Personal Landscapes

Richard Grant: A race to the bottom of crazy

Richard Grant has lived in Arizona for more than twenty years, and his latest book — A Race to the Bottom of Crazy — is a fascinating blend of memoir, history, local issues and encounters with strange characters.

It’s a place where social guardrails are weak, and outlandish behaviour is the order of the day. Arizona doesn’t just reflect national trends, it exaggerates them. Is it a bellwether for the world to come?

We spoke about the lure of the desert, Arizona’s southern border, water shortages, and the world’s biggest machine gun shoot.

 

Lesley Downer on poetry in Japan’s deep north

Lesley Downer's fascination with Japan's most famous poet took her from Tokyo's drab industrial concrete into what was then a seldom-visited part of Honshu.

It was a place of sake-drenched poetry sessions in thatched-roof highland villages, and holy mountains where modern ascetics continued to roam between their past and future lives in search of atonement. Her book about this journey, On The Narrow Road to the Deep North, was reissued by Eland in 2024.

We spoke about Matsuo Basho’s haiku, mountain ascetics and Japan’s undiscovered north.

Thomas Swick: Life in Cold War Poland

Thomas Swick moved to Warsaw at the height of the Cold War. His newest book Falling Into Place is a memoir of his life behind the Iron Curtain, but it’s also a writer’s coming of age in the heyday of post-Watergate journalism.

We spoke about life in the Eastern Bloc, Polish films, and the ten sins of travel writing.

Ian Fleming with biographer Nicholas Shakespeare

Ian Fleming was overshadowed by the fictional character he created in the final decade of his life, but his own story is far more interesting.

Biographer Nicholas Shakespeare joined me to talk about Fleming’s troubled childhood, his wartime intelligence work, and how an American president made James Bond a bestseller.

 

Kapka Kassabova: Europe’s last nomadic pastoralists

Kapka Kassabova writes about marginal places and the interdependence of humans and animals in traditional societies. In her last four books, she has made the Balkans her subject — a region I love visiting for its rugged geography and people. She’s one of today’s most interesting writers on place, and one whose work will stand the test of time.

We spoke about her newest book Anima: A Wild Pastoral, the interdependence of humans and animals, and what it’s like to live as a shepherd in a vertical world.

 

Eric Cline: Why civilization ended in 1177 B.C.

The Late Bronze Age Mediterranean was a surprisingly interconnected place. Trade flourished, interrupted by the odd embargo, and military conflicts used disinformation for strategic gain. And then something terrible happened that brought it all to an end. 

Large empires and small kingdoms that had been flourishing for centuries all collapsed at around the same time. It was as though civilization itself had been wiped away. What caused it? And could it happen to us?

Eric Cline joined me to talk about the globalized Bronze Age world, why some civilizations vanished and others thrived, and why future historians might look at 2020 in the same way we look at 1177 B.C.

Paul Theroux on Orwell and Burma Sahib

Long before he wrote 1984 — and long before he was even George Orwell — Eric Blair was a nineteen year old policeman in Burma. Biographies skirt over this five year period, but it was the making of the writer he would become.

Today’s guest set out to imagine those years in a wonderful new novel called Burma Sahib.

I've read all of Paul Theroux's books over the last 30 years. They were a crucial influence on me as a young traveller and writer, and I’ve gotten enormous enjoyment from them.

We spoke about George Orwell and Burma, of course. But this was also a conversation about reading and the life of a writer. I hope you enjoy it.

 

Jonathan Raban: one of our greatest writers on place

Jonathan Raban wrote about human landscapes rather than uninhabited ones, and the borderlands between what a place professes to be and what they are.

An Englishman who emigrated to Seattle at the age of 47, his status as an outsider gave him a unique perspective on America as the land of perpetual self-reinvention. Many of his books involved water — from the coastal UK to the Mississippi and the Inside Passage — and all contain interior as well as physical journeys.

Julia Raban and editor John Freeman joined me to talk about Jonathan's fascination with sailing, the emigrant experience and reading landscape.

James Salter: with biographer Jeffrey Meyers

James Salter is the best American writer you’ve probably never read. He was a fighter pilot in the Korean War, and a successful screenwriter. His sentences are fractured jewels. The details are closely observed, the imagery poetic. Every page contains an observation I want to write down.

Biographer Jeffrey Meyers joined me to talk about Salter’s remarkable prose style, his core themes of love and loss, and why this giant of American fiction isn’t more widely read today.

Andrew Finkel: Sherlock Holmes and the Ottoman Empire

Sherlock Holmes fans span the range from casual to obsessive. They included Abdulhamid II, the last ruler of the Ottoman Empire to hold absolute power. A description of the sultan having Holmes stories read to him at bedtime set journalist Andrew Finkel off on the flight of fancy that became his first novel. 

We spoke about The Adventure of the Second Wife, the Sherlock Holmes craze, the dying days of the Ottoman Empire, and the nature of obsession.