The earliest books I remember borrowing from the public library — over and over again — as a child were on astronomy and World War Two aircraft. I loved anything about the solar system, especially images from the early Viking landers that went to Mars, and the Voyager probes that ventured to the gas giants and beyond. And I probably knew more about World War Two fighters and bombers...
Lawrence Millman serving up arctic tern shit in Iceland… Lawrence Millman is the author of 18 books, including Northern Latitudes, Last Places, An Evening Among Headhunters, and Lost in the Arctic. His articles have appeared in Smithsonian, National Geographic Adventure, The Atlantic Monthly, Sports Illustrated, and Islands. He’s made 30 trips to the Arctic and Subarctic...
Rory Maclean Rory Maclean is the author of 15 books, including Berlin: Portrait of a City Through the Centuries, Stalin’s Nose, and Pravda Ha Ha. He’s been called “the outstanding, and most indefatigable, traveller-writer of our time” by the novelist John le Carré. Jan Morris described his work as “a new kind of history, in several dimensions and innumerable moods, that adds up to — across...
Barnaby Rogerson (Photo by Tom Bunning, October 2014) I’m launching my new Personal Landscapes podcast with Barnaby Rogerson, publisher of Eland books. It’s the only possible way I could open a discussion on books about place. Eland has been resurrecting lost travel classics and keeping them in print for more than 35 years. The legendary travel presenter and Monty Python...
Do you have a book addiction? Well I’m here to make it worse. I love a good reading list like a hobo loves Aqua Velva. As the year comes to a close, and as dark Berlin huddles beneath a pandemic sky, I’d like to take a moment to share my top reads from the past twelve months. Each book made my list because it was memorable, important, or just thoroughly enjoyable. And each is worth your time. I...
This new book by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay is essential reading for anyone struggling to make sense of the self-contradictory ‘woke’ ideology that’s spread divisive cancel culture like a mind virus through our workplaces, public policy and social lives. The authors have done an admirable job of tracing the development of these ideas, from the early insights of postmodern...
Kapka Kassabova is taking us back to the Balkans. I’ve been looking forward to something new from this wonderful writer since Border, which was my top travel read of 2018. That earlier book touched on the author’s childhood in Bulgaria, and To The Lake takes us deeper as she journeys to her grandmother’s place of origin in the mountainous Macedonian lake district. The region was once an important...
It’s been brought to my attention that I might be somewhat strange. Surely I’m not the only one who rotates their bookmarks? It’s not as though I collect bookmarks. I’m not a member of the International Friends of Bookmarks, either (yes, that’s a real thing). I don’t care what I mark my books with when I travel: an old envelope, the stub of a boarding pass, abandoned receipts. I’m unapologetic...
My last London day was a short one. We had a flight to catch that evening, but there was still time to shift the scope of my trip back to books. Our first stop was Exmouth Market, and a late breakfast with Barnaby Rogerson, the publisher of Eland Books. I wanted to get his thoughts on travel literature. But that’s the focus of my next Adrift on the Continent column in Outpost, so you’ll have to...
