Notes on...

I got Madrid utterly wrong for quite a long time. It’s a lovely city to walk in, and I thought it was idealistic and innocent, like Don Quixote. But its strength is the easy-going tricksiness of a Sancho Panza. It is a little like Toledo or Seville in the picaresque 17th century. I’ve only been

Every night, while my husband reads by screen-light, my mind runs like an invisible rat two miles north to the house we’re rebuilding in Islington. And there it scurries from room to room, around the rotten skirting boards, up walls, into corners: testing, considering, fretting. Carpets or wooden boards? Which doorknobs, latches, hinges? Which white

No city really multitasks like Paris, shorthand for romance, culture, fashion, gastronomy and the kind of street life you find on Robert Doisneau calendars. The £69 Eurostar return opens up a vista of civilised pleasures: the best cheese shops (Androuet), the loveliest perfumeries (Serge Lutens, Palais Royal), the best markets (Marché des Enfants Rouge), the

For Henry James it was ‘the repository of consolations’. Wordsworth, an earlier visitor, called it ‘the eldest child of liberty’. Ruskin, a self-professed ‘foster child of Venice’, dedicated his life to study of its buildings. Wagner and Browning died there, and Stravinsky left instructions to be buried there, in the island cemetery of San Michele,

Last year 114,000 people flocked to Houghton Hall in north Norfolk for a once-in-a lifetime opportunity. Part of the great collection of paintings sold by the Walpole family in 1779 to Catherine the Great of Russia was back, thanks to a generous loan from the Hermitage. It was an un-usual triumph — a blockbuster exhibition in

It was late September. My wife and I were feeling overworked and overstressed — our mental states not helped by the fact that we hadn’t managed to get away for a proper summer holiday. We couldn’t face the prospect of middle-of-the-night flights or airport queues, so we looked for somewhere in the UK where we

When I first visited the Marche a dozen years ago, folk who knew about such things tapped their noses and confidently predicted that it was to be Italy’s ‘next big thing’. The British would tire of Tuscany and Umbria, they said, and would head in Boden-clad hordes further east. They said exactly the same thing

Of course one feels free on a holiday: that’s what holidays are for. But I have rarely felt freer than when my younger brother, two wild Irish cousins and I, all aged 16 or under, drove across Éire to the south-west tip (with, I should mention, the permission and indeed encouragement of our respective parents).

My second tee shot soared high and straight, then hurtled down towards the lake; a repeat of my first. I didn’t hear the disheartening plop this time because the breeze had shifted and now moved loudly through the pines that surrounded us. ‘Keep buggering on,’ said my old man, cheerfully. This course, Quinta do Lago

‘What are people in your country saying about Holland these days?’ one Dutch friend recently asked me. I hadn’t the heart to reply that no one was talking that much about his country. But the question seemed typically Dutch. Endlessly outward-looking and interested, yet charmingly insular and with a slightly off-kilter view of itself. The

Winter garden visiting is a solitary pastime, lending itself to the misanthrope, and is highly recommended. When it’s so cold not even your dog wants to come with you, seize the moment, spurred on by the smug promise of self-improvement. Unfortunately, many of the best garden gates are closed during winter and can only be

Call me a trencherman or worse, but I tend to think of the Dordogne as a giant restaurant-cum-farm shop, set in a wooded riverside picnic park. And I have a feeling that’s how its native residents think of it too, so central is the well-filled table to their traditional way of life. ‘Dordogne’ of course