Give someone the World with our Map of the Month, The Times Desktop Atlas of the World.
“A goldmine of information and for a traveller, irresistible temptation.”- Michael Palin
Everyone needs a good world atlas and this one is perfect for everyday use at home or work. This is the fully updated sixth edition published earlier this year.
Continue reading Map of the Month: The Times Desktop Atlas of the World
Our Children’s Book of the Month for December is The Little Prince Pop-Up Book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Louise Greig, Illustrated by Sarah Massini.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s tender and magical classic fable, adapted as a brand-new pop-up book.
Continue reading Children’s Book of the Month: The Little Prince: Pop-Up BookWhat a great year in Books of the Month we’ve had. It seemed fitting that our final Book of the Month for 2024 was one of our favourite authors with a book that would make a great gift. Our Book of the Month for December is Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography The Quiz Book.
Do you know your continents from your countries, your landmarks from your latitudes, your mountain ranges from your rivers? Put your geographical and political knowledge to the test and discover your geography IQ with bestselling geopolitical author Tim Marshall.
The Intrepid List is not a bucket list; it’s almost the opposite. This is a curation of precious moments experienced by our travellers that have never been forgotten. It aims to inspire you to explore a little further and delve a little deeper, to engage with communities, look below the surface and open yourself to new learnings. This is the way to find the kinds of experiences that will stay with you forever so you can form your own personal Intrepid List.
Within the 10 themed sections are experiences from more than 55 countries worldwide. They range from daring to caring, wild to mild. Change the way you travel with The Intrepid List; discover local secrets and experience the eccentric, the rare and the astonishing.
Writer and journalist Laurence Blair shares the inside story behind Patria: Lost Countries of South America, a dazzling history of the continent available now.
-by Laurence Blair
In eastern Peru, where the Andes crumple into the Amazon, lies Espíritu Pampa: a labyrinth of jungle-shrouded chambers, temples and tombs. Though rarely visited today, this was the capital of The Vilcabamba: a fragment of the Inca Empire where four emperors held out for a generation after the Spanish landed in Peru. “Imagine,” says Jorge Cobos, whose family helped explorers identify the ruins just decades ago. “There are lots of buildings left to discover in the forest. And beyond, in the mountains: who knows?”
The Vilcabamba is just one of the vanished kingdoms, nations and territories featured in my non-fiction debut PATRIA: Lost Countries of South America, which hit bookshelves across the UK last week. In my decade covering the continent as a foreign correspondent – rafting down Amazonian rivers with Colombian rebels, helicoptering into marijuana plantations with Paraguayan special forces, and following Venezuelan refugees into the lawless Darien jungle – I’ve witnessed South America’s fragile natural beauty and searing inequality up close. Stretching from the edge of Antarctica to the shores of the Caribbean, it’s a cultural, culinary, and economic powerhouse that feeds, fuels and cools the planet.
Continue reading Patria by Laurence BlairLast night we hosted the award winning author and illustrator Chloe Savage for the launch of her new book The Search For Carmella published by Walker Books.
Dr Rose dreams of finding a great, mysterious beast. Legends say it has enormous crimson tentacles and roams the deepest, darkest oceans. They call it… Carmella.
A perfect blend of science and magic this is abeautifully detailed book about wonder, bravery, and the freedom to pursue your curiosity. With an iconic female lead, we love the underlying message of mindfulness and relishing in the journey. Watch out for those crabs!
In his book The White Ladder: Triumph and Tragedy at the Dawn of Mountaineering, Daniel Light uncovers the true story of the thrill-seekers, map-makers, soldiers, occultists, artists and porters who paved the way for modern mountaineering. Ahead of his event here at Stanfords, Covent Garden on Thursday 21st November, Daniel gives us a snippet of mountaineering history as he looks at some attempts at the Himalayan region.
-by Daniel Light
The American climber and explorer Fanny Bullock Workman arrived in Darjeeling in the dying days of the nineteenth century intent on leading an expedition into the heart of the Sikkim Himalaya. There, she and her husband Hunter hoped to reach record-breaking heights on some of the highest mountains on Earth.
Orbital by Samantha Harvey was last night, Tuesday, 12 November, named the winner of the Booker Prize 2024.
Orbital, which is Harvey’s fifth novel and sixth book, takes place over a single day in the life of six astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station. During those 24 hours they observe 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets over their silent blue planet, spinning past continents and cycling past seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. This compact yet beautifully expansive novel invites us to observe Earth’s splendour, whilst reflecting on the individual and collective value of every human life.
We knew it was a great book as we’ve had it centre stage in our Map of the Month window since the beginning of the month.
It was a full house tonight at Stanfords as we hosted Peter Schwartzstein in conversation with Henrietta Hunter, talking about his new ground-breaking book The Heat and the Fury: On The Frontline of Climate Violence, the first on-the-ground exploration of climate change’s contribution to global conflict.
From the ravaged villages of Iraq, where ISIS has used drought as a recruiting tool and weapon of terror, to the pirate-ridden waters of Bangladesh – and drawing on more than a decade of reporting from dozens of countries – Schwartzstein writes about the unexpected ways in which climate change is feeding global unrest and conflict. Through the stories of the soldiers, farmers, spies and others affected around the world, he makes sense of a form of conflict that remains poorly understood, even as it devastates the lives of so many millions of people.
While researching this book, Schwartzstein was chased by kidnappers, detained by police and told, in no uncertain terms, that he was no longer welcome in certain countries. Yet, as he recounts, these personal brushes with violence are simply a hint of the conflict simmering in our warming world.
As Schwartztein’s unparalleled reporting shows, there’s nothing inevitable about climate violence. In fact, as he sets out, the same stresses that are pitching people against one another can even help bring them back together.
Last night we hosted a sold out talk with Georgina Howard who spoke about her new book In the Footsteps of Smugglers published by Bradt.
“It was the enigmatic mountain paths winding their way from one Basque village to the next along smugglers’ tracks and over humpback bridges that seduced us all…”
In 2022 Georgina Howard co-presented a programme on the Basque Pyrenees with Michael Portillo. This book is her travel memoir, ‘In the Footsteps of Smugglers’, about her life in a remote Basque hamlet of the Spanish Pyrenees. Twenty-five years ago, Georgina moved into an isolated barn in a tiny, close-knit community of Basque shepherds. Taking this eccentric British woman and single mother into the fold, her neighbours helped her raise her Basque/English daughter, Marion, transform her barn into an international walking and language company and introduce her deep into the enigmatic and little-known Basque mountain culture.
The story then follows Georgina’s footfall into the Spanish/French borderlands of the Pyrenees and the heart of the former Basque smuggling fraternity. She has guided people the world over along these smugglers’ trails and focused her research on the WW2 escape routes of the Comet Line that led Allied airmen out of occupied France in to Spain. Speaking Spanish, French and Basque, she has formed personal relationships with the last remaining members of this 1941 – 1944 resistance network – then mere children – and their stories of fear, courage and secrecy are documented in detail within the pages of her book. With the help of colourful vignettes and deep anthropological insight, ‘In the Footsteps of Smugglers’ digs deep behind the scenes into all things quintessentially Basque. It also offers a rhapsody in cultural identity as this cosmopolitan nomad, and single mother, finally turns to the Basque shepherds to find home.
