Jan Morris seemed to live multiple lives.

She was a soldier at the end of the Second World War, and a globetrotting journalist with a knack for turning up in the middle of what would become historic events.

She was a man — James Morris — and then a woman, undergoing gender-reassignment surgery in Casablanca at the age of forty-six.

She hated being called a travel writer but she wrote remarkable books about place, and was one of the finest descriptive writers of her time.

She also wrote celebrated histories, including the Pax Brittanica Trilogy, an elegy to the British Empire that captured the period in a kaleidoscope of incidents and characters, steeped in melancholy and a sense of decline.

The quality of her work is uneven. Money troubles led her to recycle newspaper articles into books that were often formulaic and disjointed. But the best of her work will stand among our greatest writing on place.

The life behind that work was rife with contradictions. Morris preached the virtues of kindness, but according to her children she was a terrible parent, cold and cruel.

Others have described her as a narcissist, a fabulist, and a class snob who told stories that inflated her family origins.

Who better to uncover the complexities of this twentieth-century icon than a writer who excels at both biography and travel writing?

Sara Wheeler is the author of Jan Morris: A Life.

We spoke about Jan Morris’s iconic writing style, her late-life obsession with Welsh nationalism, and the unreconcilable sense of longing at the heart of her work.

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George Forster is the most interesting 18th century explorer that I had never heard of.

He traveled the South Pacific on Captain James Cook’s second voyage at age seventeen, sailing through icy waters tantalizingly close to undiscovered Antarctica.

The common roots of those languages and cultures led him to develop a theory of Polynesian migration two centuries before it became the scientific consensus.

The prevailing European notion at the time was also one of racial superiority, but Forster saw the peoples he met as equals and believed they had something of value to teach him.

The book he wrote about the journey made him a coveted dinner guest all over Europe. He was friends with Goethe, Benjamin Franklin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and he became a mentor to Alexander von Humboldt.

But Forster’s later life was not a happy one, and his work was largely forgotten until today’s guest rescued him from obscurity.

Andrea Wulf is the author of The Traveller: The Revolutionary Life of George Forster.

We spoke about Forster’s remarkable Pacific journey, why his ideas were so far ahead of their time, and his unfortunate end.

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When Rory Maclean’s wife died of cancer at age 55, he set out on a series of journeys that changed his life.

His newest book is an examination of grief, a celebration of love, and a cross-cultural exploration of the afterlife.

He approached each religion like an an anthropologist, participating in the rituals of living traditions in the hope of reconnecting with the wife he had lost.

From the heights of Bhutan to the plains of South Dakota, each journey and meeting opened the door to the next, as his path led him out of darkness and into a new understanding of the mystery that bookends our lives.

Rory Maclean is the author of Geography of Heaven, Berlin: Portrait of a City, Pravda Ha Ha and other books. He’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the founder and curator of the annual Sherborne Travel Writing Festival.

We spoke about the nature of grief, cross-cultural accounts of an afterlife, and what ancient rituals can teach us about modernity.

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Colin Thubron’s keenly observed travel writing has made him one of our greatest writers on place.

The scale of his journeys is immense, but his lyrical books focus on the small and immediate. He writes about ordinary people whose lives were shaped by forces beyond their control.

He also shares stories of individuals on the fringes: radical Christian sects and animist shaman, Siberian poachers, gulag survivors, and cross-border traders.

I have an abiding fascination with empty landscapes and cultural borders, and I’ve long wanted to talk to Colin about his remote Asian travels.

We spoke about how Russia’s vast landscape shaped its psyche, Asia’s suspicious borderlands, and getting grilled by the KGB.

You can listen on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Podbean, Google Podcasts, Audible, PlayerFM, and TuneIn + Alexa.

Please subscribe, and rate the podcast or leave a review.

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When Tom Feiling lived in Tokyo in the early 1990s, Japan was a vision of the future. A place where science fiction existed next to centuries old Shinto shrines.

He returned to the country nearly twenty-five years later to find some of the shine had worn off.

Its population is aging and shrinking. Inflation is finally setting in after decades of economic stagnation. People are choosing solitude over companionship. And countryside villages are being abandoned as their last residents die off.

Japan still looks like the future, but it is a troubling future, and a warning for us all.

Tom is the author of Alone in Japan: A Journey to the Future.

We spoke about Japan’s culture of overwork, extreme forms of solitude, sex doll showrooms, and attempts to save village life and big city prosperity.

Personal Landscapes relies on the support of listeners like you to keep going. Please consider joining my Member's Club on Substack, where you'll find show notes for each episode, book reviews, reading-related videos, and more. 

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The little town of Weimar was the crucible of German high culture, democracy, and dictatorship.

It was home to Goethe and Schiller, Nietzsche and Liszt. It gave its name to the Weimar Republic. And it was an early stronghold of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party.

It’s easy to look back this period and diagnose how it all went wrong. Why did so many people sleepwalk into disaster?

Hindsight is always deceptively clear. But life looks very different when you’re living it.

Historian Katja Hoyer tells the story of Weimar — and by extension, Germany’s descent into chaos — through the lives of ordinary people, giving us a vivid sense of what it must have been like, year by year, as they tried to put food on the table, build businesses, and feed their families.

Katja is the author of Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe.

We spoke about Weimar as the centre of German culture, how Elizabeth Nietzsche tarnished her brother’s legacy, and how democratic hope turned to Nazi terror.

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Landscapes contain hidden histories that shaped the development of the world we live in. How we moved through those landscapes also tells us something about ourselves.

The Paths More Traveled explores the web that has stretched across Britain for over 11,000 years, as prehistoric routeways evolved to Roman roads and pilgrim paths.

Nicholas Crane is the author of ten books, including The Path More Travelled, The Making of the British Landscape, Latitude, and one of my favourite travel classics, Clear Waters Rising. He’s also known for his television work as lead presenter on the series Coast. And he was was president of the Royal Geographical Society between 2015 and 2018.

We spoke about navigating Mesolithic routeways, the legacy of Britain’s Roman roads, and how 7th century pilgrimage reshaped the urban landscape.

Personal Landscapes relies on the support of listeners like you to keep going. Please consider joining my Member's Club on Substack, where you'll find show notes for each episode, book reviews, reading-related videos, and more. 

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The foreign affairs and travel writer Robert Kaplan sees today’s world as a larger version of Germany’s Weimar Republic, “connected enough for one part to mortally influence the other parts, yet not connected enough to be politically coherent.”

In his latest book, Waste Land, he uses history, literature, politics and philosophy to draw parallels between today’s challenges and those of Germany’s interwar period to give us a bracing glimpse of a dangerous world that we’ve already entered into.

We spoke about the immediacy of every crisis, how faltering institutions enable fanatics and ideologues, and why the roots of our permanent twenty-first century crisis continues to lie in what went wrong in the twentieth.

Personal Landscapes relies on the support of listeners like you to keep going. Please consider joining my Member's Club on Substack, where you'll find show notes for each episode, book reviews, reading-related videos, and more. 

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.personallandscapespodcast.com/subscribe

In a small medieval palace on Kathmandu’s Durbar Square, a young girl chosen from a caste of Buddhist goldsmiths watches over this broad valley and protects the country and its people.

She’s the embodiment of Devi, the universal goddess, and Hindu kings have sought her blessings for centuries to legitimate their rule.

Isabella Tree uncovered the secrets of this strange tradition over many years and many visits to Nepal. She peeled away the layers of myth, religious belief and modern history, and she slowly overcame the reluctance of priests and caretakers to meet Kathmandu’s living goddess herself.

Isabella is the author of The Living Goddess, Islands in the Clouds, The Book of Wilding, and other books. Her work has appeared in Granta, National Geographic, The Sunday Times and other publications. She’s an award winning conservationist, and lives West Sussex, in the middle of the Knepp Wildland, the first large-scale rewilding project in lowland England.

We spoke about the powers of the living goddess, how she is chosen, the connection to tantric ritual, and how the goddess foreshadowed the massacre of Nepal’s royal family.

Personal Landscapes relies on the support of listeners like you to keep going. Please consider joining my Member's Club on Substack, where you'll find show notes for each episode, book reviews, reading-related videos, and more. 

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Every book I read about Easter Island said roughly the same thing: a small, isolated group of people living on the world’s most remote inhabited island couldn’t have sculpted, moved and erected the enormous statues that are Easter Island’s most famous feature.

Or if they had, they must have been consumed by a monument building obsession that led them to cut down all the trees, causing mass starvation and warfare, and destroying their own civilization in the process.

Archaeologist Mike Pitts tells a very different and far more compelling story.

He draws on the latest research to build a picture of a remarkable cultural flourishing in a remote and unforgiving environment, by people with a highly sophisticated system of agriculture and a rich tapestry of myths, religion, political stratification and artistry.

His new book is one of my top reads of the year, and I couldn’t wait to talk to him about it.

We spoke about the small group of settlers who discovered the island, the genesis of the famous ecocide myth, and what those massive stone statues really mean.

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