By eight in the morning, the crowds are already beginning to form, huffing and puffing along the gorgeous strip of coastline that curves around Ipanema’s two miles of beach. Old old men in thongs and bathing trunks, wrinkled women in their two-piece swimsuits, power-walkers jutting their elbows back and forth as they waddle along the […]

To live in Japan without eating Japanese food seems an advanced kind of heresy. My sushi-loving friends in California regard me as a lost cause; my housemates in Japan simply shrug and see this as ultimate confirmation — me dragging at some lasagna in a plastic box while they gobble down dried fish — that […]

You touch down two and a half miles above the sea, in the world’s highest international airport, and the city below is a bowl of shining light cradled between snowcaps. The cholas, or Indian women, are tromping along in their multicoloured ponchos and bowler hats as if no one had told them that this was […]

There is a square in Mexico, just across the border, where a foreigner is sitting, looking at the bright lights, the big hotels across the bridge. Like everyone in town, he’s also been watching another foreigner–a reflection of himself, we somehow feel–who is, as it happens, a celebrated con man, in flight from his creditors, […]

“The critic I am waiting for,” wrote Somerset Maugham in a letter near the end of his life, “is the one who will explain why, with all my faults, I have been read for so many years by so many people.” The edge of defensiveness was unusual in a man who generally accepted that he […]

We stumble toward another election that can look, to the disenchanted, like a choice between one shade of grey and another. A liberation theologian is violently deposed in Haiti. Guerrillas, in Russia and everywhere, say that even the deaths of children are justified in the light of a larger cause. And a Tibetan monk flies […]

From the air, as one descends, Saigon looks to be a vast and scattered web of white and yellow lights, coming up from shacks and tiny houses, notably impoverished, not flashy, the graceful curve of the Saigon River breaking up the grid and reminding you of the paucity of clustered lights and high-rises. But as […]

Here are a few statistics from Suketu Mehta’s stunning new book, Maximum City. In some parts of Bombay, you can find 1 million people in a single square mile. Two millon of the city’s residents lack access to latrines, and the air has ten times the maximum permissible levels of lead (to breathe it in, […]

The Japan we imagine from afar is placid, tidy and seamlessly efficient, correct to the last place. The trains arrive on the dot, and when the crowds pour out of them, in streamlined rows of look-alike Chanel and grey suits, not a bead of sweat is visible even in the heat of summer rush-hour. Japan […]

Graham Greene is treacherously easy to film, not least because, as a film critic for four years in the Thirties, he was one of the first serious novelists to grow up with the cinema, in all senses, and to see how the camera had changed the way we tell stories and think about perspective. Though […]