Travel

Thursday

James Delingpole

The gilded generation – why the young have never had it so good

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_8_May_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”James Delingpole and Daniel Knowles discuss the gilded generation” startat=42] Listen [/audioplayer]No one likes being told they’ve never had it so good. When Lord Young of Graffham tried it three years ago, he was quickly forced out of his job as David Cameron’s enterprise adviser. And rightly so, you might think, for it was an affront both to the evidence before our eyes and to our most basic human instinct: that the past was golden and ahead of us lies only misery, penury, falling standards, overcrowding and the on-going destruction of our once green and pleasant land. This was the (hugely popular) theme of Danny Boyle’s London Olympics opening

Wednesday

Steerpike

London as you’ve never seen it before

The new Shangri-La hotel opened its doors to Mr S last night. Located on floor 35 of The Shard, the luxurious establishment was only, in fact, semi-open, since three ‘signature suites’ and an infinity pool are yet to be unveiled. The exhibited areas were abundant in opulence and splendour. The great and the good of luxury journalism were out in force. William Sitwell, editor of Waitrose Kitchen, Mark Palmer, travel editor of The Daily Mail and The Guardian’s Amelia Gentleman were all present to admire interior designer William Leung’s latest venture. All other glamorous guests appeared to have got lost in the lift on the way up. Entertainment included a

Thursday

Matthew Parris

A secret from my African childhood has become a deeper mystery

About 55 years ago, when I was about ten, my younger brother Roger and I discovered a slave pit in Africa. Actually it probably wasn’t a slave pit and we probably didn’t discover it, but ‘Arab’ ‘slave pits’ were what Southern Rhodesian schools offered as an explanation for the circular, room-sized, stone-lined pits sunk about five feet below ground but open to the sky. And if Roger’s and mine were not the first modern eyes to behold this antiquity, then we were able at least to persuade ourselves of the claim, as there was no path trodden into the small patch of dark, dense primary forest in whose midst we

Thursday

Philip Marsden

What seamen fear more than Somali pirates

If a time traveller were to arrive in our world from, say, 1514 — a neat half-millennium away — what single feature would strike them most? What could they use on their return to try and explain the sheer weirdness of the future? A crowded mega-city? A hospital? An international airport? A computer? What about this — a container ship, a fifth-of-a-mile of steel transport travelling thousands of miles across unknown oceans filled with 150 tonnes of New Zealand lamb, 138,000 tins of cat food, 12,800 MP3 players and any amount of the paraphernalia for which the frenetic people of the 21st century work so hard to be able to

Blair Worden

What Englishmen learnt from Europe

The pattern of foreign travel by wealthy young Englishmen that became known as the Grand Tour began in the Renaissance and matured in the 17th century. In its origins it was a training for statesmanship. The state’s takeover of the church, which had done so much of the state’s official business, enlarged the employment opportunities of the nobility and gentry. So did the expansion of the government’s administrative resources and ambitions. But with the opportunities came challenges. Monarchs needed their advisers and officials and diplomats to be skilled and knowledgeable. So noblemen and gentlemen urged their sons to look beyond the accustomed pleasures of the hunting field and get down

Thursday

Clarissa Tan

Clarissa Tan’s Notebook: Why I stopped drinking petrol

Florence was in fog the day I arrived. Its buildings were bathed in white cloud, its people moved as though through steam. The Arno river was a dense strip of dew. At the Piazzale Michelangelo, the statue of David was etched by the surrounding murkiness to a stark silhouette, the renaissance defined by gothic cloud. I peered through a telescope that overlooked the city and saw nothing for miles. My friend Alessandro told me this was unusual for sunny Tuscany, which made me feel quite pleased. Perhaps with each day that passed I would see less of Florence — the ultimate tourist experience. At a nearby cemetery, the milky arms

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Tanya Gold: Child-friendly, sex-free, nut-heavy – just the hotel for my 40th birthday

Woolley Grange is a child-friendly country house hotel that seems, at first, entirely monstrous — a grey Tudor house in Wiltshire, with gables like teeth and a pond outside, possibly haunted. It is like a smiling wife who bares her fangs and eats the car park and all the Hondas within; a cinematic fiend of a house, in fact, but I am only reading Hilary Mantel these days, and she has the gift of bestowing menace on everything — clingfilm, envelopes, nuts. A country house hotel doesn’t stand a chance. We are here because it is New Year’s Eve. It is my 40th birthday, A has decided that he hates

Ruby Stockham

The Navigators

Tehran does not welcome pedestrians. It is eight o’clock on a July evening and the sun has plunged out of the air with alarming speed; the sky is the colour of wine, and the air is thick with the scent of heat and petrol. I have long forgotten where we are going. Dust-coloured buildings spill out to the horizon, many of them protected by barbed-wire gates. In this part of town it is so unusual for people to walk on the streets at night — I am told that only fools and prostitutes do so — that the pavements are unlit, and we rely on the rippling glow of the

Thursday

Anthony Sattin

American Smoke, by Iain Sinclair – review

If you have read Iain Sinclair’s books you will know that he is a stylist with a love of language. You will also know that he has opinions to express and projects to promote or destroy: London’s Olympic park was one of his targets. He has lived in Hackney for much of the past 40 years and his previous book of that name was so provocative that Hackney council tried to ban him from giving a reading at a local library. He can be digressive to an extent that becomes challenging, as you would expect from a writer who long ago rejected the need for anything as banal as a

Thursday

Richard Davenporthines

What would Auden have deemed evil in our time? European jingoism

‘Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno’ was the first Auden poem that Alexander McCall Smith read in his youth. He discovered it in an anthology, and it puzzled him because he had not then visited Italy. A little later, Smith found Auden’s elegy to Sigmund Freud, and was enthralled by its promise that psychoanalysis frees people ‘to approach the future as a friend/ without a wardrobe of excuses, without/ a set mask of rectitude or an/ embarrassing over-familiar gesture.’ When Smith began his careful, systematic reading of Auden while living under civil war conditions in Belfast, he found the hostility, menace and anxiety of Auden’s pre-1939 poems attuned to his environment. The

Monday

Melanie McDonagh

Richard Dawkins is right: Osama bin Laden has made air travel insufferable

It’s not that often I feel a real bond with Richard Dawkins but no sooner did I read his diatribe about Osama bin Laden having won the global war on terror because he, Prof Dawkins, had had a jar of honey confiscated at the airport, than I realised that here was a kindred soul. The prof declared on Twitter over the weekend: Bin Laden has won, in airports of the world every day. I had a little jar of honey, now thrown away by rule-bound dundridges. STUPID waste. — Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) November 3, 2013   Ah yes, I’ve been there. Except the jar of forest honey – raw, lovely,

Thursday

Harry Eyres

Christopher Howse takes the slow train in Spain — and writes a classic

This is probably not a book for those whose interest in Spain gravitates towards such contemporary phenomena as the films of Pedro Almodóvar, Barcelona Football Club or the fashion retailer Zara. Nor, as far as trains go, is it a volume for people fascinated by the engineering feats of Spain’s new high-speed AVE train system, which means that you can travel from Madrid to Seville in just over two hours, or from Madrid to Barcelona in less than three (rather amazing, when you recall that the old service used to take nine hours). Christopher Howse does not like high-speed trains. Even moderately paced express trains are too fast for him,

Sunday

Clarissa Tan

Give us your views! Here is Fraser Nelson’s

Spectator readers are known for their views — fierce, funny, original. Now we want not only your opinions, but your visual views as well. This week’s magazine features Sam Leith’s lovely review of Simon Jenkins’ wonderful book, ‘England’s 100 Best Views’. What are your favourite views, from these shores and beyond? Send them to us. Also, don’t forget we’re canvassing your viewpoint with our Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize — the £2,000 award for unconventional travel writing. Only three more weeks till that competition closes. To kick off our reader photo spree, we thought we’d give you some views of our own. The photo above shows editor Fraser Nelson’s favourite view,

Thursday

Mark Mason

Walking in Ruins, by Geoff Nicholson – review

Geoff Nicholson is the Maharajah of Melancholy. The quality was there in his novels, it was there in his non-fiction book The Lost Art of Walking, and it’s there in the latter’s successor, Walking in Ruins (Harbour Books, £12.50). He savours the comfort to be gained from accepting decay as an inevitable part of life. Ruins are his muse. So he spends the book doing exactly what its title suggests. Locations include an abandoned Los Angeles zoo, now inhabited by two homeless men, a Sheffield housing estate whose road layout survives even though its houses don’t, and a desert town that’s been, er, deserted. Nicholson keeps finding shoes there, though

Sam Leith Sam Leith

England’s 100 best Views, by Simon Jenkins – review

I couldn’t decide on starting England’s 100 Best Views whether it was a batty idea for a book or a perfectly sensible one. Why write about something that begs to be seen? Would this not be better as a collection of photographs, with helpful accompanying maps and perhaps a checklist that, once filled in, entitled you to a badge from Big Chief I-Spy? On the other hand, as Jenkins (he’s Sir Simon, of course, but book reviews know no distinctions of rank) explains in his introduction, a view is more than just a picture: it is something mobile — a collocation of geography and geology, the built environment and the

Friday

Jeremy Browne

Ed Miliband needs to get out more

They say travel broadens the mind, and Ed Miliband needs to travel more. To China, India and Brazil, but also to South Korea, Mexico, Turkey and Indonesia. If he did he would see the evidence before his eyes of a global revolution taking place. This revolution, and how Britain can best be a contender in the global race, is the biggest fact of life in politics today. To dismiss this phenomenon as a ‘race to the bottom’ is so breathtakingly arrogant, parochial and ignorant that it demonstrates Ed Miliband’s lack of seriousness and suitability as a national leader. The whole world order, that has existed since at least the Industrial

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Nobody takes a flight from London to Manchester. So why would we take HS2?

From Edinburgh airport there are more than 45 flights a day to London. And, I imagine, the same number back. You can fly from Edinburgh to London Heathrow, -London Gatwick, London Luton, -London Stansted and London City — even to the optimistically named -London Southend. Glasgow offers a similar choice. I have often used these flights. I live about 25 minutes’ drive from Gatwick, so when I go to Edinburgh my -favourite plan is to take a morning train up and then fly or take the sleeper back. Since Manchester is bigger than Edinburgh, I had naively assumed that I would be able to do something similar for an upcoming

John Preston

Move Along, Please, by Mark Mason – review

Mrs Thatcher was widely believed to have said that ‘any man over the age of 26 who finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure in life’. In fact there’s no evidence Thatcher ever said it — the most likely culprit is the Duchess of Westminster. Mark Mason loves buses, and doesn’t much seem to care if anyone thinks he’s a failure. He loves them so much that he decided to travel the length of the country by local bus. This, he declares, would be a kind of anti-travel, ‘a rejection of everything we always strive for’, namely speed. Along the way he’d visit all kinds of strange

Thursday

Mark Palmer

No, you did not ‘leave the modern world behind’: some phrases should be banned from travel writing

Clichés and travel writing, sadly, often go hand in hand. I look after the travel pages at the Daily Mail and have felt compelled to compile a list of banned words and phrases for writers. The list gets longer by the week. Because the Spectator’s Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for travel writing is underway, I thought I’d pull out my list again. Here are just a few of the offending words and phrases on it. I’m sure you can think of more. city of contrasts breathtaking jaw-dropping leaving the modern world behind chilled out pampering nothing but the sound of waves bygone era stunning (includes ‘simply stunning’) nightmare (includes ‘complete nightmare’, ‘total

Tuesday

Gloria Deak

‘A banishment’ – Gloria Deak describes the visits of celebrated Victorians to America

No, they decidedly did not like us — this is true at least for the majority of the nineteenth-century British travelers to the New World. They came out of a sense of wonder, somewhat akin to the reaction of Thomas More who declared in his sixteenth-century Utopia that ‘nowadays countries are always being discovered that were never in the old geography books.’ Over the next few centuries, perhaps no emerging country west of the Atlantic would excite as much curiosity as the vast expanse of territory that would become known as the United States. It soon became manifest that, in expanding her geographical borders, the United States had staked out