Travel writing

The dark side of the Himalayas

8 October 2022 9:00 am

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

6 August 2022 9:00 am

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

11 September 2021 9:00 am

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

24 January 2020 10:00 pm

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

30 November 2019 9:00 am

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?

26 October 2019 9:00 am

This is a timely book. It addresses the challenges of a fractious and fractured Europe. The first word of the…

Credit: Getty Images

The intoxicating languor of the Caribbean

5 January 2019 9:00 am

Ian Fleming’s voodoo extravaganza Live and Let Die finds James Bond in rapt consultation of The Traveller’s Tree by Patrick…

Henry Miller: part of the radical tradition of American seers and prophets

Henry Miller — pornographer or prophet?

14 April 2018 9:00 am

Few writers seem less deserving of resuscitation than Henry Miller. When the Scottish poet and novelist John Burnside was asked…

Beyond Timbuktu

9 September 2017 9:00 am

Every so often a monster comes along. Here’s one — but a monster of fact not fiction, over 700 pages…

Children in the bidonville du Chemin du Cornillon, Saint-Denis, 1963. (From Luc Sante’s The Other Paris)

Paris: a beautiful, damned city

13 February 2016 9:00 am

The much-lamented journalist and bon viveur Sam White, late of the rue du Bac, The Spectator and the Evening Standard,…

Lesley Blanch in a bar in Menton in the south of France, in 1961Lesley Blanch in a bar in Menton in the south of France, in 1961

Lesley Blanch: a true original on the wilder shores of exoticism

28 March 2015 9:00 am

Lesley Blanch (1904–2007) will be remembered chiefly for her gloriously extravagant The Wilder Shores of Love, the story of four…