Words matter. These are the best Rory MacLean Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Mandy Sutter’s ‘Bush Meat’ triumphs in its lean prose and true dialogue, in its disarming humour, in its evocation of a family divided by sexism and racism in 1960s Nigeria.
The earliest maps were ‘story’ maps. Cartographers were artists who mingled knowledge with supposition, memory and fears. Their maps described both landscape and the events, which had taken place within it, enabling travellers to plot a route as well as to experience a story.
One of the most inexplicable characteristics of the Germans is their love of kitsch.
Shakespeare and Co dedicates itself to a shared, heady and outdated ideal that is scarce in our protective and fearful age.
Good travel books, like travel itself, open the door to new worlds. In the strongest works the author’s vision becomes our own, especially if his or her subject is a distant destination.
Eight months after graduating from Ryerson, there I was in West Berlin working with Marlene Dietrich and David Bowie and Kim Novak.
My favourite places on earth are the wild waterways where the forest opens its arms and a silver curve of river folds the traveller into its embrace.
To me, it remains incomprehensible that a people who can design the Porsche 911 and sleek, white ice trains, who created the Bauhaus and speak at least three languages at birth, want to own twee Christmas figurines painted in gaudy colours, dress up in Bavarian lederhosen, and eat Haribo gummy bears.
To me, Berlin is as much a conceit as a reality. Why? Because the city is forever in the process of becoming, never being, and so lives more powerfully in the imagination.
Before I met David Bowie, I was very nervous. I thought, ‘Here comes the Thin White Duke, Ziggy Stardust. How will I ever communicate with him?’
When we are away from home, our only constant companion is our self.
I grew up under the spell of London. Illustrator Kerry Lee’s evocative 1950 wall map of the city hung above our breakfast table at home in Canada. Over my corn flakes, I traced the capital’s high roads and medieval alleys.
The travel book is a convenient metaphor for life, with its optimistic beginning or departure, its determined striving, and its reflective conclusion. Journeys change travellers just as a good travel book can change readers.
