Colin Thubron | The New York Review of Books

Pleasure Domes and Postal Routes

Marie Favereau’s new book about the Golden Horde, the great Mongol power of the Eurasian steppe, explores its economy, ideology, and material culture, along with its wider influence.

The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World

by Marie Favereau

The Mongol Century: Visual Cultures of Yuan China, 1271–1368

by Shane McCausland

July 22, 2021 issue

The Companionship of Nature

Running like a troubled thread through Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights is the tension between a profound human need for the solace of animals and the acknowledgment, even the insistence, that they are creatures apart.

Vesper Flights: New and Collected Essays

by Helen Macdonald

April 29, 2021 issue

Escape from Fortress Crete

Patrick Leigh Fermor kidnapped a German general in the mountains of Greece during World War II. Was it worth it?

Abducting a General: The Kreipe Operation in Crete

by Patrick Leigh Fermor, with a foreword by Roderick Bailey

The Cretan Runner: His Story of the German Occupation

by George Psychoundakis, translated from the Greek and with an introduction by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

Dashing for the Post: The Letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor

selected and edited by Adam Sisman

More Dashing: Further Letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor

selected and edited by Adam Sisman

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March 11, 2021 issue

Cartographers of Stone and Air

On Tim Robinson’s intensely focused survey of a small patch of the Irish landscape and Lyall Watson’s sweeping inquiry into the mysteries and mysticism of wind.

Listening to the Wind: The Connemara Trilogy: Part One

by Tim Robinson, with an introduction by Daniel Slager

Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind

by Lyall Watson, with an introduction by Nick Hunt

December 3, 2020 issue

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