Travel is not only palaces and pastries. Part of why I travel is to understand places, and understanding a place means meeting its history, including the parts that are hard to look …

Three days in London is a highlights reel. Five days is a holiday. I have already written up the tight three-day version for a first visit, the one that races through the …

On my first visit to Tate Modern in London, I came for a giant spider and stayed for the paintings, which I did not see coming. One set of rooms held me …

London is a city that could fill a lifetime and still hold more. And yet some of my favourite days there were the ones I spent leaving it. There is a particular …

I went to Tate Modern for one thing, and it was not a painting. It was a spider. Louise Bourgeois’s giant Maman is one of my favourite sculptures anywhere, and Tate owns …

Three days is not enough for London. I want to say that at the top, because every itinerary that promises otherwise is lying to somebody. What three days is enough for 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 been a Paddington fan for as long as I can remember: the books first, then the films, and somewhere along the way a small bear in a red hat and …

I have lost count of how many times I have been to London. Across different years and every season, I keep coming back to the same handful of places, and I keep …

For two visits running, I walked straight past these helmets on my way to see the Lewis Chessmen. I would slow down for a minute, take a photo through the glass, and …

Here is the thing nobody puts in the caption. Almost nobody really sees the Rosetta Stone. I have stood in front of it twice at the British Museum in London, six years …

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. …