Andrew Finkel In the late 1800s, during the Victorian era, a moderately successful doctor in Southsea created a fictional character so compelling that people wrote letters to him asking for help. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the novel A Study in Scarlet at age 27, in less than three weeks. The book didn’t attract much interest, but he went on to write a second novel with a little nudge from Oscar...
Bill Colegrave The Amu Darya River forms a natural barrier between the lands of Central Asia to the north and the Afghan and Indian worlds to the south. Ancient writers called it the Oxus. It was the nucleus of Bactrian civilizations, the target of conquerors like Alexander the Great, and the destination of intrepid 19th and 20th century travelers. The exact location of the river’s source...
Justin Marozzi I’d always thought of Temur as a cut-rate Genghis Khan who burst out of the Asian steppe, conquered a sizeable chunk of territory, and then failed to hold his empire together. It was only when researching a trip to Uzbekistan that I discovered Temur — or Tamerlane, as he was known in the West — was one of the world’s greatest conquerors. He was a strategist on a par with Alexander...
Alex Kerr I’ve often thought of Japan as one of the world’s most misunderstood countries, not because it is uniquely inscrutable but because it’s so beset by stereotypes. The casual visitor rarely sees beyond their image of geisha, Buddhist temples, hyper-modern electronics and anime. This exotic projection seems especially prevalent here in Germany and in France. The truth is more...
Barnaby Rogerson (Photo by Tom Bunning, October 2014) The Arab conquest was a decisive event in the history of the Mediterranean, but it is also one of the least understood. Today this region is plagued by endless conflicts and proxy wars between nations that can look more similar than different to the outside observer. Its greatest internal fault line is the split between Sunni and Shia Islam —...
Sarah Anderson (Photo by Sebastian Latala) Many readers think of owning a bookshop as some sort of dream job. Sarah Anderson founded the iconic Travel Bookshop in 1979. You might be familiar with this place even if you’ve never been to London. It was the inspiration for the bookshop in the 1998 Hugh Grant / Julia Roberts film Notting Hill. But that’s not our concern here. I’ve never seen...
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...
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...
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...
Tim Cocks Lagos is a massive city with massive problems. It’s plagued by traffic jams, power cuts, street gangs, police extortion, widespread fraud, and every hustle under the sun. I’ve always been drawn to Africa’s desert regions in my own travels. And I’ve always thought of Lagos as a place to avoid: a dangerous shithole where nothing good could possibly happen to the outsider unlucky...
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