I was staying in India earlier this year, and every time I returned to my room in a semi-luxury hotel, one of the chambermen along the corridor smiled at me sweetly and said, “Sir, sir, I can clean your room?” He had cleaned it only about an hour before, usually, and there was only so […]

The Red Highway begins with a spare, haunting account of the Czech artist Karel Kupka clambering out of a plane and (as the book’s first sentence has it) stepping “for the first time into the elusive world of Arnhem Land.” Born in the last year of World War I, and growing up in a cultured […]

I walked into the center of old Kyoto not long ago and found myself in a scene from a Hiroshige painting. Huge floats containing ancestral treasures stood on the narrow lanes at the heart of the ancient capital, while rows of lanterns bobbed above the wooden houses. Old men played piercing melodies on bamboo flutes, […]

Thirty minutes to the south of the bustling little town of Galle, in southern Sri Lanka, where the single-lane road runs along a palmy coastline, I saw a small island rising out of the Pacific with what seemed to be the turrets of a white castle poking through its trees. I pulled up along the […]

You know you’re in somewhere special when the bathroom in your hotel offers, along with shower cap, razor and “vanity kit,” some condoms. The people you meet are speaking English (French, Italian) as if they’ve just stepped out of a conference-room in Paris with Umberto Eco and Susan Sontag, and the light is picking out […]

The Snow Leopard is an account of an expedition high into the seldom-seen Himalayan land of Inner Dolpo, to record the habits of the bharal, or rare Himalayan blue sheep. The book begins, as most scientific logs do, with a precise map, and ends with scholarly notes and an index. The leader of the climb […]

On the longest day of the year I found myself on what is billed as the “highest motorable pass in the world,” though “motorable” seemed as much a stretch as did “road.” Icicles were hanging from the mountainside and plaques around every turn recalled those fellow travelers, most of them soldiers, who had “left for […]

Perhaps it’s a sign of the times that the artist most constantly invoked on my first day at the Sydney Readers’ and Writers’ Festival this spring was not Patrick White or Orhan Pamuk or W.G. Sebald, but that mumbling icon known as Robert De Niro. “I don’t want to start thinking of novels as if […]

The classic British public-school grooms its inmates perfectly for taking on (or over) the world, and not at all for that half of the world known as the other sex. Its charges are trained, in effect, to see women as a foreign country (most of the old boarding-schools are still all-male), and even as they […]

Their ages when they died were 24 or 23 or 74 days; they are described in the barely legible letters on the headstones as “infant daughter”s and 17 year-old sons. The names beside them might make up an atlas of homesickness–Epsom and Abingdon and Surrey, as keenly remembered here as in the buildings all around […]