Personal Landscapes: Recent Episodes
Ryan Murdock
Here are a few recent lessons I’ve drawn from my reading and our conversations. My list won’t be your list, but you might find it useful.
How to turn my life into fictionI reread six of Paul Theroux’s novels, plus several short pieces, before a trip to Hawaii last year. Between my reading and long talks with the author, I came away with a much clearer sense of how he's drawn on his life in his fiction. He gave me ideas for taking my writing in exciting new directions that I hadn’t considered, and for writing about periods of my life that I’ve long wanted to tackle but couldn’t see how to do as memoir.
My Secret History and My Other Life are two of my favourite novels. If you’ve only read Paul’s travel books, start there.
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Stay active and stay curious to stay youthfulPaul writes every morning, and gets outside in the afternoons to swim in the sea, bike up a mountain or paddle an outrigger canoe in the Pacific. This isn’t some open-air Hawaiian version of mall walking. We went biking together on the North Shore, and I know his mountain route is no joke. That’s pretty damned impressive for a guy of any age, let alone 84, but he’s stayed active all his life, and it shows.
Paul is also one of the most curious people I know. He questioned everyone we bumped into, from walkers on the trail to the barista at the coffee shop afterwards. He’s a voracious reader, a prolific writer, and this past spring he drove from Cape Cod up to Toronto, out to Vancouver and back again on one of the many road trip’s he’s taken for a new book about Canada.
“All you have to do is keep moving and keep your mind active,” he said. “Stay in touch and don't be cynical, because there's more to discover, there's more to see.”
I find these qualities tremendously inspiring. Our book talks in particular brought fresh excitement and new directions to my work.
How to make a living writingIn one of my all-time favourite books, Sir Vidia's Shadow, Paul said, ”Even before my books sold in any numbers, I had found a way of making a living as a writer: publish a book a year and never say no to a magazine assignment. And, out of a horror of destitution, I lived within my means.”
He told me it was possible to make a living back then, when prose-hungry magazines paid decent rates, but that those days are over. My bank balance is proof of this.
I got my start at the end of the travel writing boom, when magazines still sent writers on assignments. I could contact my publisher and say, “Could you find me a Bedouin and three camels? I want to improve my camel handling skills” and within a month I’d be sleeping rough in the desert in Jordan. A kitted-out Land Rover Defender in Namibia? No problem. Here are the keys. Give us a 12 to 15 page feature when you return. Assignments like those vanished, pay-per-article dropped year by year, and the magazines I wrote for vanished, too. As Paul said, writing is a terrible living, but a good life.
The old outlets are gone, but the desire for great writing isn’t. I have an idea about where it’s going next. If you want long-form writing about place, then please support it by joining my Member’s Club. I have bigger plans for Personal Landscapes.
If you want to become a writer, leave homePaul said in one of our podcast conversations, “I have an abiding belief that the only way to become a writer is to leave home. You don't have to go to the Congo or India. All you need to do is go away, cross the border.”
Part of it has to do with detaching yourself from your family. “A family is a terrible thing if you want to find out who you are or what you want,” he said. “It's an imprisoning, fractious thing. Even happy families. Maybe happy families are the worst.”
Writing demands solitude and independence. Going out into the world alone is the best way to achieve this.
In his 1976 novel The Family Arsenal, Paul wrote, “To live abroad was to create a mythology about yourself, more than a new personality. A liberating fantasy that you could believe in, a new world.”
I asked him if it’s necessary to go away to reinvent yourself. “it's not simply that you're inventing a person, he said. “You are becoming the person that you're meant to be. That's who you are.”
If you’re a writer, going away also gives you a subject. That’s an experience Paul and I share. Writing was never the problem. The problem was finding something to write about. Going to Central America gave me my subject, and living in Africa gave Paul his.
Go far away, go alone, and go for a long timeThat’s how we used to travel in the analog era. We dropped off the map for months at a time. No one knew where we were. We were unreachable and out of touch, forced to rely on our own resources.
“Put yourself in a precarious position where you're small and you need to be a watchful,” Paul said on my podcast. “Watchful like an animal that's under siege by other animals. All your senses will be alert.”
What happens? You see everything. The colours are more vivid and the smells are more intense. Small details you’d never notice at home leap out. As Paul said in the novel Picture Palace, “Only the outsider sees. You have to be a stranger to write about any situation.”
That isolation allows you to develop at your own pace. Paul wrote about going to Africa with the Peace Corps in his collection Fresh-Air Fiend: “That decade of being off the phone, which is the most extreme condition of being cut off, was formative for me. In most respects it was one of the best things that could have happened in my passage toward becoming a writer because it forced upon me a narrow sort of life.”
But don’t bounce around — live there“There's a lot of nipping from place to place,” Paul said to me on my podcast. “There's much more movement, but they don't take root.”
He advises going to a place, getting a job and learning the language. He worked as a teacher in Malawi, Uganda and Singapore, and lived in London as a working writer for 18 years.
I followed a similar path, working as a teacher in Japan for two years, and then living in Malta for six and Berlin for nine. In between, I traveled alone through Central America and large parts of East and Southeast Asia, staying away for months at a time and writing about what I saw.
The idea that you know a place is a delusionPart of the reason you might want to live in a place is because the impression you had from social media is almost certainly wrong. We talked about this on my podcast.
Paul said, “What you find out on the Internet is so inaccurate, it's so distorted, it's so loaded that when you get to a place, it's never the place you’re expecting. You haven't arrived in a known place. It's still an unknown place. And so the delusion that you know it, or the sense that you know it, is a delusion. And you find out.”
The world is still out there for you to discover, Instagram be damned.
You learn about the world through workI discovered this through years of part-time and summer jobs, starting with my first paper route in fifth grade, and pumping gas at Sunoco in high school. It also applies to expat life.
“My childhood and early adulthood was all tied into trying to get away from home and finding out how the world works,” Paul told me on my podcast. “How do you find out? It's not by sports or anything like that. It's having a job and working with other people. So I discovered what people discover when they work, which is that work is social. Yes, you're making money, you're learning a trade, but also you're with other people, and you're with a lot of other different people, and they've got stories, they have lives, they have issues, they have crises.”
Read his story ‘Stop & Shop’ in The Vanishing Point for more. It’s based on his experience working at a grocery store as a teenager.
Risks can make you wiseWe’ve lost the taste for risk in our sheltered digital age. Growing up in the 1970s and 80s was very different. We were often left on our own. Our parents had no idea what we were up to when we left the house. We built bike ramps to jump over other kids, lit fires in the woods, and tried rappelling off bridges. We had secret lives in the real world, not just on some website.
The same is true of travel. It was different in the analog era.
Paul told me, “When I went to Africa [with the Peace Corps as a young man], if anyone made a suggestion, any offer no matter how outrageous, I thought, yeah, I'll try it. I was the opposite of risk averse. It was as though I was programmed to take risks. And I'm telling you, any one of them could have turned so, so bad. It was a time when… I won't say it was easier to take risks. There were more risks to take, but there were more rewards from them.”
He sums it up well in his most recent collection, The Vanishing Point. This is from the short story ‘A Charmed Life’: “The young know almost nothing, which is why the best of them take risks, while the others go off to work. Hard work yields a sort of knowledge through experience, but risks can make you wise — crisis as enlightenment.”
Think pessimistically but act optimisticallyI’ll share some writing advice from Paul in a moment, but here’s one last piece of travel and lifestyle advice that stayed with me. Paul said in an online interview:
“I think pessimistically, but I act optimistically. And I think that's what you've got to do. You can't say the world's going to hell, although it's pretty obvious that it is. One of the values of travel is that you see how other people have solved the problems of old age, of transportation, of employment to understand the direction of the world and solutions.”
Read a writer, not a bookI started doing this in my mid-twenties. I didn’t learn it from Paul, but it’s a practice we both share.
“Rather than read a book,” he says, “I read a writer. […] “The only way to know a book, to know a writer, is to read it all. You read everything, and you realize that a writer often writes bad books. He writes boring books. He writes books that maybe he shouldn't have written, but that's the way to another book.”
Whenever I found a writer I resonated with, I read all the books by that writer, and then the biographies, collected letters, and finally critical works about them. I did this with Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Paul Theroux, and so many more. I look back on that time as an intense period when I made a big leap as a writer. Paul would agree.
“If you want to become a writer,” he said, “if you want to be a real reader, do that. Read all the books, all the poems, then read the autobiography, and then read the biography. And then you could say, I know that writer. And that becomes a period in your life too, when you're reading, when you're completely immersed in that writer.”
But don’t stop there…
Write book reviewsIt isn’t enough to just read those writers. Paul told me that V.S. Naipaul encouraged him to write book reviews as a young writer because it helps you form clear opinions.
Reviews “force you to make a judgement on a book,” Naipaul says in Sir Vidia’s Shadow. “It’s important to reach conclusions. Most people have no idea what they think of a book after they’ve read it.”
Having to write what you think — clearly and concisely — makes you a better writer.
How you write can also help…
Write two drafts in longhandWhen asked how to improve a piece of writing, I’ve often heard Paul tell people to copy it out again in longhand. They inevitably balk at this — “It’s too much work!” — and he says, “You’ll never be a writer.”
I’ve always written the first drafts of my books longhand and typed up the second draft. I asked him what writing the second draft in longhand adds to the process. He said, “It makes you slow down.”
This was quickly followed by, “No one ever listens to me.”
Until now, that is. I’m working on a new book, so I decided to modify my method to his: write the first and second drafts in longhand, and type up the third. I was excited to get started, and I’ve enjoyed the process so much.
Don’t write too fastI’ve only written travel books and feature articles. Slowing down is something Paul emphasized several times when I told him I was attempting a novel:
“Excellent that you have a specific idea. It's always a long haul with me, but pondering, note taking and sketching are essential. My advice is not to get too far ahead of yourself. Just move from Point A to Point B, and onward because surprising and unexpected things happen when you do so. It’s always a bewildering process and I don’t think you understand the full meaning of it until you’re done.”
I found many other pieces of advice when re-reading Paul’s fiction, including…
The delight is in the detailsIn his story collection The Consul’s File, Paul wrote,“Truth is not a saga of alarming episodes; it is a detail, a small clear one, that gives a fiction life.”
It’s one of the things I like best about his work, his eye for detail and revealing scraps of dialogue. Take these two examples from the novella Dr. Slaughter:
“What was there about karate that attracted undersized people?”
And: “He was clumsy — banging, thumping, throwing things down. There was a kind of noisemaking that was a clear sign of stupidity in a man.”
I’ve filled my reading notebooks with observations like this, copied from Paul’s work. I like to think they’ve made me a better observer.
Sentences like these also ring true for another reason…
The truest expression of life is humourThat’s a line from Sir Vidia’s Shadow, a wonderful book about his friendship with V.S. Naipaul and his own coming of age as a writer.
“The truest expression of life was humour,” he said, “especially at its most disturbing. Much of what happened in Africa was not tragedy but farce.”
I tried to capture this in the first half of my book about Malta, in my earlier Central America book, and in nearly all the feature articles and columns I wrote for Outpost magazine.
Sir Vidia’s Shadow was called a hatchet job by the same lazy reviewers who apply “the grouchy traveler” to Paul’s travel books, completely missing the absurdity that dogs our clashes of culture.
They also missed the deep reflections on friendship contained in the book. “Character flaws seem to inspire the sympathy that lies at the very foundation of friendship,” Paul wrote. In another section, he mused on the solemn, undiscussed understanding at the heart of friendship: “With your ego switched off, you accept this person — his demands, his silences — and it is reciprocated.” I think about that often. I’ve been fortunate in having very good friends.
These are just a few recent lessons I’ve learned from reading and talking with Paul Theroux. I hope you found it interesting.
You can listen to two of my conversations with Paul on Personal Landscapes: Paul Theroux on Orwell and Burma Sahib and Paul Theroux on life’s vanishing points.
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If you grew up in the 80s like I did, you know Andrew McCarthy from Pretty in Pink and St. Elmo’s Fire.
But Andrew is more than an actor and director. He’s also an award-winning travel writer.
I came across so many of his stories over the years while leafing through my favourite magazines, and I reviewed his excellent first book, The Longest Way Home, for Outpost.
His writing is introspective, vulnerable and self-deprecating. He weaves memoir with vivid descriptions of people and place, and grapples with questions like how to balance a solitary nature with the desire for intimacy.
I reached out to ask him about walking across Spain, a journey he made twice: first alone, and then with his teenaged son. That’s the subject of his latest book, Walking With Sam.
I thought he might give me some insights and inspiration as I prepare for a long farewell-to-Europe trudge.
Andrew McCarthy is the author of Walking With Sam, The Longest Way Home, and Brat: An 80s Story. He was editor-at-large for National Geographic Traveler magazine, and guest editor of a Best American Travel Writing anthology. He’s written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Travel+Leisure, and many other publications. He also appeared in dozens of iconic films, including Pretty in Pink, St. Elmo’s Fire, Less Than Zero, and Weekend At Bernie’s.
You can read more about him on his website, and follow him on Facebook, Instagram and X.
We spoke about his Brat pack years, walking the Camino with his son, and how a hike can change your life.
These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:* Walking With Sam * The Longest Way Home * Brat: An 80s Story
We also mentioned:* Pretty in Pink * St. Elmo’s Fire * Brats documentary * The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux * Claude Chabrol * The Breakfast Club * Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED Talk * Orange Is The New Black
You can listen to Personal Landscapes: Conversations on Books About Place on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Podbean, Google Podcasts, Audible, PlayerFM, and TuneIn + Alexa.
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If you grew up in the 80s like I did, you know Andrew McCarthy from Pretty in Pink and St. Elmo’s Fire.
But Andrew is more than an actor and director. He’s also an award-winning travel writer.
His writing is introspective, vulnerable and self-deprecating. He weaves memoir with vivid descriptions of people and place, and grapples with questions like how to balance a solitary nature with the desire for intimacy.
I reached out to ask him about walking across Spain, a journey he made twice: first alone, and then with his teenaged son.
I thought he might give me some insights and inspiration as I prepare for a long farewell-to-Europe hike.
We spoke about Andrew's Brat pack years, walking the Camino with his son, and how a hike can change your life.
You can listen to Personal Landscapes: Conversations on Books About Place on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual places.
This podcast relies on the support of listeners like you to keep going. Please consider joining the Member’s Club.
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
Germany’s post-war recovery was an economic miracle.
The country was on the rise in a good way. And then it all started going wrong.
The signs of trouble were visible long before the covid pandemic pushed us over the brink.
Journalists Will Wilkes and Chris Reiter have spent decades reporting on Germany’s problems, and they lay it all out in their new book Broken Republik.
We spoke about Germany’s worrying lack of national identity, its reliance on structure to manage interpersonal relations, and why it has Europe’s worst social mobility.
Personal Landscapes relies on the support of listeners like you to keep going. Please consider joining the Member’s Club.
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Digital platforms promised us personalization but their algorithms homogenized culture to a bland lowest common denominator instead.
They don’t just influence what we consume, they also determine what is produced as artists shape their output to fit what gets seen and what gets shared.
My guest today traced this creeping, machine-guided curation as it infiltrated the furthest reaches of our digital, physical, and psychological spaces. And he has a few ideas for escaping it that might surprise you.
Kyle Chayka joined me to talk about how digital algorithms work, why they flatten culture and how to take back control of our own taste.
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
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 and dissolute colonial officials set against the beautifully described landscapes of Tanzania, the Congo, Brussels, Iraq and India.
Sophy Roberts joined me to talk about Frederick Carter’s forgotten journey, Leopold II’s Congo land grab, and oral memory keepers as custodians of the past.
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
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.
Biographer Melissa Harris joined me to talk about Koudelka’s wandering life, his remarkable network of friends, and his interest in capturing the end of things.
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
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 homes, the stigma of illegitimacy, and how secrecy can shape a family and a society.
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
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 an exciting high stakes thriller with insightful social commentary and a vivid sense of place. Exactly the sort of novel she excels at.
We spoke about Cold War Moscow, growing up as an embassy child, and the shock of discovering her mother’s cloak-and-dagger past.
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
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 my travel literature top ten ever since.
We spoke about traveling by camel, Saharan cultures, and what it was like to see the Nile after nine desert months.
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
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 him, he’s somewhere in Africa living as a trader and gunrunner — and for a while, that was all we knew. The book we’re talking about today reveals what happened next.
Charles Nicholl is the author of Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1890-91. He’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a recipient of the Hawthornden prize and has won the James Tait Black prize for biography.
We spoke about the allure of Rimbaud the poet, his ‘lost years’ in Africa, and his late reputation as a traveler and Arabist.
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
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 describes the things we all see but don’t mention in polite conversation, and he shines a light on thoughts we actively avoid.
Paul is the author of some 33 works of fiction including The Mosquito Coast and The Bad Angel Brothers, and 19 travel books including The Great Railway Bazaar and Dark Star Safari, books that cemented his standing as our greatest living travel writer.
We had a wide-ranging conversation about the core themes in these stories, including aging, childhood reading, and how taking risks can make you wise.
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
Pamela Petro is an American writer obsessed with a country she visited by chance. She first went to Wales as a graduate student in her early twenties. The place felt deeply familiar from the moment she arrived, as did the sense of longing that permeates its landscape and stories, both recent and ancient.
The Welsh have a word for this acute presence of absence, an untranslatable term that captures the feeling of something left behind or taken away, irretrievable beyond place and time, but that forever saddens, motivates and marks us. It’s a feeling that resonates deeply with me, and I think you’ll recognize it, too.
We spoke about her obsession with Wales, the presence of absence, and how the sense of loss and longing drives creativity and invention.
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
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Eighties movies portrayed East Germany as a vast open-air prison populated by monotonous grey blurs without individuality or agency, but the GDR was not a static land that time forgot.
Katja Hoyer's brilliant book Beyond The Wall tells its story through the lives of ordinary people. She also grapples with the ongoing tension between a Germany that sees the GDR as an aberration, and the desire of East Germans to hold on to their memories of a life they lived in colour.
We spoke about daily life in East Germany, why the Berlin Wall reduced political tensions, and why tinned soup became a modern political controversy.
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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 literature to give us a haunting portrait of a country struggling against terrible odds to survive.
We spoke about the city of Odesa, his visits to front line combat zones, and what Russia’s war means for Europe.
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
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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 sympathetic attachments between writers, artists, actors, directors, and thinkers —names you’ll recognize, and ‘greats’ you thought you understood.
We spoke about Plutarch’s use of mirror images, literary feuds as spectator sport, and Audrey Hepburn’s connection to Anne Frank.
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
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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 Tracks, and other books.
We talked about his favourite Nordic trails, how to go light by ditching your tent and sleeping bag, and why you should see the world at walking speed.
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
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 exaggerates them. Is it a bellwether for the world to come?
We spoke about the lure of the desert, Arizona’s southern border, water shortages, and the world’s biggest machine gun shoot.
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 about this journey, On The Narrow Road to the Deep North, was reissued by Eland in 2024.
We spoke about Matsuo Basho’s haiku, mountain ascetics and Japan’s undiscovered north.
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.
Ian Fleming was overshadowed by the fictional character he created in the final decade of his life, but his own story is far more interesting.
Biographer Nicholas Shakespeare joined me to talk about Fleming’s troubled childhood, his wartime intelligence work, and how an American president made James Bond a bestseller.
Kapka Kassabova writes about marginal places and the interdependence of humans and animals in traditional societies. In her last four books, she has made the Balkans her subject — a region I love visiting for its rugged geography and people. She’s one of today’s most interesting writers on place, and one whose work will stand the test of time.
We spoke about her newest book Anima: A Wild Pastoral, the interdependence of humans and animals, and what it’s like to live as a shepherd in a vertical world.
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. It was as though civilization itself had been wiped away. What caused it? And could it happen to us?
Eric Cline joined me to talk about the globalized Bronze Age world, why some civilizations vanished and others thrived, and why future historians might look at 2020 in the same way we look at 1177 B.C.
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 30 years. They were a crucial influence on me as a young traveller and writer, and I’ve gotten enormous enjoyment from them.
We spoke about George Orwell and Burma, of course. But this was also a conversation about reading and the life of a writer. I hope you enjoy it.
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 UK to the Mississippi and the Inside Passage — and all contain interior as well as physical journeys.
Julia Raban and editor John Freeman joined me to talk about Jonathan's fascination with sailing, the emigrant experience and reading landscape.
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 style, his core themes of love and loss, and why this giant of American fiction isn’t more widely read today.
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 Sherlock Holmes craze, the dying days of the Ottoman Empire, and the nature of obsession.
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 search for the source of the Oxus River, and the challenges of traveling to such a remote place.
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.
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, “instantaneous culture”, and how to look beyond the modern and connect to Japan’s deeper essence.
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.
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 writers about place?
I’ve got all that and more in the last Personal Landscapes episode of 2023. Talk about ending the year on a high note.
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, dairy products and vodka, and met incredible hardships with smiles and laughter as they carved out a life in one of our world’s most remote corners.
We spoke about life at the edge of Mongolia, the nomadic cycle, and how aloneness teaches us about ourselves.
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, and his lifelong obsession with nomads.
This might just be the strangest landscape I’ve featured on the podcast. It’s also the one we know least about.
Laura Trethewey joins me to discuss bizarre underwater landscapes, the difficulties of sonar mapping, and the amazing race to map the world's oceans.
Lagos is a massive city with massive problems. I've always thought of it as a place to avoid. But I came away with a very different impression of Africa’s largest megacity after reading the book we’re discussing today.
Tim Cocks joins me to speak about ancestral spirits, the importance of community networks, and the desperate need to hustle without getting hustled yourself.
Sacred mountains are revered across a wide array of cultures. They're sites of sacrifice and of ritual, perhaps because they feel closer to the gods: physical border zones between the sacred and profane.
Jeremy Bassetti joins me to talk about a strange religious pilgrimage in an off-the-track corner of Bolivia, the concept of liminal spaces, and suffering as the root cause of hope.
The Pyrenees form one of the great European landscapes, but they're all too often overshadowed by the romance of the Alps. As you'll hear in today's podcast, they have their own very different set of stories to tell.
Matthew Carr joins me to talk about medieval troubadours, Cathar castles, and Second World War escape routes from Nazi occupied Europe.
If you think colonialism ended after the Second World War, then my latest conversation may surprise you. Simon Winchester joins me to talk about Tristan da Cunha, hiding under a bed in the Falklands, and how he bluffed his way into the world’s most notorious military base.
Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire was first published in 1985, and is still in print. It’s one of the 5 or 6 books I had in mind when I started the Personal Landscapes podcast, and it remains one of my favourite books about place.
Tom Parfitt walked across the northern flank of the Russian Caucasus, from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea, through republics whose names are synonymous with violence, extremism and warfare. He joins me to discuss the Circassians, mass relocations under Stalin, and high mountain villages where resourceful people have survived for centuries on the stoniest ground.
Nothing symbolizes freedom in America like the open road. Richard Grant joins me to discuss frontiersmen and plains Indians, riding the rails, and the role of the Scotch-Irish in forging the utterly unique American view of freedom.
Why have nomads gotten such a bad rap? And why is their knowledge essential for us today? Anthony Sattin joins me to discuss nomadic empires, cycles of history, pastoral peoples, and how steppe nomads contributed to the European Renaissance.
If you think the world's largest desert is an empty wasteland, then you’re in for a surprise.
The Sahara has been home to cattle pastoralists, mighty empires, and trade routes that connected the Mediterranean world with sub-Saharan Africa.
I’m joined by Eamonn Gearon, author of a wonderful cultural history of the Sahara.
We talk about desert whales, fossil water, astonishing rock art older than history, and a few of the travelers who explored this vast region and returned to tell the tale.
The more I’ve travelled in Europe, the more my interest has shifted east, to a region that looks increasingly complex the deeper you delve into it. I reached out to Jacob Mikanowski to help me understand its empires, faiths, stories and nations.
He's the author of a fascinating new book called Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land.
We spoke about frontier societies, plagues of vampires, and the gift of seeing comedy amidst tragedy.
Berlin has been a crucible of culture, an industrial powerhouse, a nest of spies, and now, it’s Europe’s capital of cool. Lieutenant General Sir Barney White-Spunner joins me to talk about the Hohenzollern dynasty, waves of immigration and destruction, and the distinctly irreverent Berlin character that we both know and love.
Joseph Roth's short form journalism captured fleeting moments with universal implications, and the social conflict, cultural upheaval, and acceleration of the inter-war years. He also wrote one of the 20th century's finest novels. Biographer Keiron Pim joins me to talk about perpetual movement, straddling borders, and the loss of a world.
Norman Lewis had an instinct for being in exactly the right place to capture traditional ways of life on the brink of modernity, but his books are far from dry — he also had an unerring eye for the absurd. Biographer Julian Evans joins me to talk about Lewis’s escape reflex, the subjectivity of witness statements, and the past as a place.
Steve Kilbey is the singer and lyricist of legendary Australian rock band The Church. He's made dozens of albums, and written several volumes of poetry and a memoir called Something Quite Peculiar. He was also the single biggest influence on my own development as a writer. We discuss lyric writing, songs about place, the disillusionment of success, and how music can recall our most intense experiences with vividness and immediacy.
Gordon Peake’s work as an international development consultant has led him to the world’s forgotten corners, places once besieged by anthropologists and now overrun by Western aid workers. He's written books on Timor-Leste and Bougainville, and the inside stories he shares about the big money world of development projects will surprise you and make you laugh.
When I hiked through the Accursed Mountains last June, I met older Albanians who still referred to Edith Durham as their “mountain queen”. Her books provide a rare first-hand look at a turbulent and seldom traveled corner of Europe during the last years of the Ottoman Empire. Durham's biographer, Marcus Tanner, joined me to discuss her travels, her relief work in the Balkans, and her role in helping create an independent Albania.
David Thompson travelled some 90,000 kilometres across North America as a fur trader and surveyor, mapping one-fifth of the continent. His work was so accurate it remained the basis of all maps of the west for almost a century. And yet, he died in obscurity, his remarkable achievements largely forgotten. His biographer D'Arcy Jenish joins me to talk about this remarkable man’s life and work, and his role in creating the Canada we know today.
In 2015, Rebecca Lowe set out on a year long cycling trip from London to Tehran, a journey that revealed a splintered mosaic of cultures, countries and languages, each with their own unique traditions. We talked about the Arab Spring, the promise of Sudan, and the stark cultural divides within cosmopolitan Iran.
Martha Gellhorn wanted to be known as a novelist. Instead, she’s remembered as one of the 20th century’s greatest war correspondents. She wrote about what war does to ordinary people, and the despair of those who have lost everything. Biographer Caroline Moorehead joins me to talk about this remarkable woman.
One People is a comic novel but Cousins Cove is a real village, and the stories Guy Kennaway tells were gathered during his first ten years as an idle British expat. We spoke about Jamaican culture, the legacy of slavery, and why he’s a passionate advocate for Patwa, the national language.
Turn-of-the-century Vienna was a cultural crucible where the air seethed with repressed desire. No artist captured this more vividly than Egon Schiele. Sophie Haydock imagines herself into his world in her debut novel The Flames.
W.G. Sebald has been described as “a writer of almost unclassifiable originality”. He wrote about the plight of emigrants, and in particular, emigrants from the Holocaust. His obsessions included survivor’s guilt, the nature of decline and fall, loss and decay, and the downward plunge of nature and history. I discussed Sebald's life and work with his biographer Carole Angier.
David Eimer is the author of the critically acclaimed The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China. We spoke about that country's tumultuous border regions, and how different ethnic minorities have tried to keep their culture alive beneath the Han yoke.
Dervla Murphy has been described as a ‘travel legend’ and ‘the first lady of Irish cycling’. For five decades she’s travelled the world in a series of truly remarkable journeys, mostly alone and mostly on foot. I had the great fortune to speak with her a week after her 90th birthday. We talked about the loss of traditional cultures, travel in the pre-internet age, and the general state of the world.
Nigel Barley wrote one of the funniest travel books I've ever read, and it nearly got him kicked out of his academic discipline. We spoke about the grim reality of fieldwork, his odd attraction for monkeys, and why fiction tells us more than anthropology about what it means to be human.
Jeremy Seal is the author of six books, including A Fez of the Heart. We spoke about the infinite courtesies of Turkish hospitality, cultural divides, and the legacy of the 1960 military coup.
John Gimlette is the author of five books, including The Gardens of Mars. We spoke about Madagascar, ‘walking the dead’, and writing about places on the margin of the map.
Sara Wheeler is the author of 10 books, including Mud and Stars. We spoke about her travels in Russia, living as writer-in-residence on an Antarctic research base, and the reciprocal relationship between story and memory.
Jerry Kobalenko is one of Canada’s most experienced High Arctic travelers, and the author of The Horizontal Everest and Arctic Eden. We spoke about the lure of Ellesmere, and searching for the traces of historic travelers.
Lawrence Millman is the author of 18 books, and a master of northern writing. We talked about his book Last Places, eating bird shit in Iceland, and his efforts to preserve stories before they fade away.
Rory Maclean is the author of 15 books, including Berlin: Portrait of a City Through the Centuries. We talk about Berlin, making a film with David Bowie, the state of Europe, and how a glimpse of the Berlin Wall formed a lasting influence on his books.
Eland has been resurrecting lost travel classics and keeping them in print for more than 35 years. I talk with publisher Barnaby Rogerson about anthropology-lite, why the post-war period was a golden age for British travel writing, and why some of the 20th century’s most exciting writers were autodidacts.
The novelist and island writer Lawrence Durrell believed that everyone has a personal landscape, a landscape that resonates with them on some deep tuning fork level, where you feel most at home, and where you think your deepest thoughts.
I’ve spent more than 20 years exploring such places as a traveler, and as a writer of magazine features and books.
I’m going to talk to the people who write those books and publish those books. Experts on different geographical and cultural regions, and on long-dead writers whose books have entered the canon of travel classics.
I hope you enjoy listening to them as much as I enjoy talking to them.