Most of my long trips begin with a red-eye out of Montreal, and a fair number of those red-eyes put me down at Schiphol with hours to spend before the next leg. …
Hello, fellow adventurers! Some places feel important the moment you arrive. Not because they overwhelm you, but because they carry weight – quietly, steadily, and with purpose. Parliament Hill in Ottawa is …
I went to Tate Modern in London to see a spider, and the spider was gone. That is the short version. The longer one is that Louise Bourgeois’s Maman is one of …
I have a habit when I travel. Whatever European city I am in, I look for the Roman layer underneath it. Sometimes it is obvious. More often it is a fragment of …
I have been a Gordon Ramsay fan for years, and I know the reputation: loud, sweary, hard on people. That is only half of him, and it is not the half I …
I have stood at the edge of Monet‘s pond in Giverny, watched the water lilies wrap around me in the Orangerie in Paris, and then, not expecting it at all, found the …
London does Christmas at street level. The lights are strung the length of whole shopping streets, hung under Victorian market roofs and packed along the river, rather than gathered around a single …
Darkest Hour came out in 2017, with Gary Oldman under layers of prosthetic makeup as Winston Churchill in the last weeks of May 1940. Joe Wright directed, and Oldman won the Academy …
A small public service before we start: this is Manet, with an ‘a’, Édouard Manet, and not Claude Monet, with an ‘o’. The two are forever muddled, and I will come back …
