I love Stockholm. I’ve lived there, worked there and been charmed since my first visit by a lifestyle that seemed to me the world’s best-kept secret. Why, oh why, did …
More +Where we build our cities
This week, the 20th anniversary of the city of Astana — the new capital of Kazakhstan — coincided with me reading the opening chapters of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of …
More +6 Greats from the Great Plains
1 Plainsong Trilogy (Plainsong, Eventide, Benediction) by Kent Haruf On completing this beautifully sparse, stripped bare trilogy set in the imagined flatlands town of Holt, Colorado, I was struck by how …
More +Why we like camping
I went camping last weekend. We got chatting, round the proverbial campfire, about why we — the British, but north Europeans in general — seem to be drawn to taking …
More +Talking to a three-year-old
We’re going to the pub. Which pub? The Britannia. No, but which pub, Daddy? I just said, the Britannia. We are going to drink some lovely orange juice. Which orange …
More +Why do we go to school?
Like most people of peasant stock, I regard education as an incredible privilege — one my forebears never had. But what did I actually get? Often (not always, but often) …
More +Five-fer
I completed a 10-mile journey by canoe yesterday (with my companion, Jon) from the village of Hoarwithy in Herefordshire to the town of Ross-on-Wye. It is a free-flowing wild …
More +The Beginner’s Guide to the Turkish Elections
When? June 24. Again? Yes, following general elections in 2011, June and November 2015, and a referendum only 12 months ago. This is because incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — a …
More +The Road to Oxiana
Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana is fascinating as a travelogue through 1930s Iran and Afghanistan, at a time when vehicular roads were in their infancy, ancient practices were in …
More +Unrestricted avian migration
In my son’s new book, Robins, Wrens and other British Birds, it reads: “In springtime, many of the birds you see will have come from far away. Each year, some …
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