Travel
The dangerous charm of Peter Matthiessen
The philandering author of the sublime The Snow Leopard spent a lifetime globe-hopping from the Amazonian jungle to the Siberian tundra at great cost to family life
Hell is other tourists in Antarctica
If you’ve longed to see every penguin species in the world, think about the company you’ll be keeping, warns Jamie Lafferty
How not to behave at a London gentleman’s club
After a 5 a.m. start, I arrived at the departure gate in Nice airport to discover there was an air…
With glee to the silvery sea
Before Beeching’s cuts, hordes of British holiday-makers rushed by train to the coast every summer – from ‘bracing’ Scarborough to the ‘Devon Rivera’
Britain fought on the wrong side of the first world war
It’s more than two months since I returned from Dublin, and at last the hangover is beginning to fade. I…
Why you should never trust a travel writer
After one of Jeffrey Archer’s minor tangles with the absolute truth, his friend the late Barry Humphries remarked: ‘We all…
The slow delights of an OAP coach tour
Early on Monday mornings, in service stations across the country, armies of the elderly are mustering. These are the OAPs…
The wolf as symbol of European anxieties
This ‘amoral outcast’ and its thieving trickery is now widely equated with the economic migrant, slipping across borders unnoticed and threatening the status quo
Beware taking up running in your fifties
Over a hotel breakfast in Brisbane, I showed Sir Alan Hollinghurst my injuries. We’d met the previous week at the…
Church teaching on homosexuality can be revised
Lamorna Ash devotes much space to interviewing gay Christians seared by homophobia, but neglects scripture’s underlying message about the link between sex and loving commitment
My sitcom-worthy walking holiday
I’ve just returned from a walking holiday in Northumberland with Caroline and my mother-in-law. I say ‘walking’ but that makes…
The lost art of getting lost
One of the quietly profound pleasures of travel is renting cars in ‘unusual’ locations. I’ve done it in Azerbaijan, Colombia,…
Butlin’s is cashing in on nostalgia
Butlin’s is no longer a holiday ‘camp’. The company has evolved from its postwar heyday and now describes its properties…
How popular is Airbnb?
Tall order Two naval cadets were killed and 19 injured when a Mexican sail training vessel, the Cuauhtemoc, crashed into…
Are you a ‘tidsoptimist’?
Last week Caroline sent me an Instagram reel that featured a Norwegian word and its English translation. A ‘tidsoptimist’, I…
Texas is the perfect holiday destination
Business travel isn’t quite the perk it is cracked up to be. For one thing, you have no say about…
The joy of Channel Island hopping
Seldom has a collective term been less appropriate: ‘the Channel Islands’ – as though these were in any sense (other…
Where the young rich flee to
If Elon Musk gets his way, and Mars becomes our newest New World, I had always assumed that the people…
The adventures of the indomitable Dorothy Mills
The society rebel with a fondness for cross-dressing travelled widely in Africa, South America and the Middle East, dying in 1959, aged 70, with bags packed for the next expedition
The Gen-Z fliers obsessed with maximising their air miles
Oscar, 26, joins me on Google Meet from Buenos Aires, having arrived earlier that day from New York – by…
How to ski when you can’t ski
I was 30 when I first went skiing, and up for absolutely anything. I was a successful party caterer who…
Colombia is a better place to watch football than Loftus Road
I’ve just returned from Colombia, where I’ve been visiting my daughter. She’s doing a modern languages degree and has to…
In defence of BA’s new loyalty scheme
One of my favourite cartoons shows a couple sitting in luxury at the front of a plane, the wife peeking…
My YouTube rabbit hole
How do you live with yourself when 179 air passengers are burned alive on a South Korean runway, and you’ve…
At 61, it’s official: I’m ‘young old’
I read with some disappointment recently that the Encyclopaedia Britannica considers 61 – the age I am now – to…
