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podcast

Gordon Peake: Insider stories from the world of foreign aid

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Gordon Peake [Photo by Steve Morris] Gordon Peake’s first book — Beloved Land — was a memoir of life in Timor-Leste, one of the world’s newest and least visited nations. He followed it up with another ‘residency’ book, this time on Bougainville, an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea that hopes to become an independent country. Unsung Land, Aspiring Nation will be published in early...

Edith Durham and the Balkans

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Edith Durham, Albania’s ‘mountain queen’ When I hiked through the Accursed Mountains in Kosovo, Montenegro and Albania last June, I met older Albanians who still referred to Edith Durham as their “mountain queen” for her staunch advocacy of Albanian independence and her love of its people. I’d stumbled across a copy of her 1909 book High Albania while preparing for my trip, and...

David Thompson and the mapping of Canada

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David Thompson, the explorer who mapped western Canada David Thompson has been called “greatest practical land geographer that the world has produced”. He travelled some 90,000 kilometres across North America as a fur trader and surveyor, mapping 4.9 million square kilometres of wilderness — one-fifth of the continent.  His work was so accurate that it remained the...

Rebecca Lowe: Cycling through the Middle East’s fractured mosaic

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Rebecca Lowe In 2015, Rebecca Lowe set out on a year long cycling trip from London to Tehran, passing through the Balkans, the Levant and North Africa, crossing over to the Arabian Peninsula and ending in Iran. The Syrian civil war was raging, and Western newspapers were filed with stories of conflict and crisis, the sort of images that have come to dominate our impressions of the region we’ve...

Martha Gellhorn with biographer Caroline Moorehead

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Martha Gellhorn Martha Gellhorn wanted to be known as a novelist. Instead, she’s remembered as one of the 20th century’s greatest war correspondents. She wrote about what war does to ordinary people, and the despair of those who have lost everything. She covered the Spanish Civil War, and went ashore on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day.  But she also wrote about her travels in China, Africa...

Guy Kennaway on life in a Jamaican village 

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Guy Kennaway (Photo by Vanessa Fristedt) Guy Kennaway’s Jamaica is “a little Eden made more interesting by the Fall”. His book One People is a comic novel, but Cousins Cove is a real village, and the stories he tells were gathered during his first ten years as an idle British expat. It’s a world populated by wannabe drug dealers, resourceful beach prostitutes and rental dreads who nurse warm...

Sophie Haydock: Egon Schiele and fin de siècle Vienna 

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Sophie Haydock In the waning decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, fin de siècle Vienna became a crucible of creativity. Many of the artistic movements which shaped Western thought in the 20th century began in this remarkable melting pot of cultures and influences. Austro-Germans, Czechs, Ruthenians, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and Slovenians rubbed shoulders in the streets, and the coffee houses...

Carole Angier: The strange world of W.G. Sebald 

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Carole Angier (Photo by Roderick Field) W.G. Sebald has been described as “a writer of almost unclassifiable originality”. You’d be just as likely to encounter his “essayistic semi-fiction” under travel literature, history or fiction. It is all of these things, and none of these things. Sebald wrote about the plight of emigrants, and in particular, emigrants from the Holocaust.   His...

The word is finally getting out 

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Personal Landscapes seems to be growing a following. The word is spreading slowly but surely… An unbending onslaught of babble about books. A cacophony of cultured conversation. Voice from another room: This tiresome trireme of tomfoolery isn’t helping. Fine. Be like that. I just wanted to let you know the podcast has been added to this carefully curated list over at Nomad Flag ==> The Best...

David Eimer: Cultural survival in China’s borderlands

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David-Eimer – Photo by Gilles Sabrie David Eimer is the author of the critically acclaimed The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China, and A Savage Dreamland: Journeys in Burma. He was a Beijing-based correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph from 2005 to 2012, and the Southeast Asia correspondent for the Daily Telegraph between 2012 and 2014. You can also find his...

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