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 was walking back from Covent Garden on a wet December evening, the kind where the Strand’s Christmas lights smear across the pavement and every black cab throws up a little wake …
The first royal I was ever drawn to was not British at all. She was Austrian. On my early trips to Vienna I kept circling back to Empress Elisabeth, the one everyone …
For a long time I thought the Renaissance was an Italian story, and mostly a Florentine one. Botticelli, Michelangelo, the great dome over Florence Cathedral. It was only once I began visiting …
I had heard the name for years. Whenever something big was happening in London, a royal wedding, a jubilee, a state funeral, the cameras always seemed to be pointing down the same …
Walk into the medieval and early Renaissance rooms at the National Gallery in London and the walls turn to gold. Almost every panel is religious: a Virgin and Child, a saint, a …
I came to St James’s Park the way most people do, straight from Buckingham Palace, with an hour to spare and no real plan. I have done it a few times now, …
