All posts filed under: travel

Fiona Sampson on Limestone Country

W H Auden wrote: when I try to imagine a faultless love Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur Of underground streams, but what I see is a limestone landscape Fiona Sampson too hears the murmur of underground streams. She describes at the start of her recent book Limestone Country the shock, the epiphany, of realising that most of her favourite places were made from, and in and on, limestone: a cottage in West Oxfordshire; a hamlet in Périgord in southern France; the Karst region of western Slovenia; the city of Jerusalem. She writes: ‘Really living in these landscapes means paying radical attention to how they behave. It means knowing their wildlife as well as ways of farming, observing how water and vegetation respond to the mineral facts of rock and soil as much as how humans live in and with them.’ Responding ‘to the mineral facts’ – that might be a good way of thinking about her book. When I met Fiona earlier this year, I was keen to hear …

Summer Reading Choices: Helena Markou

Helena Markou has the enviable title of Publishing Innovation Manager for Blackwell’s (the retail chain). When she isn’t making or selling books she can be found in the printmakers studio covered in indigo ink, in the dojo shooting arrows, or in a karaoke-box hogging the mic. Here are her summer reading selections: Holiday reading is a bit of a dilemma for me. Torn between the desire to laze around doing nothing and not waste a second of the day, I tend to avoid the all engrossing page-turners if I want to get out of bed. So with me to a 17th Century Bakehouse in Devon came the following selection of non-fiction. A 1939 Ward Lock Red Guide to Torquay and South Devon purchased especially for the trip. Complete with original 1930s advertising, fold out maps (a la Jolly Postman), and eloquent descriptions of all holiday resorts accessible by rail or bicycle at the time of publication. In addition to bringing the history of a town to life, the author’s witty commentary often had us laughing …

38. Poland – a country in the moon

My guest on this week’s programme is Michael Moran, author of A Country in the Moon: Travels in Search of the Heart of Poland. Michael first visited Poland in the early 1990s after the collapse of Communism as leader of an ill-assorted crew of British teachers charged with introducing the Poles to the delights of market capitalism. As a pianist, he was attracted by the music of Chopin, but confesses that he knew little about the country. He little suspected that he would fall in love with the country and end up making it his home. A Country in the Moon – the description is Edmund Burke’s and dates from 1795, but might still stand for a country which is very little known and all too often reduced to cliché in the West – achieves something very rare for a travel book: it manages to be genuinely funny and entertaining, and also deeply thought-provoking about the many terrible chapters in Poland’s history. The book has been widely praised; the Guardian called it “the best contemporary …

36. Berlin – city of “eternal becoming”

This week’s podcast features an interview with Heather Reyes, co-founder of Oxygen Books, and co-editor of the latest addition to their City-Lit series, which appropriately enough in the week which marks the twentieth anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down, paints a portrait in words of Berlin. Although there are plenty of old favourites such as Christopher Isherwood, Alfred Döblin and Len Deighton, the emphasis of the book is on unexpected vantage points and new, less familiar voices. So there is no dutiful trot through the city’s history “from earliest times to the present day”, but instead themed sections which try to get under the skin of the city. Off the beaten track, some of the highlights of the book for me were: Rolf Schneider on the disappearing Berlin pub or Kneipe (it used to be said that every street crossing in Berlin had four corners and five corner pubs – but not any more); Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom‘s reflections on a city every inch of which is “steeped in history”, from the opening of …

27. Alice on the Indus

On Monday night Alice Albinia won the Dolman Travel Book Prize for her book, Empires of the Indus, in which she traces her remarkable journey from the river delta near Karachi to its source in Tibet. Just after the winner was announced, I spoke to Alice about her book. Click above to find out why the woman who donned a burqa to travel through Taliban country doesn’t think of herself as a particularly intrepid traveller…