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.

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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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.

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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Go to https://www.personallandscapespodcast.com/p/start-here

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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

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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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

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.

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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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. 

You’ll be supporting an independent ad-free podcast that publishes carefully curated conversations like this one, backed by decades of reading. Go to https://www.personallandscapespodcast.com/p/start-here

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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

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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Your support is greatly appreciated.

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. 

You’ll be supporting an independent ad-free podcast that publishes carefully curated conversations like this one, backed by decades of reading. Go to https://www.personallandscapespodcast.com/p/start-here

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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

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.

Personal Landscapes relies on the support of listeners like you to keep going. Please consider joining my Member's Club on Substack https://www.personallandscapespodcast.com/p/start-here

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Moonlighting posed as a detective show, but it was actually an old-fashioned 1940s screwball-comedy. Mysteries were just a framework for the romantic tension between the two main characters, played by Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd.

In an era when television was serious and even the comedies were overly-earnest, Moonlighting threw out all the rules.

Chase scenes ended in food fights and soap suds. They did song and dance routines, made film noir and Shakespeare episodes, broke the fourth wall, and did cold opens where the lead actors spoke to the audience in character.

It really is a time-capsule of what was great about the 1980’s, when we could still laugh at ourselves without being ‘triggered’.

Today I’m bringing you the inside story on the creative chaos and private feuds at the heart of that decade’s most original TV show.

I'm joined by Scott Ryan, author of Moonlighting: An Oral History.

We spoke about Moonlighting’s most creative episodes, the chaos and fighting on-set, and the myth the so-called Moonlighting Curse.

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