Travel

Friday

Brian Swift

Why the plan for Heathrow Hub is bananas

Heathrow wants to expand. Originally this was to be done by building a third or even fourth runway north of, and parallel to, the existing runways. The fourth runway would be fitted in by reducing slightly the horizontal separation between runways. The separation at Heathrow is generous, or very generous compared to Los Angeles or San Francisco. Now, apparently, Heathrow wants to expand by building one or two runways facing southwest. When LHR was built it had not only the two remaining west facing runways, but also two facing south west (and indeed also two facing north west). These other runways have been consumed by taxiways and terminals, but one southwest

Monday

William Lowe

Heathrow is the answer – and we know how to make it work

I realised I wanted to pilot Concorde the day I turned 25. I learnt to fly as a member of the Air Squadron at Birmingham University, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to make a career of flying. But when I turned on the television on my 25th birthday and saw the first flight of the British Concorde, I thought ‘that’s what I’ll do’. I became Concorde’s longest serving pilot: 27 years. Concorde has long since been retired, and I stepped down as Director of Flight Operations for British Airways a number of years ago. But the one problem that irked me throughout my flying career remains unresolved: what do

Thursday

Anthony Sattin

The Last Train to Zona Verde, by Paul Theroux - review

Paul Theroux has produced some of the best travel books of the past 50 years, and some of the lamest. His latest work shrieks swansong, from its title — The Last Train — to the acknowledgement that he has reached ‘the end of this sort of travel, marinated in politics and urban wreckage’, to the closing words with which he ‘felt beckoned home’. So, if this is the last of Theroux as epic traveller, has he gone out with a bang, or another whimper? In his 2002 book, Dark Star Safari (not his best), Theroux travelled along the eastern side of the African continent from Cairo to Cape Town. This

Thursday

Robert Twigger

What it's like to escape from Colditz

Colditz: Here I am, stuck in the same ventilation shaft that Pat Reid used to escape through just over 70 years ago. It’s a tiny letterbox-shaped hole, about three feet in length, one of the few natural holes through the castle’s monstrously thick outer walls. Captain Pat Reid and his fellow escapers had to strip off naked in order to shimmy through. It’s a cold day and even unclothed I’m far too well-fed to get through the gap, though Steffi, our well-informed guide, tells us ‘two English boys managed it last year, though you have to go through on your back, otherwise your knees get stuck’. My own Colditz mania was

Thursday

Sophia Martelli

Travel: Dublin, comeback city

The boom and bust have left their mark on Dublin. Cruising through the outskirts past the (industrial) estate of Sandyford — flimsy-looking buildings, each as nastily designed as the last but in wildly different styles — I double-take at a gigantic half-built multi-storey car park. There are ‘To Let’ signs everywhere and it’s all a bit reminiscent of a Joni Mitchell song. But the shiny new Luas tram which links this monument to property development greed to the centre of the city is quiet, efficient and fast — and Dublin is, thank heavens, still the ‘fair city’ of the song, the Liffey meandering unruffled and majestic through the middle of

Melanie McDonagh

Travel: Ireland’s wild west

The problem with writing about the Burren is that there’s no consensus about where it is. Different people have different ideas. On my first trip there, I plaintively asked a girl in a café in Kilfenora, whose heyday was probably the 11th century (Kilfenora, that is, not the café) where the Burren was and she jerked her thumb towards the door. ‘Out there,’ she said. And so I made my way down the road to the nearest field to contemplate the celebrated flora. With beginner’s luck, I saw, for the first and last time, a curious little red frog. A few minutes later I came across the wild orchids for

Thursday

Anthony Sattin

'O My America!', by Sara Wheeler - review

You might not expect Sara Wheeler, the intrepid literary traveller, to be anxious about passing the half-century point. Surely a person who can survive the mental and physical rigours of Antarctica, as she brilliantly documented in Terra Incognita, can cope with ageing and menopause? Wheeler herself was not so certain. In her restless, creative way, she met the advent of what she calls ‘the Frumpy Years’ by taking to the road, following the trails of six indomitable Victorian women across the United States. The combination of that nation of eternal makeover and of Wheeler’s travelling companions makes O My America! a curious and teasing book. Her work to date has

Friday

Hugh Thomson

In England’s green and pleasant land

The idea came to me after I had just got back from South America after a long trip to Peru.  Perhaps because I was badly jetlagged, everything about England looked strange, different — and certainly worthy of as much exploration as I would give to a foreign country. The few other times I’ve ever had really bad jet lag — the sort where you walk in a trance, as if under water and sedation — have been when I’ve travelled abroad, not travelled home.  The only cure then has been total immersion in the new culture. So I felt like plunging into England — and to do so by the

Tuesday

Clarissa Tan

The Visit - Shiva Naipaul Prize, 2007

The 2007 Spectator/ Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize was won by Clarissa Tan. The prize, named after the late Trinidadian author, is for ‘the most acute and profound observation of a culture evidently alien to the writer’. The judges that year included William Boyd, Matthew d’Ancona (then editor of The Spectator) and Mark Amory (literary editor of The Spectator). Clarissa is now a staff writer at The Spectator. To find out more about the Shiva Naipaul competition, and how you can enter, click here.   The Visit Clarissa Tan I wish to write about a place of which I know everything yet nothing, where everything is familiar yet strange, a place where I feel

Mary Wakefield

Entertaining Dr Murdock - Shiva Naipaul Prize, 2000

The Spectator/ Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for the year 2000 was won by Mary Wakefield. The judges included Antony Beevor; Patrick Marhnam; Boris Johnson, then editor of the magazine; and Mark Amory, who was and still is the Spectator’s literary editor. Mary is now Deputy Editor of the Spectator. The Shiva Naipaul prize is awarded for travel writing, and other past winners include Hilary Mantel, Miranda France and John Gimlette. To learn more about the prize and how you can enter, click here. Entertaining Dr Murdock Mary Wakefield There’s a narrow road heading east out of Denton, Texas, across the hot dust and prickly yellow grass. It runs straight as a red-neck’s gun barrel,

George Chamier

Last rites | 28 August 2012

‘Village’, to most middle-Englanders, conjures up a cosy, living community. Perhaps the post office is threatened with closure or the bus timetable is to be cut, but the hanging baskets continue to be tended, the village green still hosts games of cricket, there are moneyed retirees or commuters eager to buy the houses. It is not like that, of course, in much of Britain’s Celtic fringe, and even less so in Europe’s more remote peasant communities. Political, social and economic change has drained many villages of their people, and only the old remain. Tom Pow visits one in Spain where the youngest inhabitant is seventy, and the sad conclusion of

Thursday

Matthew Teller

Why a rough guide is better than none

Like the most desperate of priests, and the most marginal of activists, Nick Cohen wants us all to be like him. He’s an angry journalist who can’t imagine why everyone doesn’t think like an angry journalist. In What lonely planet are they on? Cohen attempts a take-down of travel guide publisher Lonely Planet, implying that they’re all liberal lefties, happy to whitewash the crimes of dictators in order to sell more books. To do so he cites the work of Thomas Kohnstamm, a Lonely Planet author who admits making stuff up (though, here and elsewhere, Kohnstamm maintains that the job he was commissioned for was a desk-edit, rather than a

Wednesday

Miranda France

Bad times in Buenos Aires - Shiva Naipaul Prize, 1996

Miranda France won the Spectator/ Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize in 1996. Her winning essay (below) formed the heart of her first, eponymous book. Two years later she wrote her second book, ‘Don Quixote’s Delusions’, which the Sunday Times described as ‘stimulating to the point of intoxication.’ To learn more about the Shiva Naipaul prize for travel writing, and how you can enter, click here.   Bad times in Buenos Aires  ARGENTINES have a word for the way they feel: bronca. An Italo-Spanish fusion, like most Argentines themselves, the word implies a fury so dangerously contained as to end in ulcers. People feel bronca when they wait for an hour to be served at a

Thursday

Clarissa Tan

Be 'unafraid', Hilary Mantel tells Shiva Naipaul Prize contenders

Hilary Mantel has just been long-listed for the Booker Prize for Bring Up the Bodies, her brilliant follow-up to Wolf Hall, which netted the coveted Booker itself in 2009. We at The Spectator can’t trumpet this enough – you see, Hilary was the first-ever winner of our Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize in 1987. The prize, awarded for ‘the most acute and profound observation of a culture alien to the writer’, is named after the author of Fireflies and North of South, the late younger brother of VS Naipaul. In 2007, we thought we’d be giving our last-ever Shiva Naipaul award, but we have decided to revive the annual prize, which this year will be judged by

Friday

Rachel Halliburton

LA gangs, Arab feminists, and learning Classics

‘There are more people teaching Ancient Greek in China than there are in Britain,’ declares Professor Edith Hall from the distinctively academic chaos of her study at King’s College, London. ‘Now you can either wring your hands about this, or do what I intend to, and go and talk to them! At the Zhejiang University [one of China’s C9 universities, their Ivy league] they’re translating Greek philosophy — Plato and Aristotle. They’re also looking at ancient Athens with a view to instituting a big discussion about democracy. This is the next frontier for Western classics.’   Professor Hall is in a particularly strong position to appreciate the irony that while

Thursday

Daisy Dunn

A knight’s tale

I can’t help thinking that the literary editor is having a little chuckle to himself, in his own private way, as he hands me Walking Home: Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way to review. What he knows is that, for my sins, I have never been anywhere near the Pennine Way, the long stretch that runs from Edale, Derbyshire, to Kirk Yetholm on the Scottish border. And yet here it is in my hand, a travel diary of sorts, dedicated to Simon Armitage’s 2010 sweaty ramble ‘backwards’ from the Scottish end to his hometown, Marsden, situated near its beginning. Thankfully, neither familiarity with the moors nor a particular

Tuesday

Daisy Dunn

An afternoon in Madrid

The most obvious — but far from the only — author to read when in Madrid must be Ernest Hemingway. For a man so fond of the laconic line, his rambling, enduring presence in the city is at once ironic and misplaced. It’s not only the guidebooks which are directing me to his erstwhile favourite watering-hole in the north, south, east or west of the city; it’s as if he left a tangible reminder of his presence — an extra shiny spot or cigarette burn burnished into the leather of an armchair — in each of the now rather shabby-chic establishments.   One such haunt is the Gran Café de

Saturday

Johnnie Kerr

Travel special - Scottish borders: On the edge

It’s odd, but most of the English faces we see in our wee corner of the Scottish Borders are merely ‘stopping’ for a night or two on their way north. What is the point, they wonder, in driving all this way only to settle a hair’s breadth past that gaudy ‘Welcome to Scotland’ sign? If they must visit Scotland, they think, they might as well do the thing properly. The Borders aren’t really Scotland, after all — just that last tedious leg of the A68 on the way into Edinburgh. They are, of course, gravely mistaken. You will find as strong a sense of Scotland here as in the grimmest

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Gatwick competes in the disgrace Olympics

Heathrow Airport’s passport control already offers a notorious welcome to Britain, but Gatwick is now offering hot competition. Gatwick Express, the rail artery connecting the airport to London, installed new ticket gates at the airport a few months ago ending the old system where you could buy a ticket on the train. But they failed to install enough ticket machines to cope with the summer demand, leading to absolute bedlam which I’ve just witnessed. The staff are mortified, and can only apologise to the Greeks and Spanish visitors who arrive here appalled at the kind of scenes that would disgrace any country – far less the fourth richest in the

Saturday

Justin Cartwright

Road to ruins

This is a delightful book, nostalgic, slyly witty, perceptive and at times flirting — deliberately — with old fogeyism. Tom Fort, a BBC radio journalist, starts from the assumption that ‘many of us have a road that reaches back into our past’. For him, this is the 92 miles of the A303 — as he subtitles his book, the ‘Highway to the Sun’. At first glance I imagined there might a be a sort of literary suicide in store; but I quickly discovered that Fort had much more in mind than an anorak’s guide to a road. By looking closely at the history of the A303, the surrounding villages and