Before I met David Bowie, I was very nervous. I thought, 'Here comes the Thin White Duke, Ziggy Stardust. How will I ever communicate with him?'
From Rory MacLean
One of the most inexplicable characteristics of the Germans is their love of kitsch.
The travel book is a convenient metaphor for life, with its optimistic beginning or departure, its determined striving, and its reflective conclusion. Journeys change travellers just as a good travel book can change readers.
To me, Berlin is as much a conceit as a reality. Why? Because the city is forever in the process of becoming, never being, and so lives more powerfully in the imagination.
One of the most remarkable shindigs I ever attended was in Warsaw.
I grew up under the spell of London. Illustrator Kerry Lee's evocative 1950 wall map of the city hung above our breakfast table at home in Canada. Over my corn flakes, I traced the capital's high roads and medieval alleys.
London has always moved and surprised me, reinventing itself in ways both fresh and familiar. It's a contrary, complex and creative city, an anarchist of a thousand faces - fickle and unfailing, tender and bleak, ambitious and callous.
The earliest maps were 'story' maps. Cartographers were artists who mingled knowledge with supposition, memory and fears. Their maps described both landscape and the events, which had taken place within it, enabling travellers to plot a route as well as to experience a story.
Good travel books, like travel itself, open the door to new worlds. In the strongest works the author's vision becomes our own, especially if his or her subject is a distant destination.
Since the summer days of my Canadian childhood, I have loved to canoe across the dark mirror of northern lakes, paddling with an inside flick of the blade, leaving a trail of twisting whirlpools in my wake.
7 perspectives
5 perspectives
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1 perspectives