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 …
For most of my life, the Queen was in my wallet. I grew up in Canada, where Elizabeth II was head of state, and her face looked out from the twenty-dollar bill …
I love The Young Victoria. The 2009 film, with Emily Blunt as Victoria and Rupert Friend as Albert, tells the story of a teenage queen finding her feet and falling in love, …
You walk into the V&A and the first thing above you is a storm of blue and green glass. The great Chihuly chandelier hangs in the domed entrance hall, eleven metres of …
We came out of dinner at Sea Containers Restaurant, just along the river, into the cold and walked straight into Christmas. The South Bank does this every winter. The riverside fills with …
I wanted to love dinner at Sea Containers. The room is good-looking, the South Bank outside is all river and lamplight, and our table looked across the Thames to the dome of …
Most of us know Elizabeth I only as the powerful queen she became. The Virgin Queen. Gloriana. The pale, jewelled figure in the Phoenix portrait, a woman who ran England on her …
