Spectator Life

In the courtyard of the bishop’s palace, the young man who would become Saint Francis stripped naked in front of his parents and various town and church officials. He handed his clothes with a bag of money on top to his father, saying: ‘I give these back to you. From now on I have one

Half of Britain is said to have watched The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show in 1977. Spain’s Christmas lottery, broadcast live to the nation each year on the morning of 22 December and marking for many the start of the holidays, is a similar moment of national unity. Spaniards everywhere down tools, watching with bated breath as lives throughout

As a travel writer, you soon learn that there are countries which, when you mention them, elicit a polite smile of incomprehension, which says: er, where’s that then? Laos is a classic example. Also Kyrgyzstan. And maybe Eswatini. But can it be true that there are chunks, regions, entire departments of France that conjure the

It’s that time of year. The sound of a Silesian Bratwurst connecting with cold lips. A security guard getting aggy with the actor playing ‘the elf’. Ketchup spraying into the air like celebratory champagne. Spilled mulled wine inebriating the local rat population. Overpriced tat sold in gift box form to drooling tourists.  It’s Christmas market season.

On a snowy night in Nuremberg, a city that encapsulates the best and worst of Germany, a huge crowd has gathered in the ancient Marktplatz for the opening of the Christkindlesmarkt, Bavaria’s biggest Christmas market. Cradling mugs of steaming Glühwein, stamping our feet to keep out the cold, we’re all waiting for the Christkind (Christ

Not much of Hong Kong still feels British. There is the odd tube stop – Admiralty, Kennedy Town, Prince Edward – but that’s about it. On the car ride from the airport, I chatted to the driver as we passed under half-built concrete arches covered in green construction cloth. He told me the authorities were

In the cavernous basement of Bilker Bunker, a second world war air raid shelter in downtown Düsseldorf, the staff of groovy events guide the Dorf are toasting the magazine’s tenth birthday. During the war, Germans sheltered here from the RAF. Today, their descendants come here to party. With an art gallery up above and DJs

Tel Aviv is the size of Bristol, with about 400,000 residents each. While Bristol has 400 pubs and bars, and just shy of a thousand restaurants, the rough concrete charm of Tel Aviv yields no fewer than 1,750 cafes, bars and clubs and more than 4,000 places to eat. Tel Aviv is a dense, hedonistic city: friendly,

The späti is a Berlin institution. These late-night corner shops began popping up in the former German Democratic Republic for workers clocking off from their evening shifts. Serving as a mixture of mini-supermarket and meeting place, spätis have outdoor seating, often wobbly wooden tables and benches on which locals sit and drink cheap bottles of

A couple of weeks ago, I made the dish I always make at this time of year. It’s a Hungarian gulyás – or more correctly, a pörkölt – a mixture of beef, onions, peppers, tomatoes and paprika, stewed very slowly and served with plenty of sour cream. It’s appropriate this dish should be from Hungary, as

‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’. Nowhere is this so true as in the streets of Calcutta, departing point of our cruise. The legacy of Mother Teresa has placed a stigma on the ancient capital of the British Raj, now forever considered a city of the dying and destitute. Unsurprisingly, Calcutta does not

The sun had sunk behind the mountains that surrounded the harbour of Cudillero, a small fishing town in Asturias. My hair was still wet from the sea. Two old men were sitting next to us, chatting loudly in Spanish while my husband, father, and I ate bonito pate. Despite being a shy child, my grandfather

Equal parts hype and horsepower, this weekend’s Las Vegas Grand Prix is the most talked about sporting event of the year. For the first time, Formula One will take to the strip, with 20 cars screaming past the floodlit Venetian Caesar’s Palace and the faux Eiffel Tower at 200mph. Certainly, it lost its shirt on

One thing you can be sure of on a visit to Japan is that the service will be at the very least good, and quite often superb. The chances of being short-changed, snubbed, or slighted are virtually zero and truly bad service is so rare I almost, after 24 years in Tokyo, crave it now

From the vertiginous belltower of Leuven’s university library, you get a great view across the mottled rooftops of Belgium’s most underrated city. Leuven isn’t swarming with sightseers, like Bruges. It isn’t choked with commuter traffic, like Brussels. It’s lively and compact, ideal for a weekend away – so why have most British travellers never even

Two hours into a muddy hike through Rwanda’s Nyungwe rainforest and though I’ve been barked at by a baboon, crossed rivers of fire ants and stepped over a foot-long centipede, I have yet to see any chimpanzees, which is the reason I’m here.  My guide and our team of trackers are on the path ahead, armed

Air travel isn’t what it used to be. I think we can all admit that. Those of us who don’t fly British Airways on a regular basis understand the true pandemonium of trying to get to Luton Airport at 3am with an Uber driver half asleep at the wheel. We understand what it means to

I suppose it was going to happen. But not inevitably. After 66 years behind the wheel, I’ve finally gotten a speeding ticket. In France. During those years, I’ve put the pedal to the metal in an Alfa Romeo (Spider Veloce with Weber carburetors), a zippy MG (my mother’s), a 375HP Corvette Stingray (my first husband’s),

England is a mystical place, and its epicentre is Glastonbury, known by its pagan residents as Avalon, the mythical island of the Arthurian legend. It has sacred springs, the supposed tomb of King Arthur, the Tor and ruined tower, proximity to Stonehenge and now a thriving, sprawling community of pagans, with dozens of denominations from druid to water-witch.

Twenty years ago, the Spanish railway company RENFE stole my girlfriend’s father. There were four of us – my girlfriend, her dad, and a university friend of ours. We had been in Spain for more than a month, walking the Camino de Santiago. Now it was time to head home, first by train to Bilbao

Having a child growing up in Italy means regular flights there and back from Stansted airport. This is unfortunate, as I find nearly any other form of transport preferable. It isn’t so much the flying itself – I lack the imagination to envisage what it really means to hover 38,000 feet above the earth in

Sir Ranulph Fiennes (a third cousin of Ralph, since you ask) has written a book about Lawrence of Arabia. He feels an affinity with him: he too has led Arabs in fighting, in Sir Ranulph’s case, for the Sultan of Oman. ‘I’d been in Arabia, leading Arabs against the Marxist rebels. In Lawrence’s day, the

I am on a retreat in the Portuguese mountains outside Faro, a heavenly place called Moinhos Velhos. I have not eaten food in three days. I have practised hours of yoga and meditation. I have swum many cool, slow lengths of a blue-tiled pool and sweated in a wood-fired sauna and walked for miles through