Travel

Saturday

Lee Langley

On the waterfront | 4 April 2009

Geoff Dyer is the least categorisable of writers. Give him a genre and he’ll bend it; pigeonhole him and he’ll break out. Clever, funny, an intellectual with a resolutely bloke-ish stance; irreverent and incorrigibly subversive, this is the man who set off to write a study of D. H. Lawrence and came up with Out of Sheer Rage, a rant against academia in which Lawrence figured as a spear-carrier. His book about jazz, But Beautiful, started life as a critical study, and in its final form combined laconic history with poignant vignettes; short stories that uncovered the heart and soul of the music. Fiction as truth. His most beguiling book,

Saturday

Byron Rogers

The romance of the jungle

It is so sad to read about the Mato Grosso now, at least it is for anyone who, like me, was a boy in the 1950s. When the vast rain forest of the Amazon makes the news at all it is in stories about economic predation, logging and genocide. The Mato Grosso has shrunk and become a victim, which for us was the ultimate in adventure, romance, and horror, with all of it so safely far away. For it had everything: lost cities in the jungle, lost treasures, lost wisdoms, as well as savage tribes which could shrink your head to the size of a cricket-ball, snakes as long as

Wednesday

Laura Fergusson

Travails with an aunt

The Flying Troutmans, by Miriam Toews Suicidal single mothers, delinquent teenagers and unwashed children sound like the ingredients for a standard-issue misery memoir with an embossed, hand-scripted title and a toddler in tears on the cover. Fortunately, Miriam Toews has instead shaken them with wit, warmth and a firm pinch of absurdity, and produced a grittily sparkling cocktail of a novel. The Flying Troutmans takes a bleak premise, adds pitch-perfect, fully human characters and makes it, if not laugh-out-loud funny, at least difficult to read without a couple of sniggers per chapter. Hattie Troutman has fled to Paris to escape the emotional masochism of proximity to her disturbed and chronically

Caroline Moorehead

Time out in Tuscany

In the spring of 2006, Rachel Cusk and her husband decided to take their two small daughters out of school and spend three months, a season, exploring Italy. She felt too settled, too comfortable, and if her friends wondered at what seemed like a curse of restlessness, what frightened her more was the opposite, ‘knowing something in its entirety’, and coming to the end of that knowing. ‘Go we must’, she decided, and ‘go we would’. Italy which had so pleased D. H. Lawrence, one of the writers and travellers she returns to on her journey — Italy, said Lawrence, was tender ‘like cooked macaroni — yards and yards of

Wednesday

Lee Langley

Troubled waters

Empires of the Indus, by Alice Albinia When Alice Albinia set off for the source of the Indus she was not embarking on a quest for the unknown: she knew where the river rises. She wanted to start her journey at its mouth, the delta on the Arabian Sea, to travel upstream to Tibet and tell the story of the river which gives India its name. Empires of the Indus covers a 2,000-mile journey and 5,000 years of history. Albinia’s prize-winning first book is a personal odyssey through landscape and time, fed by scholarship. Her pages resonate with great names: Timur, Genghis Khan, Alexander, Aurangzeb. But before that we have

Saturday

Jason Goodwin

At Home in Turkey

If you can’t afford the airfare you might take this delicious guided tour instead. Exploring some of the best contemporary Turkish houses (or caves), the photographer, Solvi dos Santos, divides her subjects by season, as if to emphasise the perpetual variety of Turkey’s terrain — and the successive civilisations that have held sway there. Berrin Torolsan’s informative text explores the inspiration behind such gems as a classical wooden yali on the Bosphorus; a rustic chalet in the mountains; a tea-planters mansion on the Black Sea; a Cappadocian cave-dwelling, with beautifully hewn piers and arches. We are also given a peek into the lives of some of Turkey’s leading figures, including

Monday

Barry Unsworth

A rose-tinted view of the bay

The Ancient Shore, by Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller Variety of impression, diversity of atmosphere and mood, incongruities of many kinds, these are only to be expected in books on travel, and perhaps particularly in one concerning Naples. But The Ancient Shore is by two hands, and there is a radical difference in style and method that makes it virtually impossible to discuss the book as if it were of a piece. There are the sections written by Shirley Hazzard, which form much the larger part, meditative, nostalgic, static, full of literary and historical reference; and there is the single episode narrated by her husband, Francis Steegmuller, in which he

Monday

Alex Massie

Behind the Security Theatre Curtain

Airport security? A complete joke. This has been apparent for some time, of course, but all the “security theatre” nonsense at least makes it seem as though something is being done. And that is the important thing, isn’t it? The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg has a good piece demonstrating just how pointless the mania for “security” is. No chance of a return to sanity of course. That would mean the terrorists are winning. Anyway, Goldberg successfully passes through the security checkpoints using a fake boarding pass: We were in the clear. But what did we prove? “We proved that the ID triangle is hopeless,” Schneier said. The ID triangle: before a

Monday

Alex Massie

Where’s Scotland?

Notice what’s missing from this Guardian scoop? A third runway at Heathrow airport would be scrapped by a Tory government that would instead build a £20bn TGV-style high speed rail link between London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. In one of David Cameron’s boldest moves on the environment, the party will today unveil plans to cut 66,000 flights a year from Heathrow by tempting passengers on to the first new rail line north of London in more than a century. Well, working on the dubious presumption that this track will actually be built (let alone that it will be delivered on time and on budget), you’ll notice that these new lines

Monday

Alex Massie

The Glamour of the Skies…

For the love of god… When will these clowns learn that the only way to ensure total security is to prevent people from getting on the plane in the first place? If you don’t want to lose your spare lithium batteries for your camera, notebook or cell phone, you might want to pack carefully for your next flight. New rules from the Transportation and Security Administration that take effect on January 1 ban travelers from carrying loose lithium batteries in checked baggage. Passengers are allowed to pack two spare batteries in their carry-on bag, as long as they’re in clear plastic baggies. Fortunately, you don’t have to worry about the

Monday

Alex Massie

But at least the trains ran on time…

Megan on the horrors of travelling in the United States these days: You know, I never really understood why making the trains run on time was so important for Mussolini, but after last week, I can understand how that became one of fascism’s main selling points. She kids, of course. I’ve always thought, however, that improvements to the reliability of the Italian train service improved after Mussolini came to power were as much due to changes in timetabling as actual efficiency gains. In other words, by officially giving the trains more time to reach their destination they had a better chance of actually getting there on time even if the