My father and grandfather were newspaper men, so you could say that ink runs in my veins. These days of course there’s not a whiff of ink on the net, but I find that pixels can be as provocative, stimulating and enlightening as any corrosive pigment.

On his website the late Clive James once mustered his pixels to consider the web as the work of a single giant spider. If only it were so, he mused, then ‘we might teach it to behave.’ For the web is ‘more like a jungle, and the most we can hope to do is make the occasional clearing, in which a civilized form of safety may be found. The visitor needs a refuge not just from nihilism, prurience and insanity, but from the meaningless, which is practically the web’s binding force even when it is providing necessary information. There have to be places where coherent expression can be found.’

I hope that some coherence may be found in these pages. You can judge for yourself the success of my battle against chaos by clicking on the links below to some of my recent articles and reviews, plus a few relevant profiles.

Selected Profiles and Interviews

On the British Council’s Contemporary Authors site
William Dalrymple on Rory as the ‘last literary traveller’
On Creative Non-fiction Writing in a ‘post-truth’ Age
Spectator ‘Table Talk’ Desert Island Dishes interview
Colin Thubron on Stalin’s Nose
Jan Morris on The Oatmeal Ark
William Dalrymple on Under the Dragon
Robert Macfarlane on Falling for Icarus
Jan Morris on Berlin: Imagine a City
Hugh MacDonald on Pravda Ha Ha: True Travels to the End of Europe
Joanna Kavenna on Pictures of You
Genevieve Fox on Gift of Time
Dan Coxon in Spike magazine
Frank Bures in WorldHum
Tim Leffel in Travel Writing 2.0
Rolf Potts in Vagabonding
CBC Radio ‘Despatches’ interview on Missing Lives
CBC interview on Canadian War Museum exhibition
The World According to Rory in Wanderlust magazine
Rory’s music on the Largehearted Boy music blog
Washington Post Books of the Year

Selected Articles by Rory MacLean

On David Bowie’s Berlin
On Bowie’s Berlin Landmarks
On the top 10 Berliners in literature
On 20^th century German literature
On the top 10 books on Burma
On Responsible Travel
On the Search for Wonders
On Swinging Sixties London
On the Glorious People’s Republic of Transnistria
On BBC Radio
On Learning German the Easy Way
On Sex … and the Germans
On Stolpersteine (I)
On Stolpersteine (II)
On Marlene Dietrich (I)
On Marlene Dietrich (II)
On Berlin’s Berghain
On Beauty…and Sex
On Campino
On Shantel
On Christmas Kitsch
On Jorinde Voigt
On a Great Lakes Escape
On the soft side of Australia
On Sunbathing with Ghosts in Florida
On the Nile High Club
On the New Berlin in Condé Nast Traveller
On Andrew D. MacLean
Across four continents with Nick Danziger
On Another Life with Nick Danziger
On a day in the life of North Korea

Selected Reviews by Rory MacLean

On Alain de Botton’s Art of Travel
On William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives
On Nicolas Bouvier’s The Way of the World
On Philip Marsden’s The Chains of Heaven
On Sara Wheeler’s The Magnetic North
On Cees Nooteboom’s Nomad’s Hotel
On Christina Lamb’s The Sewing Circles of Herat
On Tahir Shah’s The Caliph’s House
On Roger Deakin’s Wildwood
On Robert Macfarlane’s Wild Places
On Ziauddin Sardar’s Balti Britain
On Tim Butcher’s Blood River
On Guy Delisle’s Burma Chronicles
On Peter Godwin’s When a Crocodile Eats the Sun
On Michael Moran’s A Country in the Moon
On Chris Stewart’s Three Ways to Capsize a Boat
On Hugh Thomson’s Tequila Oil
On Peter Millar’s 1989
On Robert Irwin’s Memoirs of a Dervish
On Ernst Haffner’s Blood Brothers

If there is anything you’d like to discuss, please click here to drop me a line. I want to know. This site is here for you.