Travel
Joan Collins’s diary: The joy of fake Christmas trees
Every year Christmas comes earlier and earlier in America. Cards, baubles and imitation trees were being sold in the big…
In the steppes of the ancients: travels on the Silk Road
It is difficult to fault this remarkable volume. The publishers have created a book of quality with stunning illustrations and…
Fortune tellers, pound shops and Orville: why I love Blackpool
Fortune tellers, pound shops and Orville: it’s easy to take the piss out of Blackpool, but William Cook loves it
The hotels trying to turn Cornwall into Kensington
Mousehole is a charming name; it is almost a charming place. It is a fishing village on Mount’s Bay, Cornwall,…
A miracle: French hotels actually like dogs
The first time I checked in to a French hotel with a golden retriever — his name was Gregory, predecessor…
What you’re missing now that you don’t read this in print
The internet is a frighteningly efficient place for hunter-gathering – but the pleasures of undirected browsing are harder to find online
A buffet in an Egyptian tomb
Atlantico is a vast buffet inside the Lopesan Costa Meloneras Resort Spa and Casino in Gran Canaria. The Lopesan Costa…
The one economic indicator that never stops rising: meet the Negroni Index
This dispatch comes to you from Venice — where I arrived at sunset on the Orient Express. More of that…
Prue Leith’s diary: I want to be green, but I’ve got some flights to take first...
‘Please God, make me good, but not yet.’ I know the feeling. As I get older and more deeply retired,…
Napoleon's birthplace feels more Italian than French
Napoleon’s birthplace, Casa Buona-parte, in Ajaccio, Corsica’s capital, is pretty grand. It has high ceilings, generous, silk-lined rooms and a…
The hell of being Michael Palin
In these diaries, which I found excellent in a very specific way, Michael Palin tells us about his life between…
On safari in Gloucestershire
The heat was still sweltering as we headed off at dusk towards the hide to watch wildlife with our enthusiastic…
Four gadgets to take on holiday — and two to leave behind
One inarguably good thing about electronic publishing is that it solves that old quandary about what books to pack for…
The ultimate guide to Cornwall
Before writing this review I spent an hour looking for my original Pevsner paperback on Cornwall, published in 1951 (the…
The nervous passenger who became one of our great travel writers
Sybille Bedford all her life was a keen and courageous traveller. Restless, curious, intellectually alert, she was always ready to…
From Scylax to the Beatles: the West's lust for India
Peter Parker on the age-old allure of the Indian subcontinent
My desert island poet
If I had to be marooned on a desert island with a stranger, that stranger would be John Burnside. Not…
The gilded generation - why the young have never had it so good
The statistics speak for themselves. Today’s gilded generation is the most blessed that ever lived
A secret from my African childhood has become a deeper mystery
About 55 years ago, when I was about ten, my younger brother Roger and I discovered a slave pit in…
What seamen fear more than Somali pirates
If a time traveller were to arrive in our world from, say, 1514 — a neat half-millennium away — what…
Clarissa Tan's Notebook: Why I stopped drinking petrol
Florence was in fog the day I arrived. Its buildings were bathed in white cloud, its people moved as though…
The Navigators
The 2014 winner of The Spectator’s award for unconventional travel writing
Tanya Gold: Child-friendly, sex-free, nut-heavy – just the hotel for my 40th birthday
Woolley Grange is a child-friendly country house hotel that seems, at first, entirely monstrous — a grey Tudor house in…
American Smoke, by Iain Sinclair - review
If you have read Iain Sinclair’s books you will know that he is a stylist with a love of language.…
What would Auden have deemed evil in our time? European jingoism
‘Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno’ was the first Auden poem that Alexander McCall Smith read in his youth. He discovered it…
