Berlin residents must have felt one step closer to the future in the decade before the Cold War ended. That’s when a 313-metre-long spacecraft materialized in Westend. East Berlin was building their Palace of the Republic in the 1970s, and the West’s Congress Hall in the Tiergarten — known as the pregnant oyster for its unfortunate shape — was too small. A competition was held to...
Good Scammer by Guy Kennaway This is the book Horatio Alger would have written if an Alger hero came from a post-colonial Caribbean island awash with foreign money that never seems to trickle down to the poverty-stricken villages beyond gated tourist enclaves. The poorly educated, semi-literate orphan at the heart of Guy Kennaway’s latest novel experiences the ‘Rise to Respectability’, sees his...
Louisa Waugh Louisa Waugh lived in a village in the far west of Mongolia in the late 1990s and wrote a remarkable book about her experience. It’s a world of drought-stricken spring, lush summer pasture and brutal winters when fetching water meant hacking holes through river ice. In this harsh and stunningly beautiful landscape, villagers lived on mutton, dairy products and vodka, and met...
The villa of the Wannsee conference Remembrance Day isn’t observed here in the country that started and lost two World Wars. But Berlin is filled with memorials which commemorate the Twentieth Century’s darkest events. I normally stand alone in my study for the 11am moment of silence. But this year I decided to observe Remembrance Day by visiting the Wannsee villa where Nazi bureaucrats met to...
Bruce Chatwin Bruce Chatwin’s first book — In Patagonia — changed our idea of what travel writing could be. Its structural is elliptical, almost episodic. Its truth is somewhere between fact and fiction. Its richly descriptive prose is built with short, simple sentences peppered with arcane words and a rich vocabulary. Chatwin described it as a ‘cubist’ portrait. The author was as...
The New Leviathans by John Gray Only a Leviathan can protect us from the state of nature: a “war of all against all” in which the life of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” So said Thomas Hobbes in his 1651 book of that name. The Leviathan Hobbes had in mind was a sovereign with unfettered power ceded by individuals in exchange for protection. This ruler would create conditions...
Laura Trethewey This might just be the strangest landscape I’ve featured on the podcast. It’s a bizarre world of prairie flats larger than the Eurasian Steppe, a 40,000-mile-long underwater mountain range, and an underwater waterfall that makes Angel Falls look small. Only one quarter of it has been mapped, and less than 1% has been explored with remote vehicles. Why do we know so little about...
Unfinished Woman by Robyn Davidson From the very first pages of her new memoir, Robyn Davidson grapples with how to recollect the past. “The way memory plays in the mind is not factual,” she writes. “It is sketchy, mythical, misremembered, contradictory. It is flickers of light on unfathomable darkness. We go back over and over the past, watching it change with each take, not thinking of it as...
I never imaged I would see a massive crowd chanting “Gas the Jews” on the streets of Sydney. Or the leader of an academic union representing sessional faculty at McMaster University — CUPE Local 3906 — celebrating the largest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust, and then doubling down on it in the face of criticism. If you’re a member of that union, the very least you can do is...
I try to avoid politics on my blog. My focus is travel, culture and books. But I’m unable to tear myself away from the scenes of barbarity making their way out of Israel through Twitter, and sites like Bari Weiss’s Free Press substack. There’s one video I can’t get out of my head. A young girl is yanked by her hair from the back of a Jeep by a man with a pistol who shouts “God is great”...
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