Travel

Thursday

Claire Kohda

Round North Korea with Michael Palin in rose-tinted spectacles

Michael Palin in North Korea, a two-part documentary in which the Python is given a tightly choreographed tour of that country, aired on Channel 5 last year. Palin dances with cheerfully drunk residents of the country on International Workers’ Day; picnics with his guide, a woman called So Hyang; plays catch with an inflatable globe with some children; learns Taekwondo; sees some beautiful scenery — mountains, rivers as well as cities comprised of coordinated, colourful blocks, with monuments dedicated to the Great Leaders (as the rulers of North Korea past and present are collectively called). But there are some more sinister sights, such as a road lined with huge concrete

Patrick Skene-Catling

Visiting the world’s masterpieces is a quixotic undertaking

From his base in London, Martin Gayford has spent much of his career as an art critic travelling. He has interviewed and sometimes befriended many leading artists and scrutinised their works close up in their own environment. He has found that artistically creative men and women are not really very different from normal people. The text of this informative and entertaining book is comprehensively balanced, fair, lucid and subtly witty, although some of the illustrations are handicapped by the smallness of the format. Art criticism itself can be an art. Gayford’s curiosity is wide and his judgments are tolerant, no matter how onerous the investigations can be. He explores remote,

Thursday

Geoff Dyer

On photography, shrines and Maradona: Geoff Dyer’s Neapolitan pilgrimage

At the Villa Pignatelli in Naples there is an exhibition by Elisa Sighicelli: photographs of bits and pieces of antiquity from, among other places, the city’s Archaeological Museum. Put like that it doesn’t sound so interesting but the results are stunning. Walking through the Archaeological Museum after seeing the exhibition it was difficult to discover the original objects from which Sighicelli’s samples were taken. One instance, a tight crop of fingers pressing into a calf, is from a highly elaborate, much restored and augmented sculpture with so much going on — a naked swirl of bodies, a rearing horse, a sympathetic doggy — it’s hard to imagine how she found

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Looking for a new idea? Try borrowing an old one

Recently I suggested a new approach to commuter-train overcrowding. It simply involved reformulating the problem by accepting that not all overcrowding is equally bad: 100 people forced to stand 10 per cent of the time do not experience anything like the same irritation as ten people who have to stand 100 per cent of the time. So my suggestion was that a proportion of peak-time train seating — even a few peak-time trains — should be reserved for annual season ticket holders. But when I mentioned this to a group of engineers, one pointed out something that hadn’t occurred to me: ‘Airlines already do that.’ ‘They do?’ ‘Well, airlines don’t

Thursday

Victoria Lane

Savannah

Savannah GA is supposed to have lots of ghosts, but I’d forgotten that. It was an April morning and sunlight filtered through the Spanish moss. As I arrived at Wright Square, someone fell into step with me and we crossed the road together. At the other side I glanced to see who it was. No one. Huh. This is the Ghost Coast and there is an industry around it, including night-time tours in a black trolley bus that end in a visit to Savannah’s most haunted residence, the gothic Sorrel-Weed House. At dusk you pass groups of people being told unsettling stories — I caught a snippet about a cat that

Thursday

Ross Clark

An alternative route

Just 48 hours before the conclusion of the Conservative leadership contest, Allan Cook, chairman of HS2, wrote to the government to confess that the costs of the project could rise from the current projection of £56 billion to as much as £86 billion. Given that Boris had already announced that he is to review the project, it was pretty much akin to a condemned prisoner writing a letter of confession. The Prime Minister is not fond of doomsters and gloomsters who pooh-pooh things for the sake of it, and as we know is partial to the odd vanity project. More-over, he seems as fond of trains as he is of

Sunday

Rory Sutherland

The service station problem: it’s becoming impossible to correct a mistake

My first award for intelligent design this week goes to Dublin airport for displaying a sign which reads ‘Lounges. Turn back. No lounges beyond this point.’ It may seem like a trivial thing, but it takes a rare intelligence to think in this way. It’s one thing to put up a sign that says ‘Lounges, this way’. But it takes nous to think ‘yes, well and good, but what happens if people see the first sign but miss the second one?’ In all likelihood, they would end up walking 500 yards in the wrong direction, as I nearly did. Signage and wayfinding are mostly designed for people who never make

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 30 May 2019

Q. A delightful but disorganised friend has invited several of our circle for a weekend at his family’s beautiful country home, having hosted a similar group last year. I have received all the particulars and accepted with pleasure. However, I know of another friend (in last year’s group) to whom the host mentioned the possibility of this year’s reprise, but she has not had full details. How can I delicately figure out if this is an oversight or deliberate? — Name and address withheld A. Ring the host and mention that you are thinking of asking for a lift with this friend but don’t want to put your foot in

Wednesday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 17 April 2019

Q. I am not a professional writer but on the strength of a short piece I contributed to a Festschrift have been asked to extend this to a 5,000-word memoir. I had no idea how difficult I would find it to do this work outside of the office context in which I normally operate. I can’t seem to crack this challenge. It’s not that I find I can’t write. My problem is that I can’t start. Every day I find a reason to procrastinate. What do you suggest? —Name and address withheld A. Ask one of your most ruthless and greedy friends to help you out. Send him a cheque

Thursday

Christian Wolmar

A great track record

Monisha Rajesh wrote lovingly about the Indian railways in her previous book, Around India in 80 Trains; but her new one set her wondering whether the train journey had lost its allure elsewhere — for which there is a strong case to be made in Britain, at least. The constant outpouring of anger in the media about the horrors of modern travel seems to have captured the public mood: the delays, the cancellations, the overcrowding, the fatuous announcements, the garish logos of the privatised companies and the overspending on major projects all seem set to undermine our love of the railways. Rajesh, however, muses that the greater threat might in

Thursday

Mark Palmer

Tuning up to Linz

You never know who you might meet on a river cruise. It was my 89-year-old father-in-law, Noel, who first recognised a tall, professorial man only a few years younger than him remonstrating with an uninterested official at Munich airport about a pre-paid taxi to Passau, where we were due to board our ship. ‘That’s Humphrey Burton,’ said Noel. ‘We worked together at the Beeb, though he was far more important than me.’ Noel is forever modest but you could argue that Burton was the Melvyn Bragg of his day — a description I later put to him but one from which he recoiled not exactly in horror, but certainly in

Harry Mount

The rock of ages past

How lazy, snobbish and wrong it is to mock Gibraltar for the lager and fish and chips clichés. Yes, you can get lager and fish and chips there; nothing wrong with  that. The pint of lager I had in a pub in Gibraltar Main Street was excellent. And the funny thing is that, unlike consciously ‘British’ pubs in Rome or New York, there was no ersatz feel to it. It was exactly like a pub in Britain, down to the two middle-aged office workers in shirtsleeves, exchanging dull office chat, breaking off occasionally for low-level, awkward flirting with the barmaid, who was in her twenties. That’s what’s so gripping about

Ian Thomson

A tainted paradise

Ian Fleming’s voodoo extravaganza Live and Let Die finds James Bond in rapt consultation of The Traveller’s Tree by Patrick Leigh Fermor. ‘This, one of the great travel books, is published by John Murray at 25s’, proclaims a footnote in the first edition. Fleming was a friend of Leigh Fermor, so this is to be expected. Published in 1950, The Traveller’s Tree may still be the best non-fiction account of the West Indies. ‘It’s by a chap who knows what he’s talking about’, M tells 007, knowingly. But Paul Morand’s 1929 Hiver caraïbe comes a close second. The question is: why has it taken 90 years for this masterwork to

Thursday

Horatio Clare

The ice was all around

‘We had seen God in his splendours, heard the text that nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man.’ Ernest Shackleton’s lines unscroll through both these complementary books. David Grann’s The White Darkness is all-man, the gripping story of mighty but quite straightforward struggles. The Library of Ice, brimming with men, women, ships, science, complexity, brevity and beauty, has a precision and quiet brilliance which suggest the feminine. In fact, these qualities belong simply to the author, Nancy Campbell. Readers will finish her quasi-travel book, a search for an ‘understanding’ of ice, wary of any idleness of expression, any generality in thought. Campbell seems incapable of either. There

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

The tech timewasters

I have just spent a weekend planning a family trip to Chennai and Hyderabad. Since some of the flights are booked with reward points and some are not, our flights are under three separate booking numbers, each of which requires a separate login. I also had to print out booking confirmations from three different hotels, four boarding cards for the internal flights from Madras to Hyderabad, and a separate docket for my airport parking. That doesn’t include the two hours my wife spent applying for online visas, or the 90 minutes I spent getting approval to use a British credit card on an Indian airline website. Or the time I

Thursday

Justin Marozzi

Hair-raising stuff

Ask most people whether they fancy a four-month, 5,000-mile trek across the Middle East and they might conclude you need your head seen to. With civil war raging in Syria, Iraq mired in internecine conflict while mopping up the remnants of Daesh, al-Qa’eda running amok in southern Yemen and simmering strife between Israelis and Palestinians, walking across 13 countries might not seem like an obvious itinerary. But Levison Wood, it is fair to say, is not your average traveller. A committed biped, he is the author of a trio of books on walking the Nile, Himalayas and Americas respectively. Ostensibly unlike the other television-led journeys which preceded it, this expedition

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Why better beats bigger

A few weeks ago I flew to Sydney to speak at a conference. The first leg was on the new Qantas route non-stop from London to Perth, the UK’s longest flight. Two million people live in Perth, of whom 250,000 were born in the UK, so the route makes sense. But I was dreading the length of the flight. Granted, I wasn’t travelling at the back of the plane, but I was surprised to find the 16-hour flight little worse than an eight- or ten-hour one. For one, there is the unexpected bonus that you can fall asleep whenever you like. On shorter flights, if you miss a narrow window-of-nod

Thursday

Ted Harrison

Life on Unst

‘I’d like a copy of the Times,’ said the visitor from the south. ‘Yesterday’s or today’s?’ the shopkeeper asked. ‘Today’s, of course.’ ‘Come back tomorrow.’ Life on Unst has its idiosyncrasies, but personally, I blame the weather forecasters for giving the nation the impression that the place may not even exist. Their London-centric maps of Britain, showing Scotland fading into the distance, leave us off entirely. Not surprising, as we are the most northern of the Shetland Islands and nearer Bergen than Aberdeen. Newcastle is to us the deep south. Yet we hold a key position in defence. It wasn’t a coincidence that when Kim Jong-un started building rockets, it

Wynn Wheldon

Curiosity – and cats

To Jan Morris, I am anathema. That goes, too, for David Attenborough. It is a word that this unarguably great writer likes: ‘It rolls well off the tongue.’ Why are your reviewer and the great broadcaster anathema, you ask. Well, we have been to the zoo. In this almost entirely enjoyable book no-one comes in for quite so much disapproval as those of us who have been to the zoo.I mention David because, when I was young, he took me to the zoo. However, despite this sinfulness, I would be surprised if Morris, who is a year older than Attenborough, does not recognise in David a confrère in the war

Thursday

Richard Davenporthines

Two men on a mountain

A book that opens in a Lahore refugee camp, shifts to Cat Bells Fell, rising above the shores of Derwentwater, and then swoops between the Ranigunj coalfields in Bengal, Belsize Park, a handicrafts exhibition at Kharagpur, Kensington Gore, military intelligence headquarters in Calcutta, an aircraft factory in Wembley and the Himalayas is bound to keep its readers jumping. In The Last Englishmen, Deborah Baker has written an exuberant, scene-changing, shapeshifting group biography, with John Auden and Michael Spender as its chief human protagonists. But she makes the Himalayas, and Mount Everest, palpable and vivid characters in her story too. John Auden was the geologist elder brother of W.H. Auden and