Colin Thubron

A potash mine, Berezniki, Russia; from Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, a documentary film by Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier, and Edward Burtynsky, 2017

Our Guide to the Underworld

Underland: A Deep Time Journey

by Robert Macfarlane

July 18, 2019 issue

‘Mandarin’s wife and two daughters with bound feet’; from Isabella Bird’s The Yangtze Valley and Beyond

Reveling in Discomfort

The Yangtze Valley and Beyond: An Account of Journeys in China, Chiefly in the Province of Sze Chuan and among the Man-tze of the Somo Territory

by Mrs. J.F. Bishop (Isabella L. Bird), with an introduction by Dervla Murphy

July 19, 2018 issue

Fishermen on the Okhotsk Sea, at the mouth of the Amur River, which separates Russia and China

A River Runs Through It

Black Dragon River: A Journey Down the Amur River at the Borderlands of Empires

by Dominic Ziegler

October 26, 2017 issue

Lost in Arabia

An account of the 1761-1767 Danish expedition to Arabia was first published in English in 1964 as Felix Arabia. It was only then that the full drama and strangeness of the expedition was widely revealed.

June 15, 2017

Young Cubans crossing the Malecón as tourists drive by in antique American convertibles, Havana, May 2016

Where Globalization Began?

Island People: The Caribbean and the World

by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

June 8, 2017 issue

Remembering Bob Silvers

On the late editor of The New York Review

March 21, 2017

‘The Dutch delegation of Johan Josua Ketelaar to the Maharana Sangram Singh in Udaipur’; detail of a tempera painting on cotton, 1711

A Different Vision of History

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

by Peter Frankopan

April 21, 2016 issue

Pamuk: Under the Spell of Istanbul

A Strangeness in My Mind

by Orhan Pamuk, translated from the Turkish by Ekin Oklap

November 5, 2015 issue

An East German soldier looking through the Berlin Wall, 1990

Mesmerized by Germany

Roads to Berlin: Detours and Riddles in the Lands and History of Germany

by Cees Nooteboom, translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson, with photographs by Simone Sassen

December 19, 2013 issue

Francis Bedford: The Colossi on the Plains of Thebes, March 17, 1862

When the Ruins Were New

In February 1862 the eldest son of Queen Victoria, the Prince of Wales and future King Edward VII, embarked on a four-and-a-half month journey through the Middle East. Among the party was the photographer Francis Bedford, who in over 190 prints produced one of the earliest photographic records of the region.

July 6, 2013

The Wailing Wall at the Temple Mount, with the Dome of the Rock in the background at right, Jerusalem, 1993

Apocalypse City

Simon Sebag Montefiore’s ‘Jerusalem: The Biography’

Jerusalem: The Biography

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

January 12, 2012 issue

Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915–2011)

September 29, 2011 issue

The Chukchi people hunting walruses and whales; ivory tusk engraving from the village museum in Uelen, the easternmost settlement in Russia and Eurasia

The Last Shaman

The Chukchi Bible

by Yuri Rytkheu, translated from the Russian by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse

August 18, 2011 issue

‘The Beauty of Xiaohe,’ female mummy, circa 1800–1500 BC; excavated from Xiaohe (Little River) Cemetery 5, Charqilik (Ruoqiang) County, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, China

The Secrets of the Mummies

Secrets of the Silk Road

an exhibition at the Bowers Museum, Santa Ana, California, March 28–July 25, 2010; the Houston Museum of Natural Science, August 28, 2010–January 2, 2011; and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology,

May 12, 2011 issue

Buddhist prayer flags at the base of Mount Kailas in Tibet, where pilgrims come to walk the perimeter of the mountain, and where some monks and nomads follow the practice of sky burial. ‘Especially in this propitious month of Saga Dawa,’ Colin Thubron writes, ‘people may repair to lie down and enact their own passing.’

On Tibet’s Holy Mountain

March 10, 2011 issue

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres: The Turkish Bath, 1862

Madame Butterfly’s Brothel

The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters

by Richard Bernstein

June 11, 2009 issue

Suleiman the Magnificent, sultan of the Ottoman Empire at the height of its power, from 1520 to 1566; sixteenth-century painting by a member of the Venetian school

The Great Battle Against Islam

Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World

by Roger Crowley

April 9, 2009 issue

Fishing in the Dead Sea

Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace

by Avi Shlaim

King Hussein of Jordan: A Political Life

by Nigel Ashton

The Arab Center: The Promise of Moderation

by Marwan Muasher

November 20, 2008 issue

Letter

John E. Merriam

‘The Plucky Little King’

December 18, 2008 issue

Marco Polo Goes to Gorgeous Xanadu

October 9, 2008 issue

A Prince of the Road

A Time to Keep Silence

by Patrick Leigh Fermor, with an introduction by Karen Armstrong

Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese

by Patrick Leigh Fermor, with an introduction by Michael Gorra

Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece

by Patrick Leigh Fermor, with an introduction by Patricia Storace

A Time of Gifts

by Patrick Leigh Fermor, with an introduction by Jan Morris

Between the Woods and the Water

by Patrick Leigh Fermor, with an introduction by Jan Morris

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January 17, 2008 issue