The walls of Carcassonne One of Europe’s most brutal episodes of religious persecution happened in the south of France. It wasn’t exactly ‘France’ back then. The nation we known today is bounded by those ‘natural limits’ Cardinal Richelieu described in the 17th century: the Rhine, the Alps, the Mediterranean, the Pyrenees and the Atlantic. But in the 12th century, the Massif Central was a greater...
The back cover of my book A Sunny Place for Shady People refers to Malta as “an island so small that few knew it was an independent country and even fewer could find it on the map”. It isn’t a sleight at Malta’s size, or an accusation of insignificance. It’s a comment on how little foreigners know about a country whose strategic location at the centre of the Mediterranean placed it in...
Kapka Kassabova Kapka Kassabova is the most interesting new writer in the travel literature genre. I use the term “new” in the sense of my own reading. I mostly read older books, or new books by older writers, because so little of what’s being published today seems relevant beyond the present moment. I think Kapka’s work will stand the test of time. She was born and raised in Cold War...
“Tell me the truth. Are you a spy?” It wasn’t the first time an old friend had asked me this, but the others made it sound like a joke. I suppose it was all those strange stamps in my passports: North Korea, China, Burma, Sudan, Syria… That and a twenty-two year-long obsession with a martial art that had historic links to espionage. I always assumed writing for travel magazines helped others make...
A short post-Canada update now that I’m back in Berlin. Thank you to everyone who packed the room for my talk at the Prescott Public Library. Special thanks to those who spent hours on the highway driving from Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and Syracuse NY. It was nice to see so many old and new faces — especially on a sunny summer Saturday when everyone would much rather be outdoors...
Eric Cline The Late Bronze Age Mediterranean was a surprisingly interconnected place. Rulers sent one another gifts, as well as diplomatic exchanges, and food aid in times of drought. Trade flourished, interrupted by the odd embargo, and military conflicts used disinformation for strategic gain. It was globalized and cosmopolitan in a way that feels very familiar to us in 2024. And then...
Long before George Orwell wrote Animal Farm and 1984 — and long before he was even George Orwell — Eric Blair was a nineteen year old policeman in Burma serving the British Raj. Biographies skirt over this five year period, in part due to the absence of letters and diaries, but it was the making of the writer he would become. Today’s guest set out to imagine those years in a wonderful new novel...
I’m doing an author talk at the Prescott Public Library next Saturday May 25th. That’s Prescott, Ontario. Not the other Prescott in Arizona. Start time is 1:30pm. I’ll speak for about 20 minutes, and will do two readings from A Sunny Place for Shady People, followed by Q&A and signing. I’ll have copies of the book available on site if you’d like to buy one (or three) directly from me. The...
Jonathan Raban (Photo by Julia Raban) Jonathan Raban wrote about human landscapes rather than uninhabited ones, and the borderlands between what a place professes to be and what they are. An Englishman who emigrated to Seattle at the age of 47, his status as an outsider gave him a unique perspective on America as the land of perpetual self-reinvention. Many of his books involved water — from the...
James Salter James Salter is the best American writer you’ve probably never read. He was a fighter pilot in the Korean War, flying more than 100 combat missions in an F-86 Sabre. He wrote Hollywood screenplays, one of which was made into a film starring Robert Redford. Three of his books — the novels A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years, and a memoir called Burning the Days — place him among the...