Travel writing
The dark side of the Himalayas
How best to write a book about the Himalayas when Mount Everest has been reduced to just another tick-off on…
A poet finds home in a patch of nettles
Towards the end of a long relationship – ‘resolved to have a conversation about the Future, which meant Separating’ –…
A mighty river with many names: adventures on the Amur
The Amur is the eighth or tenth longest river in the world, depending on whom you believe. The veteran travel…
Dreaming of the desert: my life in the Sahara, by Sanmao
Travel writing is ‘the red light district of literature’, as Colin Thubron aptly put it, a space where anything goes.…
The exotic Silk Road is now a highway to hell
This engaging book describes the Norwegian author’s travels round the five Central Asian Stans — a region where toponyms still…
Whatever happened to glasnost and perestroika?
This is a timely book. It addresses the challenges of a fractious and fractured Europe. The first word of the…
The intoxicating languor of the Caribbean
Ian Fleming’s voodoo extravaganza Live and Let Die finds James Bond in rapt consultation of The Traveller’s Tree by Patrick…
Henry Miller — pornographer or prophet?
Few writers seem less deserving of resuscitation than Henry Miller. When the Scottish poet and novelist John Burnside was asked…
Beyond Timbuktu
Every so often a monster comes along. Here’s one — but a monster of fact not fiction, over 700 pages…
Paris: a beautiful, damned city
The much-lamented journalist and bon viveur Sam White, late of the rue du Bac, The Spectator and the Evening Standard,…
Lesley Blanch: a true original on the wilder shores of exoticism
Lesley Blanch (1904–2007) will be remembered chiefly for her gloriously extravagant The Wilder Shores of Love, the story of four…
