Alone on a wide, wide sea
Some years ago, when I stepped from an unstable boat onto Juan Fernández island, a friendly man took my bag…
For fashionable Victorian travellers, the only way was Norway
‘The only use of a gentleman in travelling,’ Emmeline Lowe wrote in 1857, ‘is to take care of the luggage.’…
Thin air and frayed tempers
Born in New South Wales in 1888, George Finch climbed Mount Canobolas as a boy, unleashing, in the thin air,…
The revolution that went up in smoke
‘Every day’, writes the foreign correspondent Wendell Steavenson in this account of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, ‘see-sawed between joy and…
The story of Sikkim’s last king and queen reads like a fairy tale gone wrong
Sikkim was a Himalayan kingdom a third of the size of Wales squeezed between China, India, Nepal and Bhutan. I…
A Victorian sailor is the new love of my life
Jenny Balfour Paul is an indigo dye expert. She has written two books on the subject, and lectures around the…
Dreaming of a golden future: there will always be people willing to sacrifice all in the pursuit of gold
In 2008, the price of gold lofted above $1,000 an ounce for the first time in history, inspiring a rush…
The greatest American Arctic disaster
In the course of the 19th century, various flotillas of expeditions hastened to the polar regions in little wooden ships…
