open...

Looking towards the old town and the surrounding hills Up on the observation deck, a watery sun above me.  I can pick out landmarks of the o...

  Kvetera fortress church Sitting inside the  Kvetera fortress church .  What an astonishing masterpiece.  Its form, with the four main  aps...

High in the mountains, at the heart of Kyrgyzstan Thanks to the driver, we reach the pass at 3,400 metres - very cold, but we did arrive.  T...

The entrance to the Yaghnob valley At the last fork in the road for us: up to Margib, down to the Yaghnob valley.  Two huge peaks lour over ...

The Guggenheim Bilbao by night By the   cathedral   in the old town.  The smell of drains, and a light rain falling.  A characteristic featu...

I will soon have spare slots in my freelance writing schedule for regular weekly or monthly work, and major projects. Here are the main area...

Since Elon Musk is trying to ban any mention of Mastodon on Twitter, I thought I'd just make it as easy as possible to find me on the fo...

Back in November, during the UK's second lockdown, I put online my novel about travel and tourism – " Egyptian Romance " – sin...

In 1990, before I had a go at writing a couple of novels, I put together Glanglish, a collection of short essays.  They are about nothing in...

Once again, many people are under lockdown.  Once again, travel is hard, or impossible.  During the first lockdown, I published my black not...

I have two great regrets in my life.  One is eating a chicken sandwich in Varanasi, shortly before flying to Kathmandu.  This gave me the w...

Just as  A Partial India  was a re-working of  my   travel   notebook  for India, so  Walks with Lorenzetti  re-visits  a 1988 trip I made ...

In October and November 1986, I went to India for the first time.  It was an important experience,  which I tried to capture as it happened...

As people may have heard, there is a rather important vote on Brexit tomorrow.  It's going to be very close, so I would like to urge e...

As most people reading this will know by now, the deeply-flawed EU Copyright Directive faces one final vote in the European Parliament soon...