#culture

What Stockholm in two days taught me about Swedish precision, open-fire dining and the danger of overplanning a city.Stortorget, the colourful heart of Stockholm’s Gamla Stan.The bus from Stockholm Skavsta Airport refused to leave. The engine was running, everyone was on board, and a fairly long drive to Stockholm lay ahead. Yet the driver wouldn’t

How Vivaldi, an extraordinary countertenor and a convenient flight became the beginning of my first proper journey through Poland Three hundred years before Instagram, Antonio Vivaldi wrote an aria about longing and the quiet certainty of seeing someone beloved again. “Vedrò con mio diletto” belongs to Giustino, an opera first performed in Rome i

Two hotels, two stages and one unapologetically expensive escape Technically, this story is about forty hours in Paris. Spiritually, it began with a brioche in Strasbourg. I had flown into Paris the previous day, only to leave it almost immediately by train. I had never visited Strasbourg, and late November seemed like a reasonable time to correc

A levitating train, a room above the city, ancient temples beneath skyscrapers—and the moment China stopped looking simple. Shanghai lay beneath me, and I recognised absolutely nothing. From the upper floors of the Shanghai Marriott Marquis City Centre, the city stretched beneath me in every direction: towers, parks, roads and blocks of buildings

A journey beyond the Hollywood myth, through inland Sicily and roads that made a battered town sign feel like a summit Table of contentsThrough the corn to SalemiAn Accidental Stop in SalemiAfter SalemiWhen the Road Fell ApartThe signThe town behind the nameHow a Parallel Authority Took RootThe Museum I Failed to EnterWhat remained Morning in Mar