I have become an absurdly anxious traveller. Every little detail now preoccupies me until my flight has actually left the ground: visas, check-in, reaching the airport and, what I suspect…
Two centenaries have preoccupied me for much of the past year, professionally as well as personally: the 100th anniversary of the formation of Northern Ireland in May 1921, and of…
With a week’s leave left to take, an article in The Guardian furnished me with a destination. I had never heard of Zaragoza, but that made it all the more…
Until recently, photography was banned in both Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral. For a collector of Prime Ministerial graves, this proved a bit of a problem. Not only that,…
Back in January, when the pandemic was only a few weeks into the future but light years away in terms of comprehension, a friend and I drove from Oxford â…
When someone in Pula told me there was ‘nothing to see’ in Rijeka, I knew at once I’d like it. Experience told me that such warnings tended to be the…
The launch of the Conservative party manifesto last week gave rise to much commentary about ‘Mayism’, whether it existed and, assuming it did, what it meant. This is something that…
In Oban there’s a little hillside cemetery overlooking the atmospherically-named Halfmoon Bay. There are only a few dozen gravestones, many of them bearing the same family name, but some of…
A few months ago I flew via Iceland to Alaska, which is as far west as you can go in North America. En route my no-frills aircraft passed over Greenland…
It was surprisingly cold in the Holy Land. In Jerusalem, I needed a hat and gloves while London basked in sunshine, and in Hebron, I found myself sheltering from both…