Travel
Corsica
Napoleon’s birthplace, Casa Buona-parte, in Ajaccio, Corsica’s capital, is pretty grand. It has high ceilings, generous, silk-lined rooms and a…
Perils of a charmed life
In these diaries, which I found excellent in a very specific way, Michael Palin tells us about his life between…
Gloucestershire
The heat was still sweltering as we headed off at dusk towards the hide to watch wildlife with our enthusiastic…
Holiday kit – should it stay or should it go?
One inarguably good thing about electronic publishing is that it solves that old quandary about what books to pack for…
For the love of Cornwall
Before writing this review I spent an hour looking for my original Pevsner paperback on Cornwall, published in 1951 (the…
Through her eyes only
Sybille Bedford all her life was a keen and courageous traveller. Restless, curious, intellectually alert, she was always ready to…
Fabled splendours
Peter Parker on the age-old allure of the Indian subcontinent
A perfect stranger
If I had to be marooned on a desert island with a stranger, that stranger would be John Burnside. Not…
The luckiest kids in history
The statistics speak for themselves. Today’s gilded generation is the most blessed that ever lived
Back in time to a childhood discovery in Africa
About 55 years ago, when I was about ten, my younger brother Roger and I discovered a slave pit in…
Modern-day Leviathans
If a time traveller were to arrive in our world from, say, 1514 — a neat half-millennium away — what…
Florence Notebook
Florence was in fog the day I arrived. Its buildings were bathed in white cloud, its people moved as though…
The Navigators
The 2014 winner of The Spectator’s award for unconventional travel writing
Meet the parents
Woolley Grange is a child-friendly country house hotel that seems, at first, entirely monstrous — a grey Tudor house in…
The long and winding road
If you have read Iain Sinclair’s books you will know that he is a stylist with a love of language.…
The good companion
‘Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno’ was the first Auden poem that Alexander McCall Smith read in his youth. He discovered it…
Off the beaten track
This is probably not a book for those whose interest in Spain gravitates towards such contemporary phenomena as the films…
This other Eden
Sam Leith is transported by the finest scenery in England
Comfort in melancholy
Geoff Nicholson is the Maharajah of Melancholy. The quality was there in his novels, it was there in his non-fiction…
Cheap and cheerful
Mrs Thatcher was widely believed to have said that ‘any man over the age of 26 who finds himself on…
Low life
This time last year the postman delivered a picture postcard depicting a village square in Provence. The photograph on the…
A touch of class
Usually it is annoying when you have to board an aeroplane via a shuttle bus rather than an airbridge. The…
Set in a silver sea
‘Tom Island’ — that was the name I was given once by a girl I met on an island in…
Notes on…Normandy
There are some, I know, who for whom Normandy means the three Cs — cider, cream and calvados. But if,…
