Tag Archives: Travel

In My Hands Today…

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The Way of the Hermit: My 40 Years in the Scottish Wilderness – Ken Smith, Will Millard

Could you leave behind the bustle of modern society and spend your days immersed in nature? In The Way of the Hermit, seventy-four-year-old Ken Smith recounts a life he has chosen to spend alone with the wilderness.

Ken Smith has spent the past four decades in the Scottish Highlands. He lives alone, with no electricity or running water. His home is a log cabin nestled near Loch Treig, known as ‘the lonely loch’, where he lives off the he fishes for his supper, chops his own wood, and even brews his own tipple. He is, in the truest sense of the word, a hermit.

For the first time, Ken shares the story of his life. From his working-class origins in Derbyshire, to the formative years he spent travelling in the Yukon and finally how he came to be the Hermit of Loch Treig. Looking back through decades of diary entries, Ken reflects upon the reasons he turned his back on society, the vulnerability of old age and the awe and wonder of a life lived in nature. The Way of the Hermit is a humorous, transcendent and life-affirming memoir.

In My Hands Today…

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In Search of Berlin: The Story of A Reinvented City – John Kampfner

No other city has had so many lives, survived so many disasters and has reinvented itself so many times. No other city is like Berlin.

Ever since John Kampfner was a young journalist in Communist East Berlin, he hasn’t been able to get the city out of his mind. It is a place tortured by its past, obsessed with memories, a place where traumas are unleashed and the traumatised have gathered.

Over the past four years Kampfner has walked the length and breadth of Berlin, delving into the archives, and talking to historians and writers, architects and archaeologists. He clambers onto a fallen statue of Lenin; he rummages in boxes of early Medieval bones; he learns about the cabaret star so outrageous she was thrown out of the city.

Berlin has been a military barracks, industrial powerhouse, centre of learning, hotbed of decadence – and the laboratory for the worst experiment in horror known to man. Now a city of refuge, it is home to 180 nationalities, and more than a quarter of the population has a migrant background. Berlin never stands still. It is never satisfied. It never believes it has the answer. But it is now the irresistible capital to which the world is gravitating.

In Search of Berlin is an 800-year story, a dialogue between past and present; it is a new way of looking at this turbulent and beguiling city on its never-ending journey of reinvention.

In My Hands Today…

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Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe’s Lost Country – Simon Winder

In 843 AD, the three surviving grandsons of the great emperor Charlemagne met at Verdun. After years of bitter squabbles over who would inherit the family land, they finally decided to divide the territory and go their separate ways.

In a moment of staggering significance, one grandson inherited the area we now know as France, another Germany and the third received the piece in between: Lotharingia.

Lotharingia is a history of in-between Europe. It is the story of a place between places. In this beguiling, hilarious, and compelling book, Simon Winder retraces the various powers that have tried to overtake the land that stretches from the mouth of the Rhine to the Alps and the might of the peoples who have lived there for centuries.

In My Hands Today…

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A Training School for Elephants – Sophy Roberts

In 1879, King Leopold II of Belgium launched an ambitious plan to plunder Africa’s resources. The key to cracking open the continent, or so he thought, was its elephants—if only he could train them. And so he commissioned the charismatic Irish adventurer Frederick Carter to ship four tamed Asian elephants from India to the East African coast, where they were marched inland towards Congo. The ultimate aim was to establish a training school for African elephants.

Following in the footsteps of the four elephants, Roberts pieces together the story of this long-forgotten expedition, in travels that take her to Belgium, Iraq, India, Tanzania, and Congo. The storytelling brings to life a compelling cast of historic characters and modern voices, from ivory dealers to Catholic nuns, set against rich descriptions of the landscapes travelled. In an original weave of past and present, she digs deep into historic records revealing an extraordinary—and enduring—story of colonial greed, hypocrisy, and folly.

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Myths of Geography: Eight Ways We Get the World Wrong – Paul Richardson

Is geography really destiny?

Our maps may no longer be stalked by dragons and monsters, but our perceptions of the world are still shaped by geographic myths. Myths like Europe being the centre of the world. Or that border walls are the solution to migration. Or that Russia is predestined to threaten its neighbours.

In his punchy and authoritative new book, Paul Richardson challenges recent popular accounts of geographical determinism and shows that how we see the world represented often isn’t how it really is – that the map is not the territory.

Along the way we visit some remarkable Iceland’s Thingvellir National Park, where you can swim between two continents; Bir Tawil in North Africa, one of the world’s only territories not claimed by any country; and we follow the first train that ran across Eurasia between Yiwu in east China and Barking in east London.

Written with verve and full of quotable facts, Myths of Geography is a book that will turn your world upside down.