Writing

Growing Old Disgracefully

Fast nearing 70, I take my tips on surviving the Battle of Life from oldies like my late friend – and peerless war-reporter – Martha Gellhorn, who was savage in reaction to whatever wasted her time or sparked her incandescence. Just like her, I demand real conversation. The clock is ticking, the black crow is sitting there implacably awaiting the end. In face of all this, I want people to come to the table.

Literary Review, diary

Scepticism and superstition are the writer’s guiding stars. This is true of biography especially. Before consecrating years of your life to plotting someone else’s, you can be spookily receptive to even the most trivial signs.

Ian Fleming and John le Carré

One chief of British Intelligence described James Bond as “the best recruiting sergeant in the world.” Another former head of MI6, Richard Dearlove, agrees that the fictional spy’s impact has been huge. “Definitely, it’s had a positive effect. It’s made the Service the most famous Intelligence organisation. There is no linking or reality at all, but that’s not really the point. It’s reputational, it’s myth-building, it’s contributed to the brand. In the most distant part of the world, everyone has heard of MI6. There are big espionage cases, not just walk-ins like Oleg Gordievsky and Vasily Mitrochin, where people have gone to the British when it would be more logical to approach the Americans, and who particularly like the British because of the Bond culture.”

Beer lines

The Compasses lies on the edge of an old straight track in a hollow that shelters it from the cold south-west wind. It’s in the hamlet of Chicksgrove. In the field below, you can still see the outline of an oppidum, where Romano-Britons mined for Chilmark stone, and somewhere up on the ridge is an Ancient British fort that I’ve yet to investigate.

Bruce Chatwin at 80

I still can remember my shock when I heard that Bruce Chatwin had died. It was Wednesday, the eighteenth of January, 1989. I was thirty-one, and, like many who had known or read him, I felt a grief out of all proportion to my expectation.

The Falklands War Revisited

The end of empire came with a successful defence of empire. The Argentine dictatorship never imagined for a moment that the British would react militarily to their seizure of a small group of islands 8,000 miles away, the inhospitable habitat for 1,763 resolutely British flag-wavers who had survived there, against considerable odds, for 149 years.

Anthony Powell: a huff to the music of time

You’re in the index, but not in the book. It’s a ghostly sensation. Yet this has been my experience since 1990 after I commissioned Auberon Waugh to review Anthony Powell’s Miscellaneous Verdicts for the Sunday Telegraph.

Winston’s great secret: how Churchill unexpectedly gained power

In all the attention paid to the 75th anniversary of Dunkirk, there was scarcely a whisper about Winston Churchill’s arrival in No. 10 a fortnight earlier, something we now take for granted, but which was not assured at the time, in fact rather the opposite. Up until three days before this seismic moment in our nation and the world’s history (shortly after 6.30 p.m. on 10 May 1940), there was no realistic expectation that Churchill would step into Neville Chamberlain’s shoes, and compelling reasons why he should not. How Churchill landed in Downing Street at the last moment, with much greater odds against him than is commonly supposed, is every bit as interesting a story as the familiar drama of what followed.

How Fishing Liberates the Mind

Chatwin and Utz

I once heard Bruce Chatwin read aloud from a work in progress. It was from his last novel, Utz. Ill with the disease that shortly would kill him, Chatwin sat at his kitchen table in Oxfordshire, glancing up from time to time to check if I was bored. I wasn’t. The thirty pages he narrated were hysterically funny and quite sad.

Marquez’s secret muse

Even the briefest encounter has the power to transform us, Gabriel García Márquez believed. Living in Paris in the late 1950s, he spotted Ernest Hemingway on the Boule Miche and without thinking yelled out “Emming-way!” The American did not look round, merely raised his hand. Yet the young Colombian writer interpreted his gesture as a blessing, a permission to continue – and eventually to leave us with some of the most enduring novels of the past century.

The Power and the Passion

Aged 20, I spent a week in the ancient ruined city of Petra where one night a grey-bearded man in a turban invited me to dinner in his tent. By day, he sold Coca-cola to blue-rinse American ladies visiting the rock-temples. At night, he resumed his position as chief of the local Nabatean tribes. Over our meal, he said something I’ve treasured. “We have a saying that the more power you possess, the more brain cells you need to be able to cope with it.” In other words, to execute any form of power, you must use every scrap of intelligence and imagination to stop it going to your head.

Author interviews

The whole business of being published is the literary equivalent of the bends. Submerged for four years during the researching and writing, you are propelled, gasping and choking, to the surface. From having existed, as it were, as a solitary fish – living a life of “problems and drudgery” in Halldor Laxness’s phrase about writing – you are suddenly expected to be a performing poodle, articulate and entertaining. The official launch day of a book is traditionally a Thursday. In 1993, to avoid pre-publication nerves, I went to Essaouira during the week of The High Flyer‘s publication. This time I have submitted to an interview with the Telegraph’s books editor Gaby Wood. It’s the first time I have done this in the UK, largely because, having interviewed many writers, I’m aware of the dangers. Not only the peril of the interviewer who has not read the book (this happened to me once, when at the last minute I had to stand in for Caroline Moorehead, slotted by the Times to interview Robert Hughes about The Fatal Shore). There’s also the panicky search for a revealing motif that the book is suspected of having failed to disclose – ie the way the writer dresses in white socks or, unknown to his wife, smokes a cigarette, or speaks, as I made Hughes do, like a woodcock batting out of a thicket. But my deepest reservation is about how the interview a) becomes an extremely pale stand-in for the work, and gives permission to lazy readers to gut and fillet in five minutes what you have spent years working on; and b) an excuse for people automatically to despise the author for their perceived vanity/self-obsession. The late German critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki wrote that he had never met a writer of any worth who was not vain and egotistical. This fear of vanity is the reason Graham Greene gave when asked why he didn’t appear on television: “Because I think it’s not my business. I can think of too many writers who’ve become actors, even stars, on TV to the detriment of their work as writers. A writer depends a great deal on not being recognized.”

Graham Greene

I want to begin by holding up one of my dearest possessions, which has hung for the past 25 years on a wall opposite my desk. It’s a framed telegram – from the days when we had telegrams – that was sent to me in June 1988, in London, and represents the first and last telegram I ever received. It reads in capital letters:

Patrick White: Voss

Patrick White is one of the great novelists of the twentieth century, on a par with his fellow Nobel Laureates William Faulkner, Halldór Laxness and Thomas Mann; and yet, one hundred years after his birth, his name seems temporarily and inexplicably lost in the immense desert spaces to which he introduced a new generation of readers, buried like one of those Roman legions of Herodotus, beneath the glare and flies and red Australian sand.

Christopher Hitchens

He was, in the parlance of his old party, our maximum journalist. As his profession goes through Lord Leveson’s wringer, the death of Christopher Hitchens at the age of 62, is a reminder that journalism can be a noble calling and that, in answering its call, it is not necessary for its finest practitioners to hack into your telephone. Hitchens taught that it was a far, far more rewarding exercise to tune into the old verities of his nineteenth-century mentors: to read the right books, know the right people, ask the right questions. His improbable podium was Vanity Fair, but I wonder if he would not have been at his happiest in the coffeehouse culture of his beloved William Cobbett.

Ian Fairweather – Britain’s Gauguin

One night in April 1952 near Darwin, a strange, shy man, sixty-years old, with a cultured voice and intense pale blue eyes, climbed aboard a raft that he had constructed from aircraft drop tanks, and shoved off into the Timor Sea. He carried a sack of dried bread to last ten days and a thirty-shilling compass. Within minutes the waves slapped up between the planks.

My Favourite Cricketer

It is hard to be an English cricket fan in Tasmania. “We’re going to murder you next year,” was one of the milder sledgings I received in the corner store when I commiserated over Australia’s Ashes defeat. Still, as I struggle to teach my sons cricket on Nine Mile Beach, I am left nurturing a fantasy that Max – aged 8, b. Wiltshire – will one day open the bowling for England against Benedict – aged 5, b. Hobart (in the same hospital as Tasmania’s most famous son, but unremarkable slip catcher: Errol Flynn).

Bruce Chatwin: The Songlines

One autumn evening in 1983, Bruce Chatwin, then aged 43, joined Jorge Luis Borges and Mario Vargas Llosa for a televised discussion in London about South American literature. This parable by Borges kicked off their conversation:

Reading to Borges

One of my most rewarding moments as a young journalist on the Times was to publish, for the first time in English, the last story written by Jorge Luis Borges. The story – “Shakespeare’s memory”– concerns a German scholar who, in a London pub over a mug of warm beer, accepts the gift, not of Shakespeare’s fame but of his personal memory.

W Somerset Maugham: Collected Stories

Towards the end of his life, the most widely read English writer since Dickens, and the highest paid in history, was observed by an old woman on Vevey railway station trying to play hide-and-seek with his male secretary. “Yoo-hoo”, he called from behind a pillar. When the secretary began to reprimand him, the woman moved to intercede: “You should be gentle with that nice old man. He thinks he’s Somerset Maugham.”

Evelyn Waugh: Collected Travel Writing

As soon as I set out on my own, things began to go slightly against me, Ninety-Two Days

W Somerset Maugham: Cakes and Ale

“I have never felt entirely myself,” wrote Maugham, “till I had put at least the Channel between my native country and me.” Cakes and Ale; or The Skeleton in the Cupboard was the first book that he completed at the Villa Mauresque on Cap Ferrat where he had gone to live in June 1927. Maugham believed that “it is the impressions of a man’s first twenty years which form him”, and at the age of 53 – and extracted from his turbulent marriage to Syrie Wellcome – he had chosen to look back at his boyhood on the Kentish coast and at his early adulthood as a medical student in London. Distant in time and space from its material, the composition of the novel, which was to become his favourite book, was unexpectedly pleasurable and easy. He finished the manuscript in July 1929, four months after his divorce, and it was published on September 29, 1930, causing an immediate furore.

Bruce Chatwin: In Patagonia

In December 1974, the 34 year-old Bruce Chatwin departed Buenos Aires on the night bus south, beginning a journey that would transform a truant journalist to one of the most stylish and original travel-writers of the late twentieth-century. That same year, almost to the day, I left school to work as a cowhand in the Buenos Aires province. To the south, the plains spread on and on into Patagonia.

Martha Gellhorn Remembered

I had known Martha Gellhorn ten years when she decided to investigate the plight of street children in Brazil. I put her in touch with my sister who worked with children from the Pelourinho in Salvador. On the eve of her flight, Martha sent me a fax:

Gabriel García Márquez: Love in the Time of Cholera

One seventh of July at six in the afternoon, a woman of seventy-two and man of seventy-eight ascend a gangplank to begin one of the greatest adventures in modern fiction. The man is Florentino Ariza, President of the Caribbean Riverboat Company. The woman is his childhood sweetheart, the recently widowed Fermina Daza. She has ear-ache. He is bald and lame. Their journey upriver holds out a shimmering promise: the consummation of an amor interruptus spanning half a century.

William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury

I remember Oxford, Mississippi, as a small, prim town of white-painted metal bedsteads and on the lawns the brass of fallen leaves. There was a fine bookshop in the square and a university. Otherwise, the place was as remote as could be from Oxford, Oxfordshire, where I had been at boarding school. The town had the air of a stage-set hauled out into the flat and viewless swampland by a people with a feverish appetite for theatrics.

Charles Macomb Flandrau: Viva Mexico!

THE echoed sob of history. Coming to the final paragraph of Viva Mexico! one reader – a commuter from Pittsburgh – was stung to his own tears. “It was just so good that I had to have a good cry about it.” He was crying for pleasure, but the life of the author can also provoke a lachrymose response.

W H Hudson: Far Away and Long Ago

‘THERE was no one I thought more highly of as a man, or respected as a genius,’ Cunninghame Graham wrote of W. H. Hudson shortly after his death in 1922. ‘That he was a genius, 1 think all his real admirers know. Some day the world will become aware of it.’ Conrad thought he wrote as the grass grew. Madox Ford considered him the greatest prose writer of the day, and Galsworthy wished that every man, woman and child in England were made to read him. Yet it is sixty years since Hudson died, in a gloomy boarding-house in Bayswater, and the grass has grown over his name. If he is remembered at all, it is for several rather quaint novels and some sawdusty books on birds.

An immense conundrum

In October 2010, when Gabriel García Márquez, by then suffering from dementia, was told that his former friend and rival had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he enquired: ‘Who is Mario Vargas Llosa?’ This tottering, always compulsive biography of the writer who died last year and which has taken 15 years to write (‘I completely miscalculated its complications’) is Gerald Martin’s valiant answer. ‘Is there a life quite like this one anywhere in the western world in the second half of the 20th century?’ In Martin’s breathless judgment ‘this literary adventurer, politician, diplomat and warrior all rolled into one’ was a single-minded workhorse whose sheer intensity, quality and variety of life was ‘almost literally incredible’.

At the beginning of the second world war, Winston Churchill seemed a most unlikely hero

Removed from banknotes, his statue sprayed with graffiti, blamed for Gaza, the Bengal famine, the deaths of millions, Churchill no longer sits comfortably aloft his ‘pinnacle of deathless glory’, as he wrote of Alfred the Great. In the parlance of the late Martin Amis, it’s as if our national hero’s trusted barber at Truefitt & Hill has given him a brutal rug-redo. A further clipping to his reputation is Simon Matthews’s study of his ‘poor record’ at the Admiralty between September 1939 and May 1940 – i.e. just before he becomes ‘Peak Churchill’.

Charles Darwin’s contribution to Patagonia’s grim history

It was a journey Bruce Chatwin hankered to make: to Southampton and the grave of General Juan Manuel de Rosas, the exiled Argentine dictator described in the Southampton Times after his funeral in 1877 as ‘one of the most cruel, remorseless and sanguinary tyrants who ever existed on Earth’. Chatwin died before I could accompany him to the Hill Lane Cemetery, but four years later I stood with his widow in front of Rosas’s ornamented tomb in Buenos Aires as we prepared to meander south on a 2,000-mile car journey in his footsteps.

A war of words: circulating forbidden literature behind the Iron Curtain

If James Bond, now in American hands, re-emerges refreshed as an agent of the CIA, then it will be a homecoming of sorts, given that his creator played a role in drawing up the blueprint for America’s first foreign intelligence service. In May 1941, Commander Ian Fleming sat down in Washington with Colonel William (‘Wild Bill’) Donovan to sketch out an agency modelled on British naval intelligence. Under Donovan’s stewardship, this became the Office of Strategic Services and, in 1947, the CIA.

The great awakening: Henry Shukman becomes a child of the universe

For eight years I rented a small house in Oxford overlooking the canal. The landlord, a poet and novelist younger than myself, had moved with his family to New Mexico. At his desk I managed to write three books, beneath shelves containing editions of his work. I can’t explain why it took me so long to reach up and open those books, but when I finally did, it was extraordinary to discover how similar were our trajectories: same prep school and university; two young sons; novels set in North Africa and Peru; a gap year working on an Argentine estancia.

The making of a monster: Paul Kagame’s bloodstained past

In June, Commonwealth heads of government will meet in the Rwandan capital Kigali, a city advertised by their Tutsi host, the 63-year-old Paul Kagame, as ‘the Davos of Africa’. Kagame, Rwanda’s de facto leader since 1994 — and boasting more honorary degrees than Barack Obama, although he never finished high school — has become the ‘donor darling’ of the international community. He is why the World Bank has donated in excess of $4 billion, and why, until recently, the biggest bilateral donor has been the UK. ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ says the Tory MP Andrew Mitchell, ‘he is a hero for ending the violence.’

Russian Roulette: The Life of Graham Greene

Joseph Conrad’s death made Graham Greene feel, at 19, sitting on a beach in Yorkshire, “as if there was a kind of ‘blank’ in the whole of contemporary literature”. Greene’s own death in 1991, aged 87, had a similar effect on many younger writers, myself included.

Novel explosives of the Cold War

Orwell’s searing satires as well as samizdat works from Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak proved powerful weapons in the fight against communism

The thoughts of Chairman Gonzalo

When Nicholas Shakespeare wrote his Shining Path novel, he attributed characteristics to its leader which no member of the public knew. They proved spot-on

Sun, sea and spooks

Greene’s brother, as well as Agent Garbo, provided comic inspiration for the vacuum-cleaner salesman recruited by SIS in Our Man in Havana

The name’s Sorge, Richard Sorge

Owen Matthews on the colourful life of a Stalin-era secret agent

Voices from the recent past

Naim Attallah’s illustrious interviewees also include John Updike, Diana Mosley, John Mortimer, J.K. Galbraith and Harold Macmillan

The old man and the siren

For the last decade of his life, the sozzled Hemingway was in thrall to an Italian 30 years his junior, padding around after her like a puppy

Outward bound

Queen of the Sea: A History of Lisbon reviewed

Hooked for life

Will Millard’s fishing memoir, The Old Man and the Sand Eel, reminds Nicholas Shakespeare inevitably of stories of ‘Papa’

The greatest journeys ever made

The British, French and Dutch discovered Utopia — and left it ‘the worst country in the world’, as Diana Preston relates

Love at first sight

The correspondence between her and Eric Siepmann is erotic, honest, funny and supremely sad

A sensual Greek goddess

She was a great life-enhancer, and muse to countless men — but chiefly to Paddy, her soulmate for 60 years

A tidal wave of grief

Outrage over the deaths of so many schoolchildren led to accusations of murder

Gilded prostitution

Their money rescued a bankrupt European aristocracy, but the prestige they received in return eventually proved too dear

Two small boys in the sea

Richard Beard is still haunted by the unspeakable sorrow that has ruined his family’s life for the past 40 years

Righter of wrongs

He was the great champion of the falsely accused, says Richard Ingrams, and his fight for justice has benefitted us all

Divinely decadent

Mary S. Lovell’s account the sad, seedy socialites of the Côte d’Azur is as shallow as the poolside tittle-tattle it salivates over

Travel in a time of coronavirus

Covid has altered the syntax of travel. It compels us to question not only where we are, but where we might go – plus the best means to get there. Back in 1988, before revolution swept Russia and Europe, we had the confidence to stride out. Afghanistan, Patagonia, Algeria, the Volga, Hong Kong, no place was out of bounds to a westerner with a backpack. One great strider was Bruce Chatwin, who gave the impression he’d been everywhere. His doubt crept in only at the end. ‘Which do you prefer?’ he asked me at his kitchen table not long before he died. He held up two alternative covers for his forthcoming collection of travel writing. The title on the first cover had a question mark. On the second, it didn’t. His publisher needed to know right away. Bruce, unusually for him, was undecided. I pointed at the second, which, without the question mark, appeared to calm the sentence down a bit. ‘That one,’ I said. It seemed a small thing, but when What Am I Doing Here became an international bestseller, the question-turned-statement started to haunt me. Chatwin had enjoyed the luxury of tearing around the world without the burden of punctuation, before the age of radical doubt. Since his death in that pivotal year, 1989, the landscape for travellers has changed beyond recognition – post-Aids, post-internet and now mid-pandemic. Chatwin’s question not asked remains unanswered. These thoughts pattered through my head as I boarded a flight from Faro in August. It was midsummer, in any other year the jam-packed height of the tourist season. Yet with no queues, no waiting, and the plane three-quarters empty, I was transported to another age, back to when I used to fly to Rio de Janeiro as ‘an unaccompanied minor’. With the novelty of a row of Ryanair seats all to myself, I had a hallucinatory moment of feeling absurdly grand, like James Bond in For Your Eyes Only as he crossed the Atlantic strapped into a four-engined Boeing 377 Stratocruiser: eating dinner in peace, sleeping for seven hours in a comfortable bunk, wandering down to the lower deck to have a BOAC ‘country house’ breakfast while dawn flooded the cabin ‘with the first bright gold of the western hemisphere’. For all the horrors of 2020, I felt strangely liberated in a way I hadn’t for ages.

Jamaica

In April, shortly before the 25th Bond movie unveiled its stars, but not yet its name, at Ian Fleming’s house in Jamaica, the Kingston Daily Gleaner, which Fleming called “my favourite newspaper above all others in the world”, published this letter from me:

Al Ula

Mada’in Saleh remains a blank page on the archaeological record, closed off by geography, politics, and religion – but this stunning region is about to throw open its doors to the world

Argentina for Vanity Fair

Norway

Newswalk 1 – Daniel Libeskind

In his “Walking Essay” of 1912, a brilliant young English writer, A.H. Sidgwick, proposed that walking “lays a foundation of mutual respect more quickly and more surely” than any other activity. The environment of a walk, suggested Sidgwick, who was killed five years later at Ypres, was exactly right: “familiar enough to create a sense of ease, and yet strange enough to throw the walkers back on themselves with the instinct of human solidarity.”

Newswalk 2 – Bob Brown

Newswalk 3 – Marina Warner

Newswalk 4 – Russell Foster

Newswalk 5 – George Steiner

Cuba: fishing for Hemingway

My Cuba was formed by Graham Greene in his novel Our Man in Havana, about an English vacuum-cleaner salesman recruited by MI6 during the fag end of Batista’s dictatorship. Vivid in memory is the battered Penguin copy Greene later showed me: the gift of a Russian cosmonaut who had read it in space. While circumnavigating Earth, he underlined the places that he’d visited in Havana—the Country Club, the Malecón, the Floridita bar, where Ernest Hemingway downed his daiquiris.

Tel Aviv

In 1909, 60 white single-storey houses rose from a bumpy sand dune a mile from the ancient port of Jaffa. The middle-class Jews who had purchased the 55-acre plot hoped to achieve a way of life that belonged to the Jews themselves. This had proved impossible under the shadow of their Arab landlords in Jaffa. So was born the world’s first Jewish city in 2000 years. “There is only one Jewish city,” wrote the novelist Joseph Kessel a couple of decades later, “and that is Tel Aviv.”

Outback jihad

Even in Australian terms, Broken Hill – 852 km north of Melbourne, 1,150km west of Sydney – feels a long way from anywhere. Yet in its boom days, the sweltering main street boasted more hotels than any city in Australia. From the ironwork verandah of the Palace Hotel, I look out at the gigantic slag heap which dominates every street like a frown; grey and obdurate, “the mullock” is an unavoidable reminder of the source of Broken Hill’s phenomenal wealth in the early twentieth century, when its minerals – chiefly zinc, silver and lead – were railroaded to Port Pirie and then shipped to Saxon smelters in Freiberg, “the Mecca of ores”, to make bullets for German guns.

Once Upon A Time In Peking

John Shakespeare lived in Peking in 1936. Now in his 80s, he has just gone back there for the first time. His son Nicholas Shakespeare tells the tale.

Beyond The Killing Fields

Nearly 50 years ago, Nicholas Shakespeare’s family was forced to flee Cambodia. Now he and his father return for the first time since the fall of the Khmer …

Lost in France

One March day in 1937, “feeling very ill and alone in the world”, my aunt Priscilla caught the Paris train from London’s Victoria Station with £5 in her pocket. She was 20, unmarried and pregnant, and had decided to go to France, where she had grown up, to have an abortion.

The Return of the Native, Ox Travels

My sister and I grew up in Brazil during the 1960s. Thirty years later, my sister went back to work with street children in the Pelourinho district of Bahia, where she fell in love with a former street boy, a carefree rastafarian called Rasbutta da Silva.

Anita Goulden: angel of Piura

Twenty-one years ago I wrote a story for this magazine about a feisty 71-year-old Mancunian woman who lived in north-west Peru. For 30 years, Anita Goulden had dedicated her life to looking after abandoned and disabled children in the coastal desert town of Piura. I had met her when my father, the British ambassador to Peru, had travelled to Piura to open an irrigation system. As well, he carried a suitcase of clothes and dried milk for Goulden, a gift from the British community in Lima. Most of us are smaller than life. Anita Goulden was a great deal larger. That afternoon, I had visited Goulden’s hospice and was moved to give her all the money I had on me. It was not much – about £30. On my return to London there was a letter to say it had been enough to provide the medicine for a boy who had been hospitalised with an asthma attack. Also to cover an operation on a girl’s legs and the paper napkins to keep her plaster dry. ‘A thank-you from people who have nothing doesn’t begin to express it.’

The Dancer And The Terrorist

“Amigo?” The interrogator – a stout policewoman in a tight black jersey – sits behind a scuffed counter.

Tasmania

For much of the past decade I have lived on a nine-mile beach with no land between my deck and the ice floes of Antarctica. What anchored me here, initially, was the quality of the light, like an overexposed photograph, but possessing a clarity that I have not encountered elsewhere. Until I came to Tasmania, I never knew what it was to feel drunk on light – sunlight, moonlight, starlight, the strange throbbing flare of the Aurora Australis, or the double-rainbows that are a feature of Tasmania’s east coast as much as its sudden winds. Here, unlike in England – and escaped from what Robert Louis Stevenson called “the Bastile of civilisation” – I find it no hardship to rise with the sun and pick my way through the boobyalla for a barefoot tramp on the sand. There are mornings, before the south-easterly picks up, when the air is so clear and the water in the bay so glassy that I have the illusion of being able to see not merely to the lip of the horizon, but beyond it – back even to the damp northern island where I’m from.

The Quest For The Tasmanian Tiger

One wet night in March 1982, Hans Naarding was surveying snipe in north-west Tasmania when he came face to face with a Tasmanian tiger – a creature that he believed to be extinct.

Tahiti Straight To The Heart

I know, now, what I'm going to do when I become so wealthy that I don't know what to do. I'm going to charter the Ti'a Moana for a week's "yachting" in Tahiti and invite along my family and friends.

South

When I was 17 I had an experience that only now am I able to meet in the eye. One humid night in Hortensia, a village on the plains directly west of Buenos Aires, I was challenged to a knife fight. The face remains a blur, but I have a harder memory of the squat black hat associated with the gaucho, the leather belt studded with silver pesos, and the isosceles of flashing steel that the men I rode with called a facon.

Dobbing On Dr Raad

Dr Maurice Raad was a large, chubby South African, 53-years old, with a prominent mole on his right cheek. He appeared harassed on his first morning. As he bustled about the room, opening and closing cupboards, he chatted about Tasmania – he was new to the island, but looked forward to working in Swansea at least five years. He wondered aloud about the Japanese restaurant on the highway.

Being With John Malkovich

The location: a flat off Ladbroke Grove in London. The time: 2am, early November, 1995. I’m lying across the bed, despondent, broke and just back from India where I spent my last penny taking the girlfriend to whom I’d dedicated The Dancer Upstairs (and who is going to break up with me anyway) on a trek. In our absence the novel has been published, received good reviews and disappeared. I am wondering how I’m going to make ends meet, when the telephone rings.

Kemp & Potter

Early in 1999 I flew from London to Sydney and then, on Valentine’s Day, to Tasmania. I’d just finished writing a long biography, seven years work on one man, the writer and traveller, Bruce Chatwin, and I was burnt out. One of Tasmania’s attractions was its remoteness; another was that Chatwin, who specialised in the remote, had never been there. The island would be terra incognita, unevoked in my mind by his writing and my research into his life. Tasmania’s freshness – its wind and its light (friends in mainland Australia remarked on the light especially) – might empty me of the biographer’s condition: that dull, unfriendly abstraction brought on by too many months in the shade of old documents.

Lesotho

At the top of the pass, someone has hammered a big bronze plaque into the rock face:

Guzmán Found

We’re under full sail, approaching the rocks. Above us a soldier waves his gun. He speaks urgently into a handset. Last week shots were fired at this boat and days before the navy spotted a small craft adrift in the night and dropped depth charges. The reason for the tension is a prisoner in the low orange buildings beyond the watchtowers. Peering into the maginot line of concrete arcs, I try to picture a man from the sierra, a 59 year old philosopher with skin rash and the hillman’s fear of the sea.

The Princess and the plea

‘I’VE GONE OUT WITH Ceauşescu’s son, Valentin. I’ve had an affair with the Prime Minister. One of my helpers is my lesbian lover, another a Mossad agent. I’ve two illegitimate children, one of them conceived in a Paris hotel – but I’m refusing to let him speak Romanian and this has angered my father.’