Daphne Caruana Galizia was the most dangerous person in Malta. I probably don’t need to tell you who she is anymore, because her name is making the news worldwide. I first came into contact with Daphne on January 13, 2017. But of course I knew her work well by that point, because I had been a twice-daily reader of her blog for the past 6 years. Admittedly, I found her blog when googling key words...
A few readers have asked me how much research goes into the writing of a book. How much do you have to read in order to write? It really depends on the project, of course. And I’m sure it’s different for everyone. I tend to read quite a lot. Partly because I love to read, and doing a book or an article gives me an excuse to dig into a subject. You never really know what sort of obscure fact or...
I turned up the collar of my black trench coat and thrust my hands deep into my pockets. I didn’t have a semi-automatic pistol to clutch, so I held my phone instead. We had fallen into a Cold War movie, and I was trying to act the part. We’d spent the night of Tomoko’s birthday on a train from Krakow to Lviv, where we ate a railway station cake on hard fold-down bunks, chased with lukewarm Polish...
“Oh come on, ‘I’ for Italy!” “What’s the problem?” Tomoko asked, buckling her seatbelt and settling in for a drive. “It looks like my recently updated sat nav has maps for all of continental Europe…except Italy.” We were sitting in the rental car lot at Bologna airport. Night was falling. I’d never been to this part of the country before, and we had to get to the town of Faenza that same evening...
There’s a smallish town just outside the Berlin city centre that’s completely encrusted with palaces. It’s only 30 minutes away, at the end of the S7 line, on the River Havel. And it’s the most popular day trip from Berlin. Postdam was originally a Slavonic settlement, founded in the tenth century. But it was the Hohenzollerns who put it on the map. The house of Hohenzollern rose to prominence...
I learned and experienced many things during my years in Malta, and I wrote around 30 articles about it — most of them were positive, about the places we discovered, from small village streets to the windswept heights of Ras ir-Raheb and the coast of Blata tal-Melh. But some were critical, too. I found the history to be quite fascinating. The present culture not so much. And this past year of...
I moved to the Mediterranean because I wanted to write an island book inspired by Lawrence Durrell. But it had to be a place no one else had written about — at least, not in that way. I found Malta after a brief web search. I knew nothing about the place apart from indirect Dashiell Hammett references and vague notions of Knights battling Turks. That vagueness appealed to me. And so we gave up...
We weren’t even halfway up the mountain yet, and I was already coming to terms with my own mortality. “Don’t take that trail,” the apartment owner had told us. “It’s very steep. Go around this way instead.” But we had slept late and missed the bus. And this trail began right at the edge of the village. It seemed like the most convenient option at the time. I began to doubt the wisdom of this...
I’ve been in Berlin for the past few weeks, soaking up some art and inspiration in my favourite city. And no visit is complete without soaking up a few of the local spirits, too. I had a chance to stop by one of my favourite cocktail bars last week. And it just happens to be in the very same neighbourhood as our current short term flat. It’s called Beckett’s Kopf. There’s no sign to mark...
When I was a teenager, my vision of university was one of solid stone buildings, some covered in vines. The footsteps of a single person echoing from a lonely courtyard late at night. Vast libraries with wood panelled walls and statues of ancient Greeks. And new worlds of knowledge opened by brilliant professors, who would spark discussions that would rage far into the next morning’s light. None...