am

It may not be the grandest of the world’s waterways – the Nile and Amazon are ten times its length…

The wonder of the wandering life

9 July 2022 9:00 am

Anthony Sattin begins with a quotation from Bruce Chatwin, who famously tried all his life to produce a book about…

New light on the building of Stonehenge

12 March 2022 9:00 am

When it comes to Stonehenge, we are like children continually asking why and never getting a conclusive answer. There are…

The least familiar stretches of Nile prove the most interesting

24 July 2021 9:00 am

It’s one of the most tantalising travel images in the world — a felucca floating along the Nile at sunset,…

The jab that saved countless lives 300 years ago

24 April 2021 9:00 am

This timely book celebrates one of the most remarkable women of the 18th century. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was so…

How Neanderthal are you?

24 April 2021 9:00 am

I’m Neanderthal and proud of it

Has Britain learned from its failures in Afghanistan?

25 March 2021 5:20 am

As the Americans prepare to leave Afghanistan, and in the UK we hold our own Defence Review, should we not…

Peru’s beauty has been a real curse

13 March 2021 9:00 am

As the planet gets more and more ravaged, the mind can begin to glaze over at the cumulative general statistics…

Exotic and endangered: Madagascar in peril

16 January 2021 9:00 am

Madagascar. There are so many delightful incongruities about the island. Despite being off the coast of Africa, because of the…

She just keeps rollin’ along: Colombia’s Magdalena River

29 August 2020 9:00 am

As Colombia comes out of 50 years of civil war and into a still precarious peace, with some 220,000 dead,…

The pleasures — and trials — of knowing Bruce Wannell

15 August 2020 9:00 am

Bruce Wannell was by some way one of the most charismatic travellers I have ever met. Despite his almost complete…

Lake Ohrid: an oasis of peace in the war-torn Balkans

15 February 2020 9:00 am

Kapka Kassabova’s previous travel book, Border, was rightly acclaimed and won several prizes. The author travelled to the edge of…

Alistair Moffat imagines St Cuthbert’s death, in the bleak midwinter, on a lonely, inhospitable island

Can’t anyone travel for fun any more?

24 August 2019 9:00 am

There was a time when travel writers would set off with a spring in their step: Coleridge knocking the bristles…

Norfolk may be flat, but it’s never boring

10 August 2019 9:00 am

Francis Pryor claims he would be a rich man if every person who told him that the Fens were ‘flat…

The murder of Thomas Becket in stained glass at Canterbury cathedral. Next year sees the 800th anniversary of the creation of Becket’s shrine and the revival of the old pilgrimage route from Southampton to Canterbury

Will the Pilgrims’ Way soon rival the Camino de Santiago?

20 April 2019 9:00 am

There are more than 100 cathedrals in England, Scotland and Wales of many different denominations (although I for one had…

‘Old Glory’ flowing through Natchez, Mississippi

Travel literature

21 July 2018 9:00 am

Jonathan Raban was largely responsible for changing the nature of travel writing. Back in the 1970s when he began, the…

The spring gentian’s ‘tongues of ocean blue’

Dying buddleias on railway lines are what excite the new nature writer

3 March 2018 9:00 am

A parliament of owls. A gaggle of geese. A convocation of eagles. But what is the generic term for the…

Reaping the whirlwind of climate change

11 November 2017 9:00 am

I spent part of the summer sailing around Ithaca and the Ionian Sea. It was a good reminder of how…

The uninhabited island of Fuday in the Sound of Barra, Outer Hebrides

Our islands’ story

7 October 2017 9:00 am

Britain has 6,000 islands. Not as many as Sweden’s 30,000 but quite enough to be going on with. Only 132…