Travel

Many moons ago when I went to Sissinghurst to ask Nigel Nicolson (late of this parish) if I could write about his mother, Vita Sackville-West, he raised his hands, and eyebrows, in horror, ‘Oh! Not another book about my mother!’ These two titles on Italian gardens may provoke a similar reaction, for there has been a recent run of revisiting via Charles Latham’s vintage Country Life photographs, Edith Wharton’s Edwardian musings and Georgina Masson’s 1961 classic, now revived. Many moons ago when I went to Sissinghurst to ask Nigel Nicolson (late of this parish) if I could write about his mother, Vita Sackville-West, he raised his hands, and eyebrows, in

In the autumn of 1984, after an unexplained fall, I found myself in a hospital in Rome acutely head-injured and disorientated. I had been found sprawled on the floor of my flat on Via Salaria; the police suspected an intruder, yet nothing apparently was stolen. Bloody handprints covered the walls where I had tried to steady myself. I was 23 and newly arrived in Rome to work as a journalist and teach. Later, I regained consciousness outside a latrine on the sixth floor of San Giovanni hospital. A group of nuns with elaborate bird-like coifs swished past, each bearing a carafe of white wine. So I was in paradise —

Christopher Howse describes Spain as ‘the strangest place with which Westerners can easily identify’. Christopher Howse describes Spain as ‘the strangest place with which Westerners can easily identify’. He has certainly written one of the strangest books on the country in recent years. His approach is gloriously and provocatively unfashionable. Whereas other authors on Spain today might dwell on its innovative new chefs, the modernity of Barcelona and Bilbao, the tawdry Costa del Sol, and such persistent Andalucían-based stereotypes as duende, bullfighting and Moorish sensuality, Howse has concentrated on an aspect of the country that was once no less integral to its image — its austere and spiritual side. This

For Peter Ackroyd, the subterranean world holds a potent allure. London Under, his brief account of the capital’s catacombs and other murky zones, manages to radiate a dark mystery and sulphur reek. ‘There is no darkness like the darkness under the ground’, Ackroyd announces, like a Victorian raree-show merchant. This is an entertaining if slightly daft book, that reveals what a weird world lies beneath our feet. Whether Ackroyd has actually been to all the places he describes is uncertain. Journalists have contorted themselves through narrow, stinking cave-galleries and risked leptospirosis from rat urine in their quest for London subterranea. But the stately Ackroyd? The London sewers are vividly described

For centuries, the history of the far North was a tapestry of controversies and mis- understandings, misspellings, dubious arrivals and equally dubious departures. Pytheas the Greek sailed north from Britain in the 4th century BC, found a place where the sea, land and sky seemed to merge, and was trounced by later scholars as a terrible charlatan. The Vikings mingled cartographical details with stories of trolls and hauntings. During the reign of Elizabeth I, Martin Frobisher went north and (mistakenly) thought he’d found gold. Undeterred, successive explorers and treasure hunters ventured into the Arctic wastes, many of them vanishing among the floes. Frederick Cook claimed to have reached the North

In the late 1960s I grew up in the London borough of Greenwich, which in those days had a shabby, post-industrial edge. Behind our house on Crooms Hill stood a disused London Electricity Board sub-station. Broken glass crunched underfoot and buddleia grew amid the fly-tipped junk. I went there chiefly to shoot at pigeons and set fire to things. Tea chests went up in a satisfying orange whoosh; I was mesmerised. One day, dreadfully, the LEB building burned down after I neglected to extinguish embers. The fire-fighters flashed a spectral white and blue, I remember, from the fire-engine’s beacon. I could no longer go there unnoticed. I was reminded of

The unification of Italy 150 years ago was a terrible mistake, according to David Gilmour, imposing a national state on a diverse collection of people with little sense of patria. But Barry Unsworth thinks it’s too early to cry failure David Gilmour begins his pursuit of this most elusive of quarries where all such pursuits should begin: with a close look at the physical features of the country, which have from the remotest times determined the pattern of its history, the repeated waves of invasion and settlement. Few countries have been more vulnerable. The coastline is enormously long, impossible to guard effectively; the northern rampart of the Alps has never

Colin Thubron’s new book will disappoint those of his readers who admire him for his reserve. He is the last and perhaps the best of the gentleman travellers of the old school, his books distinguished by scholarship, rigour and that extraordinary ability that he has made his own: the capacity to immerse himself in someone else’s culture and yet remain utterly detached. Those same readers may also be disappointed by the slimness of the present volume, which occupies days rather than months and encompasses a mere province rather than the usual continent. But they would be wrong to dismiss To a Mountain in Tibet as lightweight. Nothing Thubron writes cannot

Some years ago I went to a dinner party in Lucknow, capital of India’s Uttar Pradesh, where the hosts and their guests were Hindus who as children had fled Lahore in 1947 at the time of Partition. A week later I was in Lahore, capital of Pakistan’s Punjab, and found myself in a house where the other diners were Muslim refugees who at a similar age had come from Lucknow. Midway through the second meal, I suddenly realised how similar the two groups of middle-class professional people were. Lawyers, teachers, booksellers and architects, they shared the same tastes and the same worries, their chief anxiety being that their belligerent governments