Personal Landscapes
Episodes
Nicholas Crane on the hidden history of Britain's paths
20 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Landscapes contain hidden histories that shaped the development of the world we live in. How we moved through those landscapes also tells us something...
Robert Kaplan on a world in permanent crisis
20 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The foreign affairs and travel writer Robert Kaplan sees today’s world as a larger version of Germany’s Weimar Republic, “connected enough for o...
Isabella Tree on Nepal’s living goddess
06 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In a small medieval palace on Kathmandu’s Durbar Square, a young girl chosen from a caste of Buddhist goldsmiths watches over this broad valley and ...
Easter Island with archaeologist Mike Pitts
09 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Every book I read about Easter Island said roughly the same thing: a small, isolated group of people living on the world’s most remote inhabited isl...
Moonlighting: reliving the 80’s with Scott Ryan
25 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Moonlighting posed as a detective show, but it was actually an old-fashioned 1940s screwball-comedy. Mysteries were just a framework for the romantic ...
Constantine Cavafy with biographer Gregory Jusdanis
11 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
I first encountered Constantine Cavafy in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, where ‘the old poet’ represented the ghostly voice of the city....
Peter Matthiessen with biographer Lance Richardson
28 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Peter Matthiessen is a towering figure of twentieth-century American letters, and the only writer to win the National Book Award in both fiction and n...
Alex Hutchinson on what drives us to explore
14 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This drive to discover is deeply human, and as today’s guest will tell you, it might even be encoded in our genes.Alex Hutchinson is the author of T...
Foster Hirsch on film noir and 1950s Hollywood
30 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Film noir is is my favourite silver screen genre. I’ve seen every A-list film noir multiple times, and most of the B-movies, too. I’ve wanted to d...
Peter Carpenter: Walking in the Footsteps of David Bowie
16 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When his doctor told him to walk or die, Peter Carpenter transformed a health crisis into a feat of urban archaeology.In wandering the streets where D...
Justin Marozzi: Slavery in the Islamic World
02 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Atlantic slave trade began in the 15th century and was abolished in the United States in 1865, but slavery was practiced in the Muslim world for m...
Europe By Rail with Nicky Gardner
15 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Europe By Rail is a beautifully-published guidebook that covers 50 key rail routes across Europe, blending practical advice with narrative storytellin...
Louis D. Hall on riding to the end of the land
24 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In his mid-twenties, city-bound and restless, Louis D. Hall decided to make an uncharted journey on horseback.He found his horse, Sasha, in Italy’s ...
Andrew McCarthy on walking the Camino and the Brat Pack
10 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If you grew up in the 80s like I did, you know Andrew McCarthy from Pretty in Pink and St. Elmo’s Fire.But Andrew is more than an actor and director...
Germany’s Broken Republic
27 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Germany’s post-war recovery was an economic miracle.The country was on the rise in a good way. And then it all started going wrong.The signs of trou...
Kyle Chayka on how the internet flattened culture
13 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Digital platforms promised us personalization but their algorithms homogenized culture to a bland lowest common denominator instead.They don’t just ...
Sophy Roberts on A Training School for Elephants
29 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 1879 a forgotten Irish adventurer called Frederick Carter marched four tamed Asian elephants from the coast of East Africa to the edge of the Congo...
Joseph Koudelka with biographer Melissa Harris
15 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Josef Koudelka was born in Czechoslovakia the year Germany annexed the Sudetenland. His childhood was overshadowed by Nazi occupation. He lived under ...
Clair Wills on Ireland’s missing persons
01 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Clair Wills was in her twenties when she learned she had a cousin she'd never met.It wasn’t as though their families drifted apart. She’d never be...
Deborah Lawrenson on her mother the spy
18 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What would you do if someone you knew your entire life — your mother — suddenly revealed that she’d been a spy? Deborah Lawrenson turned her sto...
Michael Asher on crossing the Sahara by camel
04 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 1986, Michael Asher and his wife Mariantonietta Peru set out to cross the Sahara from west to east, by camel and on foot. Their 4,500 mile (7,200 k...
Charles Nicholl on Rimbaud’s lost Africa years
18 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Arthur Rimbaud turned French poetry on its head in his late teens. His work influenced everyone from the modernists and the Beats to Bob Dylan and Jim...
Paul Theroux on life’s vanishing points
04 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The stories in The Vanishing Point, Paul Theroux's new collection, span the globe from Hawaii and the South Seas to Africa and New England. They have...
Pamela Petro on the Welsh presence of absence
21 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Pamela Petro is an American writer obsessed with a country she visited by chance. She first went to Wales as a graduate student in her early twenties....
Katja Hoyer on daily life in East Germany
07 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Eighties movies portrayed East Germany as a vast open-air prison populated by monotonous grey blurs without individualit...
Julian Evans on Odesa and Ukraine
24 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Julian Evans first visited the city of Odesa, Ukraine on a boat journey down the Dnipro River in 1994. He fell in love ...
Jeffrey Meyers on charting parallel lives
10 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.A great biography reveals the raw humanity behind lives of rare genius. In his latest book, Parallel Lives: From Freud a...
Cam Honan on the hiking life
26 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Cam Honan has hiked across 56 countries on six continents, logging over 96,500 km in three decades. Backpacker Magazine...
Richard Grant: A race to the bottom of crazy
12 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Richard Grant has lived in Arizona for more than twenty years, and his latest book — A Race to the Bottom of Crazy —...
Lesley Downer on poetry in Japan’s deep north
29 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Lesley Downer's fascination with Japan's most famous poet took her from Tokyo's drab industrial concrete into what was t...
Thomas Swick: Life in Cold War Poland
15 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Thomas Swick moved to Warsaw at the height of the Cold War. His newest book Falling Into Place is a memoir of his life ...
Ian Fleming with biographer Nicholas Shakespeare
07 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Ian Fleming was overshadowed by the fictional character he created in the final decade of his life, but his own story is...
Kapka Kassabova: Europe’s last nomadic pastoralists
02 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Kapka Kassabova writes about marginal places and the interdependence of humans and animals in traditional societies. In...
Eric Cline: Why civilization ended in 1177 B.C.
11 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.The Late Bronze Age Mediterranean was a surprisingly interconnected place. Trade flourished, interrupted by the odd emb...
Paul Theroux on Orwell and Burma Sahib
27 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Long before he wrote 1984 — and long before he was even George Orwell — Eric Blair was a nineteen year old policeman...
Jonathan Raban: one of our greatest writers on place
14 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Jonathan Raban wrote about human landscapes rather than uninhabited ones, and the borderlands between what a place profe...
James Salter: with biographer Jeffrey Meyers
30 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.James Salter is the best American writer you’ve probably never read. He was a fighter pilot in the Korean War, and a s...
Andrew Finkel: Sherlock Holmes and the Ottoman Empire
16 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Sherlock Holmes fans span the range from casual to obsessive. They included Abdulhamid II, the last ruler of the Ottoman...
The Wakhan Corridor with Bill Colegrave
02 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.I first got interested in the Wakhan Corridor when I read The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk. This weird bit of political g...
Justin Marozzi: Tamerlane and Samarkand
19 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.I’d always thought of Tamerlane as a sort of cut-rate Genghis Khan. It was only when researching a trip to Uzbekistan ...
Alex Kerr: Finding hidden Japan
04 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.I’ve often thought of it as one of the world’s most misunderstood countries. Not because it’s uniquely inscrutabl...
Barnaby Rogerson: The making of the Middle East
02 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Barnaby Rogerson joins me to talk about the origins of the Sunni-Shia schism, the differences between them, and the curr...
Sarah Anderson: Founding The Travel Bookshop
11 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Sarah Anderson founded the iconic Travel Bookshop in 1979.You might be familiar with it even if you’ve never been to L...
Louisa Waugh: Life on the edge of Mongolia
21 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Louisa Waugh lived in a village in the far west of Mongolia in the late 1990s, and wrote a remarkable book about her exp...
Bruce Chatwin: with editor and friend Susannah Clapp
07 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Bruce Chatwin’s first book — In Patagonia — changed our idea of what travel writing could be.He was a traveler, an...
Laura Trethewey: Mapping our unknown oceans
24 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.This might just be the strangest landscape I’ve featured on the podcast. It’s also the one we know least about.Laura...
Tim Cocks: Life in Africa’s biggest megacity
10 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Lagos is a massive city with massive problems. I've always thought of it as a place to avoid. But I came away with a ver...
Jeremy Bassetti: Pilgrims on Bolivia’s Hill of Skulls
26 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Sacred mountains are revered across a wide array of cultures. They're sites of sacrifice and of ritual, perhaps because ...
The Pyrenees: Matthew Carr on Europe’s savage frontier
12 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.The Pyrenees form one of the great European landscapes, but they're all too often overshadowed by the romance of the Alp...
Simon Winchester: Outposts at the edge of the world
29 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.If you think colonialism ended after the Second World War, then my latest conversation may surprise you. Simon Wincheste...
Tom Parfitt: Walking the High Caucasus
15 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Tom Parfitt walked across the northern flank of the Russian Caucasus, from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea, through rep...
Richard Grant: Travels With American Nomads
04 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Nothing symbolizes freedom in America like the open road. Richard Grant joins me to discuss frontiersmen and plains Ind...
Anthony Sattin: How nomads shaped settled civilization
31 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Why have nomads gotten such a bad rap? And why is their knowledge essential for us today? Anthony Sattin joins me to dis...
The Sahara with Eamonn Gearon
11 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.If you think the world's largest desert is an empty wasteland, then you’re in for a surprise.The Sahara has been home ...
Eastern Europe with Jacob Mikanowski
20 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.The more I’ve travelled in Europe, the more my interest has shifted east, to a region that looks increasingly complex ...
Berlin with Barney White-Spunner
04 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Berlin has been a crucible of culture, an industrial powerhouse, a nest of spies, and now, it’s Europe’s capital of ...
Joseph Roth: The collapse of the civilized world
22 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Joseph Roth's short form journalism captured fleeting moments with universal implications, and the social conflict, cult...
Norman Lewis: The 20th century’s greatest travel writer
07 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Norman Lewis had an instinct for being in exactly the right place to capture traditional ways of life on the brink of mo...
Steve Kilbey: writing, lyrics & songs about place
01 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Steve Kilbey is the singer and lyricist of legendary Australian rock band The Church. He's made dozens of albums, and wr...
Gordon Peake: Insider stories from the world of foreign aid
14 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Gordon Peake’s work as an international development consultant has led him to the world’s forgotten corners, places...
Edith Durham: The traveler who became Albania’s mountain queen
30 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.When I hiked through the Accursed Mountains last June, I met older Albanians who still referred to Edith Durham as their...
David Thompson and the mapping of Canada
07 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.David Thompson travelled some 90,000 kilometres across North America as a fur trader and surveyor, mapping one-fifth of ...
Rebecca Lowe: Cycling through the Middle East’s fractured mosaic
26 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.In 2015, Rebecca Lowe set out on a year long cycling trip from London to Tehran, a journey that revealed a splintered mo...
Martha Gellhorn: with biographer Caroline Moorehead
27 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Martha Gellhorn wanted to be known as a novelist. Instead, she’s remembered as one of the 20th century’s greatest wa...
Guy Kennaway: Life in a Jamaican village
13 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.One People is a comic novel but Cousins Cove is a real village, and the stories Guy Kennaway tells were gathered during ...
Sophie Haydock: Egon Schiele and fin de siècle Vienna
12 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Turn-of-the-century Vienna was a cultural crucible where the air seethed with repressed desire. No artist captured this ...
Carole Angier: The strange world of W.G. Sebald
20 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.W.G. Sebald has been described as “a writer of almost unclassifiable originality”. He wrote about the plight of emig...
David Eimer: Cultural survival in China’s borderlands
29 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.David Eimer is the author of the critically acclaimed The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China. We spoke about...
Dervla Murphy: Reflections on a lifetime of travel
09 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Dervla Murphy has been described as a ‘travel legend’ and ‘the first lady of Irish cycling’. For five decades sh...
Nigel Barley: The Innocent Anthropologist
01 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Nigel Barley wrote one of the funniest travel books I've ever read, and it nearly got him kicked out of his academic dis...
Jeremy Seal: Modern Turkey and the 1960 coup
18 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Jeremy Seal is the author of six books, including A Fez of the Heart. We spoke about the infinite courtesies of Turkish ...
John Gimlette: Madagascar, and ‘walking the dead’
05 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.John Gimlette is the author of five books, including The Gardens of Mars. We spoke about Madagascar, ‘walking the dead...
Sara Wheeler: Russia, Antarctica and how we shape stories
21 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Sara Wheeler is the author of 10 books, including Mud and Stars. We spoke about her travels in Russia, living as writer-...
Jerry Kobalenko: Searching for ghosts on Ellesmere Island
02 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Jerry Kobalenko is one of Canada’s most experienced High Arctic travelers, and the author of The Horizontal Everest ...
Lawrence Millman: the Arctic, technology and saving stories
22 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Lawrence Millman is the author of 18 books, and a master of northern writing. We talked about his book Last Places, eati...
Rory Maclean: Berlin, Bowie and the new Cold War
15 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Rory Maclean is the author of 15 books, including Berlin: Portrait of a City Through the Centuries. We talk about Berlin...
Anthropology-lite with Barnaby Rogerson of Eland books
08 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.Eland has been resurrecting lost travel classics and keeping them in print for more than 35 years. I talk with publisher...
Introducing... Personal Landscapes
06 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Donate to Personal Landscapes.The novelist and island writer Lawrence Durrell believed that everyone has a personal landscape, a landscape that resona...