Book review – travel

Shetland with tirricks

Kayaking solo from Shetland to the Channel

27 July 2019 9:00 am

After kayaking solo in a November storm to a square mile of rock called Eilean a’Chleirich in the Summer Isles…

Barry Lopez. Credit: John Clark

For a passionate ecologist, Barry Lopez burns a lot of oil

29 June 2019 9:00 am

It is more than a generation since the appearance of Barry Lopez’s classic Arctic Dreams. That book’s effortless integration of…

Val d’Aran in the Catalan Pyrenees [Getty}

The peculiar allure of the Pyrenees

1 December 2018 9:00 am

On 26 August 1880 Henry Russell consummated his marriage in an unusual way. He was, to his own mind, married…

View of Marseille from the basilica of Notre-Dame de la Garde, also known as La Bonne Mère, traditionally regarded as the city’s protectress. ‘The Good Mother intervenes at sick beds, down shadowy streets, and in the dark hours of night,’ writes Iain Sinclair [image: Getty]

How do our surroundings affect our health and happiness?

15 September 2018 9:00 am

The Wellcome Trust puts on some of the most engaging exhibitions in London and holds in its permanent collection a…

Lake Kolyvan in the Altai Republic. Watercolour by Thomas Atkinson

The magnificent Atkinsons: rigours of travel in 19th-century Russia

4 August 2018 9:00 am

Russia has always attracted a certain breed of foreigner: adventurers, drawn to the country’s vastness and emptiness; chancers, seeking fortunes…

Sickness strikes in the clifftop monasteries of Meteora, and Stagg leaves the pilgrimage route

Staggering to Jerusalem — a journey from darkness into light

30 June 2018 9:00 am

Guy Stagg walked 5,500 km from Canterbury to Jerusalem, following medieval pilgrim paths, and he records the expedition in The…

Horatio Clare breaks the ice with the taciturn Finns

18 November 2017 9:00 am

In this slim travel book Horatio Clare voyages as a guest on the Finnish icebreaker Otso (Bear), ‘mostly in darkness,…

The uninhabited island of Fuday in the Sound of Barra, Outer Hebrides

Our islands’ story

7 October 2017 9:00 am

Britain has 6,000 islands. Not as many as Sweden’s 30,000 but quite enough to be going on with. Only 132…

Fishing for sturgeon at the mouth of the Amur River in the Okhotsk Sea

‘Russia’s Mississippi’ — or China’s — just keeps rolling along

9 January 2016 9:00 am

In 2014, Beijing and Moscow signed a US$400 billion deal to deliver Russian gas to Chinese consumers. Construction of the…

Paul Theroux returns home — to guns and evangelism

12 December 2015 9:00 am

During the first ten pages of this long work Paul Theroux, on a journey through the American South, meets two…

An elegy for Concorde, the most beautiful airliner of all time

14 November 2015 9:00 am

The Concorde experience, a fleeting indulgence in luxurious grandiosity, began each day with circumvention of the hugger-mugger of the hoi…

‘Pleasures of a sea voyage’ from Three Men and a Bradshaw

Where are the green silk blinds of the once luxurious Metropolitan Line?

11 July 2015 9:00 am

Most current writers on railways don’t want to appear at all romantic lest they be shunted into the ‘trainspotter’ siding.…

The darkest secret about commuting: some of us enjoy it

29 November 2014 9:00 am

In the early days of Victorian railways, train journeys were (rightly) considered so dangerous that ticket offices sold life insurance…

Aimé Tschiffely with Mancha and Gato. The strongest emotional bonds he formed on his epic journey were with his horses

A horse ride from Buenos Aires to New York? No problem!

14 June 2014 8:00 am

Sam Leith marvels at a lone horseman’s 10,000-mile ride, braving bandits, quicksands, vampire bats and revolution in search of ‘variety’

Go east – the people get nicer, even if their dogs get nastier

12 April 2014 9:00 am

When Nick Hunt first read Patrick Leigh Fermor’s account of his youthful trudge across Europe in A Time of Gifts…

The gorge between Romania and Serbia, known as the Iron Gates of the Danube

The long and winding story of the Danube

14 December 2013 9:00 am

For much of its history the Danube has been a disappointment. It looks so tempting on the map but, far…

Why worship Prince Philip?

23 November 2013 9:00 am

In this travelogue, Matthew Baylis, the novelist and TV critic and former Eastenders screenwriter, goes to Tanna, a Melanesian island,…