#photography

Queen Margrethe’s breakfast room, diamond signatures, royal gardens and a quiet walk to Lake Esrum — a summer afternoon inside Fredensborg Palace, Danish royal home still in use.The local train from Helsingør took about half an hour to reach Fredensborg, and the moment I stepped off I checked whether I had made a mistake. The station seemed almost

Exploring Catania on foot through its palaces, churches and fish market, with Bellini along the way, pasta alla Norma at dinner and rather too many reasons to miss my train.When Venus and Mars make love, Vulcan rages in the depths of Etna, spewing his pain into the sky. Fire rains down on Catania, but Liotru, the mighty black elephant, takes the go

Lost photographs from a 2007 trip to Bulgaria bring back Plovdiv, Bachkovo, a global conference and a suitcase misrouted to Tirana.In 2026, while looking for photographs for a completely different blog, I found an old compact camera. I had assumed that whatever remained on it had disappeared from my life years ago, yet its memory card still contain

Amsterdam 20 Years Later: Same Tracks, Tired Windows, Stronger Weed — and the Suspicion That the Party Moved to BerlinIn 2004, Amsterdam ended for me with a daytime train to Cologne. Twenty years later, Cologne was where Amsterdam began again. I was returning along the same railway corridor to a city I remembered well enough to miss, but perhaps no

Fifteen stops, one phone, years of Prague experience — let the hunt for the best Prague photograph begin.I have been to Prague enough times for another round of classic sightseeing to make very little sense. I know the major landmarks, I have photographed most of them before, and I certainly do not need another picture proving that Charles Bridge i

Travelling to Fes can easily feel like travelling into the past. Pass through one of the monumental gates of its medina and the first question is almost inevitable: are we really still in the twenty-first century?There are sensible ways to visit Fes for the first time, and hiring a local guide is certainly one of them. Fes el-Bali is not the kind o

Seven years after my first visit, I returned to discover what Oxford keeps behind its gates Had apparition been allowed inside Hogwarts, I could have travelled directly from the Gloucester Cathedral cloister where Mrs Norris was found petrified to the hospital wing in Oxford’s Divinity School. Unfortunately, it was not. So I had to take a train.

One perfect reflection, two mountain transport systems and a ridiculously expensive day above Zermatt. There is a photograph of the Matterhorn on the wall of my office. The mountain rises almost perfectly above Riffelsee, while its reflection points downward into water so still that Switzerland appears to have arranged itself specifically for my

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