Sara Wheeler

What makes this Bhutanese schoolgirl happy?

What makes a semi-police state happy?

16 December 2017 9:00 am

This charming collection of individual photographic portraits of Bhutanese citizens intentionally highlights the two central features of the kingdom today:…

Horatio Clare breaks the ice with the taciturn Finns

18 November 2017 9:00 am

In this slim travel book Horatio Clare voyages as a guest on the Finnish icebreaker Otso (Bear), ‘mostly in darkness,…

The Battle of Diu, India (1509), in which Lopes took part as a member of Francisco de Almeida’s victorious fleet

The greatest survival story

24 June 2017 9:00 am

This is the story of a 16th-century Portuguese knight and mariner who survived alone on a lump of volcanic rock…

A Kalash girl in traditional dress

The curse of the Yeti

29 April 2017 9:00 am

This book, according to its author Gabi Martínez, is ‘a non-fiction novel’. It tells the story of Jordi Magraner, a…

Up where the air is clear

19 November 2016 9:00 am

Robert Twigger’s father was born in a Himalayan hill resort and carried to school in a sedan chair. His son,…

Alone on a wide, wide sea

10 September 2016 9:00 am

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

4 June 2016 9:00 am

‘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

13 February 2016 9:00 am

Born in New South Wales in 1888, George Finch climbed Mount Canobolas as a boy, unleashing, in the thin air,…

Graffiti outside the American University of Cairo reads ‘Revolution’ (December 2011)

The revolution that went up in smoke

22 August 2015 9:00 am

‘Every day’, writes the foreign correspondent Wendell Steavenson in this account of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, ‘see-sawed between joy and…

Rabdentse, near Pelling, the ruined former capital of Sikkim, with Mount Kanchenjunga in the distance

The story of Sikkim’s last king and queen reads like a fairy tale gone wrong

1 August 2015 9:00 am

Sikkim was a Himalayan kingdom a third of the size of Wales squeezed between China, India, Nepal and Bhutan. I…

‘Jeddah from the sea’— sketch by Thomas Machell in one of his journals

A Victorian sailor is the new love of my life

27 June 2015 9:00 am

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

11 April 2015 9:00 am

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

7 February 2015 9:00 am

In the course of the 19th century, various flotillas of expeditions hastened to the polar regions in little wooden ships…