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 came out of the Willem-Alexander Pavilion with a vague piece of information and no map sense whatsoever. Somebody had mentioned an orchid exhibition. I had no idea where it was, so …
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 …
Regent’s Park in London covers 410 acres of what was once a royal hunting ground. Henry VIII took the land at the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s and kept it …
Before I had ever been anywhere, I knew Venice from paintings. Gold light on green water, gondolas tipped like commas across a canal, a city that looked too lovely to be a …
Queen Victoria was born at Kensington Palace on 24 May 1819 and lived there, under a strict and closely watched upbringing, until the June morning in 1837 when she was woken to …
What I have always respected about Rembrandt is that he told the truth. Where so many painters flattered, smoothed and arranged, he set down what was in front of him, including his …
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 …
