Colin Thubron

The Artificiality of Nations

Two recent books advance compassionate cases against the cruelty of closed borders.

Hard Solaces

Jonathan Raban’s memoir recounts his experience in a rehabilitation ward after a stroke, interleaved with his father’s experience as a young artillery officer during World War II and his own childhood memories.

Remainders

Two recent books explore the complex pleasure we take in ruins and the rediscovery of long-forgotten objects.

Pleasure Domes and Postal Routes

Marie Favereau’s new book about the Golden Horde, the great Mongol power of the Eurasian steppe, explores its economy, ideology, and material culture, along with its wider influence.

The Companionship of Nature

Running like a troubled thread through Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights is the tension between a profound human need for the solace of animals and the acknowledgment, even the insistence, that they are creatures apart.

Escape from Fortress Crete

Patrick Leigh Fermor kidnapped a German general in the mountains of Greece during World War II. Was it worth it?

Cartographers of Stone and Air

On Tim Robinson’s intensely focused survey of a small patch of the Irish landscape and Lyall Watson’s sweeping inquiry into the mysteries and mysticism of wind.

Our Guide to the Underworld

Reveling in Discomfort

A River Runs Through It

Lost in Arabia

An account of the 1761-1767 Danish expedition to Arabia was first published in English in 1964 as Felix Arabia. It was only then that the full drama and strangeness of the expedition was widely revealed.

Where Globalization Began?

Remembering Bob Silvers

On the late editor of The New York Review

A Different Vision of History

Pamuk: Under the Spell of Istanbul

Mesmerized by Germany

When the Ruins Were New

In February 1862 the eldest son of Queen Victoria, the Prince of Wales and future King Edward VII, embarked on a four-and-a-half month journey through the Middle East. Among the party was the photographer Francis Bedford, who in over 190 prints produced one of the earliest photographic records of the region.

Apocalypse City

Simon Sebag Montefiore’s ‘Jerusalem: The Biography’

Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915–2011)

The Last Shaman