Category Archive

In its third year, this weekend’s 2025 Sherborne Travel Writing Festival unfolded with dazzling speakers, ecstatic audiences and a relieved curator (that’s me, folks). As the UK’s only annual festival … Read More

Sunlight sparkles off the broad Dniester River. Smugglers’ tracks wind across the snow and into silent woods. Patriotic oligarchs in Gucci tracksuits hunt wild boar with AK-47s. In 2013 when … Read More

At last I am at my desk editing the new book, drawing together the experiences of more than a dozen extraordinary research trips to Bhutan, Kerala, the Peruvian Amazon, Jerusalem, … Read More

To Benedict Allen, Don McCullin, Noo Saro-Wiwa, Nick Danziger, Monisha Rajesh, Kassia St Clair, Hilary Bradt, Katie Carr, Bijan Omrani, Tom Parfit and Davina Quinlivan, and to our wonderful audiences, … Read More

Apologies for my lengthy silence. Since my last newsletter I’ve been travelling, making research trips to India, California, the US Great Plains, British Columbia and Bhutan. Three weeks ago I … Read More

These last years have brought dramatic changes to our lives: Brexit, Covid lockdowns, soaring energy costs, climate change and the largest, most brutal war in Europe since 1945. While our … Read More

Tim Hannigan is a lovely man. The Cornish writer and academic is author of several narrative history books, including the award-winning Raffles and the British Invasion of Java. His book The … Read More

After two years of personal and collective loss, for so many of us, we seemed at last to have started on a new, hopeful journey – until two weeks ago. … Read More

Once in a life? No, twice in a life. At least. Long, long ago and fresh out of film school, I worked with David Bowie in Berlin. At the end … Read More

A few days ago we lost the great, gifted writer Jan Morris. Today I’m honoured to remember her in the Guardian alongside Pico Iyer, Marcel Theroux, Kapka Kassabova, Sophy Robert and Hugh … Read More