Personal Landscapes

In 1879 a forgotten Irish adventurer called Frederick Carter marched four tamed Asian elephants from the coast of East Africa to the edge of the Congo.  He was sent to establish a training school for African elephants so they could be used to transport cargo in place of vast armies of porters. It’s a tale of ineptitude, hypocrisy and greed filled with powerful chiefs, ivory dealers, Catholic nuns...

Josef Koudelka was born in Czechoslovakia the year Germany annexed the Sudetenland. His childhood was overshadowed by Nazi occupation. He lived under the postwar communist regime, and watched Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in 1968. His work is permeated by feelings of tragedy but the man himself is surprisingly optimistic, seizing on the present moment while appreciating the beauty of life. Biogr...

Clair Wills was in her twenties when she learned she had a cousin she'd never met. It wasn’t as though their families drifted apart. She’d never been told of this person’s existence. It was shrouded in shame and secrecy, and she wanted to understand why. Her memoir Missing Persons may change how you think about your own family, and your family secrets. We spoke about Ireland’s mother and baby home...

What would you do if someone you knew your entire life — your mother — suddenly revealed that she’d been a spy? Deborah Lawrenson turned her story into a novel.  The tangled web of espionage she weaves in The Secretary is fiction, but the background to the story is authentic, drawn in part from a seemingly innocent diary her mother wrote in 1958 while working at the British Embassy in Moscow. It’s...

In 1986, Michael Asher and his wife Mariantonietta Peru set out to cross the Sahara from west to east, by camel and on foot. Their 4,500 mile (7,200 km) journey is the longest trek ever made by Westerners in the Sahara, and the first recorded crossing from west to east by non-mechanical means.  I read Asher’s book about this trip — Impossible Journey — more than twenty years ago, and it’s been in...

Arthur Rimbaud turned French poetry on its head in his late teens. His work influenced everyone from the modernists and the Beats to Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison, but he wasn’t recognized or well-liked in his lifetime. He guzzled absinthe, sponged money off friends, and wrecked the life of fellow poet Paul Verlaine. And then he renounced poetry at age 20 and simply walked away.  The last we hear of...

The stories in The Vanishing Point, Paul Theroux's new collection, span the globe from Hawaii and the South Seas to Africa and New England. They have all the qualities I love in his fiction: a sharp bite of satire that skewers pretension, crisp dialogue, and an eye for the small, clear detail — an action, a pattern of speech, an element of dress — that reveals someone’s deepest character. He descr...

Donate to Personal Landscapes . Julian Evans first visited the city of Odesa, Ukraine on a boat journey down the Dnipro River in 1994. He fell in love with its distinct personality as a self-contained world. He also fell in love with a local woman, and for nearly thirty years, her city became his city, too.  His new book, Undefeatable: Odesa in Love and War, weaves memoir with history and literatu...

Donate to Personal Landscapes . A great biography reveals the raw humanity behind lives of rare genius. In his latest book, Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath, Jeffrey Meyers draws on Plutarch’s principle of dual composition to shed fresh light on some of the figures who did so much to shape our world. It’s full of literary feuds, illicit romance, chronic alcoholism and sympath...

Donate to Personal Landscapes . Cam Honan has hiked across 56 countries on six continents, logging over 96,500 km in three decades. Backpacker Magazine called him “the most traveled hiker on earth”. I’ve wanted to speak with him for ages about his excellent website The Hiking Life. He's also the author of Wanderlust Nordics, Wanderlust Himalaya, Wanderlust Mediterranean, Wanderlust USA, The Hidden...

Donate to Personal Landscapes . Richard Grant has lived in Arizona for more than twenty years, and his latest book — A Race to the Bottom of Crazy — is a fascinating blend of memoir, history, local issues and encounters with strange characters. It’s a place where social guardrails are weak, and outlandish behaviour is the order of the day. Arizona doesn’t just reflect national trends, it exaggerat...

Donate to Personal Landscapes . Lesley Downer's fascination with Japan's most famous poet took her from Tokyo's drab industrial concrete into what was then a seldom-visited part of Honshu. It was a place of sake-drenched poetry sessions in thatched-roof highland villages, and holy mountains where modern ascetics continued to roam between their past and future lives in search of atonement. Her book...

Donate to Personal Landscapes . Thomas Swick moved to Warsaw at the height of the Cold War. His newest book Falling Into Place is a memoir of his life behind the Iron Curtain, but it’s also a writer’s coming of age in the heyday of post-Watergate journalism. We spoke about life in the Eastern Bloc, Polish films, and the ten sins of travel writing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss...

Donate to Personal Landscapes . The Late Bronze Age Mediterranean was a surprisingly interconnected place. Trade flourished, interrupted by the odd embargo, and military conflicts used disinformation for strategic gain. And then something terrible happened that brought it all to an end.  Large empires and small kingdoms that had been flourishing for centuries all collapsed at around the same time....

Donate to Personal Landscapes . Long before he wrote 1984 — and long before he was even George Orwell — Eric Blair was a nineteen year old policeman in Burma. Biographies skirt over this five year period, but it was the making of the writer he would become. Today’s guest set out to imagine those years in a wonderful new novel called Burma Sahib. I've read all of Paul Theroux's books over the last...

Donate to Personal Landscapes . Jonathan Raban wrote about human landscapes rather than uninhabited ones, and the borderlands between what a place professes to be and what they are. An Englishman who emigrated to Seattle at the age of 47, his status as an outsider gave him a unique perspective on America as the land of perpetual self-reinvention. Many of his books involved water — from the coastal...

Donate to Personal Landscapes . James Salter is the best American writer you’ve probably never read. He was a fighter pilot in the Korean War, and a successful screenwriter. His sentences are fractured jewels. The details are closely observed, the imagery poetic. Every page contains an observation I want to write down. Biographer Jeffrey Meyers joined me to talk about Salter’s remarkable prose sty...

Donate to Personal Landscapes . Sherlock Holmes fans span the range from casual to obsessive. They included Abdulhamid II, the last ruler of the Ottoman Empire to hold absolute power. A description of the sultan having Holmes stories read to him at bedtime set journalist Andrew Finkel off on the flight of fancy that became his first novel.  We spoke about The Adventure of the Second Wife, the Sher...

Donate to Personal Landscapes . I first got interested in the Wakhan Corridor when I read The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk. This weird bit of political geography once formed a buffer between Tsarist Russia and Imperial Britain. It’s been closed to traffic for more than a century, and it remains one of the world’s least-visited corners. Bill Colegrave joined me to talk about the Wakhan region, his s...

Donate to Personal Landscapes . I’d always thought of Tamerlane as a sort of cut-rate Genghis Khan. It was only when researching a trip to Uzbekistan that I discovered he was one of the world’s greatest conquerors. Justin Marozzi joined me to talk about Temur’s military genius, his architectural and cultural legacy, and how he’s remembered in Uzbekistan today. This is a public episode. If you'd li...

Donate to Personal Landscapes . I’ve often thought of it as one of the world’s most misunderstood countries. Not because it’s uniquely inscrutable but because it’s so beset by stereotypes. The truth is more complicated and far more interesting. Alex Kerr is the author of Lost Japan, Dogs and Demons: The Fall of Modern Japan, and Hidden Japan. He joined me to talk about embodied philosophy, “instan...

Donate to Personal Landscapes . Barnaby Rogerson joins me to talk about the origins of the Sunni-Shia schism, the differences between them, and the current ethnic and linguistic rivalries plaguing the Middle East. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.personallandscapespodcast.com/subscribe

Donate to Personal Landscapes . Sarah Anderson founded the iconic Travel Bookshop in 1979. You might be familiar with it even if you’ve never been to London. It was the inspiration for the bookshop in the 1998 Hugh Grant / Julia Roberts film Notting Hill. What are the biggest challenges of running a bookshop? Was there a ‘golden age’ of literary travel writing? Who are Sarah’s favourite forgotten...

Donate to Personal Landscapes . Louisa Waugh lived in a village in the far west of Mongolia in the late 1990s, and wrote a remarkable book about her experience. Hearing Birds Fly describes a world of drought-stricken spring, lush summer pasture and brutal winters when fetching water meant hacking holes through river ice. In this harsh and stunningly beautiful landscape, villagers lived on mutton,...

Donate to Personal Landscapes . Bruce Chatwin’s first book — In Patagonia — changed our idea of what travel writing could be. He was a traveler, an art expert whose keen eye for fakes made him a star at Sotheby’s, and to those who knew him, a perpetual house guest and mesmerizing conversationalist. His friend and editor Susannah Clapp joined me to talk about Chatwin’s unforgettable writing style,...