Tag: international

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Kendal Mountain Festival: Levison Wood

Amy Aed, concluding her adventure series covering Kendal Mountain Festival 2020, is touched by Levison Wood's redemptive encounter with the Marsh Arabs

PUBLISHED ON: 16/12/20

CATEGORY: Adventure, Blog

Levison Wood, one of the most renowned speakers at this year’s Kendal Mountain Festival, shares stories about his incredible adventures and the people …

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From Love Bugs to Period Taboos: Kendal Mountain Festival 2

Amy Aed’s second report from the festival’s varied fare, from veteran married entomoligists on film, UK period poverty and Nepalise menstrual taboos, cooped-up British children and feminist adventurers

PUBLISHED ON: 08/12/20

CATEGORY: Adventure, Blog

The Kendal Mountain Festival showcases some of the most influential explorers, books, and films in the industry. One of the many documentary features …

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The Lives and Extraordinary Adventures of Fifteen Tramp Writers from the Golden Age of Vagabondage

Chris Moss finds that there is something romantic and true about the fourteen men and one woman who lived first, wrote afterwards, and saw in the tramping life a mode of being that was more meaningful than home-focused domestic existence

PUBLISHED ON: 03/11/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Jim Phelan, in collection of Ian Cutler   An extensive list of words for people of no fixed abode in the introduction to this book reminds us how …

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Tiger Girl

Vicky MacKenzie lauds an eighth collection, shimmering with beauty and rage, by the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize-winning poet, a writer who refuses to flinch

PUBLISHED ON: 03/11/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Tiger Girl shimmers with beauty and rage: for every exquisite description of a bird or tiger, there’s an incident of cruelty and horror, unfolded on t …

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The Distance

Set in apartheid South Africa, this allegory of boxing, blood and brotherhood, writes Chris Moss, ripples with meanings and possibilities, is full of grace and tenderness, and demonstrates the light touch of a prose master

PUBLISHED ON: 03/11/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Great boxing matches are ‘allegories authored in blood’, wrote Budd Schulberg. It’s quoted late on in Ivan Vladislavíc’s sixth novel, which, among oth …

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Expeditions Unpacked: What the Great Explorers took into the Unknown

From parrots to monkeys to gigantic boxes of British tea, Amy Aed is fascinated to read what was packed for world-changing adventures

PUBLISHED ON: 30/10/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

The concept behind Ed Stafford’s Expeditions Unpacked: What the Great Explorers took into the Unknown is quite simple: what did the world’s best explo …

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A Beginner’s Guide to Japan

Pico Iyer Amy Aed is intrigued by a very unconventional guidebook (more poetry and internal dialogue than a cheat-sheet for tea shops) to a nation with American surfaces and non-American values

PUBLISHED ON: 29/10/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Pico Iyer is often referred to as one of the best travel writers of the twenty-first century. I had not heard of him, I’m embarrassed to reveal. But t …

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The Rhino Conspiracy

For Amy Aed, this fast-paced bold thriller by the former Labour Minister is one of her picks for the year

PUBLISHED ON: 28/10/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

The Rhino Conspiracy by Peter Hain is a dynamic, fast-paced thriller based in apartheid South Africa. It is emotional and compelling, educational and …

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Kidnapped by my Father: BBC One Wales

Chris Moss hails an honest, crafted and true documentary about an indomitable Cardiff woman, a first-hand account of why immigration happens, and the long stories behind every tearful airport reunion

PUBLISHED ON: 29/09/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Yemen is one of the world’s shadowlands. We only see it on the news, usually under a pall of smoke after mortars or aerial bombings. It’s a source of …

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Plague Dreams of the Future City

The metropolis is being whipped by the long tail of Covid-19. Chris Moss envisions the death of the megacity

PUBLISHED ON: 29/09/20

CATEGORY: Column

Plagues kill citizens. They reconfigure cities. An outbreak of yellow fever in Buenos Aires in 1871 emptied the southern districts of wealthy resident …

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