Julian Evans Julian Evans first visited the city of Odesa on a boat journey down the Dnipro River in 1994. He fell in love with its crumbling baroque beauty, and with its distinct personality as a self-contained world: part stage set and part port city on the make, a place where the boundaries between the actual and imaginary were continually blurring. He also fell in love with a local...
Jeffrey Meyers A great biography reveals the raw humanity behind lives of rare genius. Plutarch’s Lives set the pattern for the biographical arts in the tumultuous second century, and formed a source of inspiration for everyone from Shakespeare to America’s founding fathers. It seems to have fallen from grace in an age when projecting current values into the deepest corners of the past has...
Cam Honan Cam Honan has hiked across 56 countries on six continents, logging over 96,500 km in three decades. Between July 2011 and December, 2012, he set out on a dozen consecutive thru hikes that took him through 29 US states and 4 Canadian Provinces, a trip known as the 12 Long Walks. Backpacker Magazine called him “the most traveled hiker on earth”. I’ve wanted to speak with Cam for...
Richard Grant I’ll always love the American Southwest because it’s where I first encountered the desert. Arid places are my personal landscape — and this one contains more stories than most. Arizona’s defining social characteristic is transience. According to today’s guest, outsiders move there “to make a fresh start and reinvent themselves, or to find a refuge where they can be their...
Lesley Downer Lesley Downer first went to Japan as an English teacher in the late 1970s. She immersed herself in the language and culture and developed a keen interest in the Edo period, especially the poetry of Matsuo Basho. Years later, she returned to Japan to follow the same route the poet had written about in his 17th century book Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North)...
Thomas Swick Thomas Swick moved to Warsaw at the height of the Cold War. He suffered bleak winters in gloomy concrete apartment blocks, and he experienced two very different worlds: the closed-door life of spirited friends huddled over tables at home, and the empty windswept boulevards of an Eastern European capital without street life. He also lived through events that would be seen as...
Ian Fleming Ian Fleming was overshadowed by the fictional character he created in the final decade of his life, but his own story is far more interesting. He’s been mocked as a womanizing gambler and drinker who liked flogging his wife, just another bad writer of popular fiction. But his closest friends described him as enchanting, funny, and kind. He was fluent in German, and translated Klaus...
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...
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...