Tag: travel

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Tough Women: Kendal Mountain Festival

Amy And delights in an event and book which readdresses the toxic male image problem of travel, exploration and adventure writing

PUBLISHED ON: 25/11/20

CATEGORY: Blog, Travel

The Kendal Mountain Festival is on now and on demand until 31 December 2020. Tickets from £5.50, with some free events.  On Friday 20 November at the …

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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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Barry Island: The Making of a Seaside Playground c1790–1965

How Penarth beat Biarritz Barry. Chris Moss traces the posh eighteenth-century roots of the working-class resort

PUBLISHED ON: 03/11/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Some British seaside resorts double as lazy jokes. Skegness, Blackpool and Clacton-on-Sea are names that trip off the tongue when there’s chatter abou …

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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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Return Journey

Poem by Hilary Watson

PUBLISHED ON: 29/09/20

CATEGORY: Poetry

 ‘Hullo?’ the call connects as a child screams through the funnel of the carriage. ‘It’s me,’ I say. a man pulls the armrest down ‘I got your message. …

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The Price of the Picturesque

The package tour was invented in Wales. In the week the ‘travel ban’ is likely to be lifted, Chris Moss calls for a reinvention of Welsh tourism after coronavirus

PUBLISHED ON: 30/06/20

CATEGORY: Opinion

The Emptying of Covid-19. It sounds like the title of a Thomas Pynchon novel. But for three long months, the skies cleared, the beaches were clean and …

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Thinking Again

When a travel writer has been everwhere, writes Chris Moss, there is something radically enlightening – as well as saleable – in writing about home and stasis. Jan Morris demonstrates the arts of seeming intimate without ever being truly confessional, stoicism and the ability to find a quiet poetry in social isolation

PUBLISHED ON: 01/04/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

A national treasure, Jan Morris can do no wrong. As she approaches her mid nineties, each new book is offered as the last. With more than sixty alread …

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Pravda Ha Ha

Jemma L King is intrigued by this exploration, comic in parts, in which a return to Russia 30 years on from the fall of the Berlin Wall, reveals the rise of the Right and how the little guy was shafted in the interim, and the stupid became unjustifiably wealthy

PUBLISHED ON: 02/03/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Jemma L King is intrigued by this exploration, comic in parts, in which a return to Russia 30 years on from the fall of the Berlin Wall, reveals the r …

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An Interview With Helen Mort

Suzannah V Evans talks to the poet Helen Mort about female mountaineers, storytelling through place, and going to Switzerland clad in a crinoline

PUBLISHED ON: 11/02/20

CATEGORY: Interview

The poet Helen Mort was born in Sheffield. Her first collection Division Street (Chatto & Windus, 2013) won the Fenton Aldeburgh Prize. Her second …

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