Travel Podcasts, Discovered
Ryan Murdock talks with the world’s most original writers, publishers and travelers to get the story behind great books about place.
www.personallandscapespodcast.com
50 most recent episodes displayed below
Visit website →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 ov
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 h
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 k
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 famou
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
I first encountered Constantine Cavafy in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, where ‘the old poet’ represented the ghostly voice of the city.
I was immediately attracted to the dreamlike quality of his poems, and the way he captured a sense of me
Peter Matthiessen is a towering figure of twentieth-century American letters, and the only writer to win the National Book Award in both fiction and nonfiction.
He’s also a difficult man to pin down because he accomplished so much in so many differe
This drive to discover is deeply human, and as today’s guest will tell you, it might even be encoded in our genes.
Alex Hutchinson is the author of The Explorer's Gene. He draws on the latest insights from neuroscience and behavioural psychology to
Film noir is is my favourite silver screen genre. I’ve seen every A-list film noir multiple times, and most of the B-movies, too. I’ve wanted to do a podcast conversation about it since I started Personal Landscapes.
These downbeat stories of ordina
When his doctor told him to walk or die, Peter Carpenter transformed a health crisis into a feat of urban archaeology.
In wandering the streets where David Bowie honed his craft, Carpenter uncovered hidden dimensions and new connections to pivotal B
The Atlantic slave trade began in the 15th century and was abolished in the United States in 1865, but slavery was practiced in the Muslim world for much longer. It dates back to the 7th century, and endured openly until late in the 20th century.
Wh
Europe By Rail is a beautifully-published guidebook that covers 50 key rail routes across Europe, blending practical advice with narrative storytelling, and a focus on slow travel by local trains.
This wonderful resource has been inspiring travel dr
In his mid-twenties, city-bound and restless, Louis D. Hall decided to make an uncharted journey on horseback.
He found his horse, Sasha, in Italy’s Apennine Mountains and headed west for ‘the end of the land’.
In Green is a classic adventure story
If you grew up in the 80s like I did, you know Andrew McCarthy from Pretty in Pink and St. Elmo’s Fire.
But Andrew is more than an actor and director. He’s also an award-winning travel writer.
His writing is introspective, vulnerable and self-depre
Germany’s post-war recovery was an economic miracle.
The country was on the rise in a good way. And then it all started going wrong.
The signs of trouble were visible long before the covid pandemic pushed us over the brink.
Journalists Will Wilkes
Digital platforms promised us personalization but their algorithms homogenized culture to a bland lowest common denominator instead.
They don’t just influence what we consume, they also determine what is produced as artists shape their output to fit
In 1879 a forgotten Irish adventurer called Frederick Carter marched four tamed Asian elephants from the coast of East Africa to the edge of the Congo.
He was sent to establish a training school for African elephants so they could be used to transp
Josef Koudelka was born in Czechoslovakia the year Germany annexed the Sudetenland. His childhood was overshadowed by Nazi occupation. He lived under the postwar communist regime, and watched Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in 1968.
His work is perm
Clair Wills was in her twenties when she learned she had a cousin she'd never met.
It wasn’t as though their families drifted apart. She’d never been told of this person’s existence. It was shrouded in shame and secrecy, and she wanted to understand
What would you do if someone you knew your entire life — your mother — suddenly revealed that she’d been a spy? Deborah Lawrenson turned her story into a novel.
The tangled web of espionage she weaves in The Secretary is fiction, but the background
In 1986, Michael Asher and his wife Mariantonietta Peru set out to cross the Sahara from west to east, by camel and on foot. Their 4,500 mile (7,200 km) journey is the longest trek ever made by Westerners in the Sahara, and the first recorded crossin
Arthur Rimbaud turned French poetry on its head in his late teens. His work influenced everyone from the modernists and the Beats to Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison, but he wasn’t recognized or well-liked in his lifetime. He guzzled absinthe, sponged mone
The stories in The Vanishing Point, Paul Theroux's new collection, span the globe from Hawaii and the South Seas to Africa and New England. They have all the qualities I love in his fiction: a sharp bite of satire that skewers pretension, crisp dialo
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Julian Evans first visited the city of Odesa, Ukraine on a boat journey down the Dnipro River in 1994. He fell in love with its distinct personality as a self-contained world. He also fell in love with a local woman, a
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A great biography reveals the raw humanity behind lives of rare genius. In his latest book, Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath, Jeffrey Meyers draws on Plutarch’s principle of dual composition to sh
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Cam Honan has hiked across 56 countries on six continents, logging over 96,500 km in three decades. Backpacker Magazine called him “the most traveled hiker on earth”.
I’ve wanted to speak with him for ages about his e
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Richard Grant has lived in Arizona for more than twenty years, and his latest book — A Race to the Bottom of Crazy — is a fascinating blend of memoir, history, local issues and encounters with strange characters.
It’s
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Lesley Downer's fascination with Japan's most famous poet took her from Tokyo's drab industrial concrete into what was then a seldom-visited part of Honshu.
It was a place of sake-drenched poetry sessions in thatched-
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Thomas Swick moved to Warsaw at the height of the Cold War. His newest book Falling Into Place is a memoir of his life behind the Iron Curtain, but it’s also a writer’s coming of age in the heyday of post-Watergate jou
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The Late Bronze Age Mediterranean was a surprisingly interconnected place. Trade flourished, interrupted by the odd embargo, and military conflicts used disinformation for strategic gain. And then something terrible ha
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Long before he wrote 1984 — and long before he was even George Orwell — Eric Blair was a nineteen year old policeman in Burma. Biographies skirt over this five year period, but it was the making of the writer he would
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Jonathan Raban wrote about human landscapes rather than uninhabited ones, and the borderlands between what a place professes to be and what they are.
An Englishman who emigrated to Seattle at the age of 47, his status
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James Salter is the best American writer you’ve probably never read. He was a fighter pilot in the Korean War, and a successful screenwriter. His sentences are fractured jewels. The details are closely observed, the im
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Sherlock Holmes fans span the range from casual to obsessive. They included Abdulhamid II, the last ruler of the Ottoman Empire to hold absolute power. A description of the sultan having Holmes stories read to him at b
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I first got interested in the Wakhan Corridor when I read The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk. This weird bit of political geography once formed a buffer between Tsarist Russia and Imperial Britain. It’s been closed to tra
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I’d always thought of Tamerlane as a sort of cut-rate Genghis Khan. It was only when researching a trip to Uzbekistan that I discovered he was one of the world’s greatest conquerors.
Justin Marozzi joined me to talk a
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I’ve often thought of it as one of the world’s most misunderstood countries. Not because it’s uniquely inscrutable but because it’s so beset by stereotypes. The truth is more complicated and far more interesting.
Alex
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Barnaby Rogerson joins me to talk about the origins of the Sunni-Shia schism, the differences between them, and the current ethnic and linguistic rivalries plaguing the Middle East.
This is a public episode. If you'
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Sarah Anderson founded the iconic Travel Bookshop in 1979.
You might be familiar with it even if you’ve never been to London. It was the inspiration for the bookshop in the 1998 Hugh Grant / Julia Roberts film Notting
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Louisa Waugh lived in a village in the far west of Mongolia in the late 1990s, and wrote a remarkable book about her experience.
Hearing Birds Fly describes a world of drought-stricken spring, lush summer pasture and
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Bruce Chatwin’s first book — In Patagonia — changed our idea of what travel writing could be.
He was a traveler, an art expert whose keen eye for fakes made him a star at Sotheby’s, and to those who knew him, a perpet
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This might just be the strangest landscape I’ve featured on the podcast. It’s also the one we know least about.
Laura Trethewey joins me to discuss bizarre underwater landscapes, the difficulties of sonar mapping, and
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Lagos is a massive city with massive problems. I've always thought of it as a place to avoid. But I came away with a very different impression of Africa’s largest megacity after reading the book we’re discussing today.
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Sacred mountains are revered across a wide array of cultures. They're sites of sacrifice and of ritual, perhaps because they feel closer to the gods: physical border zones between the sacred and profane.
Jeremy Basset
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The Pyrenees form one of the great European landscapes, but they're all too often overshadowed by the romance of the Alps. As you'll hear in today's podcast, they have their own very different set of stories to tell.
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If you think colonialism ended after the Second World War, then my latest conversation may surprise you. Simon Winchester joins me to talk about Tristan da Cunha, hiding under a bed in the Falklands, and how he bluffed
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Tom Parfitt walked across the northern flank of the Russian Caucasus, from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea, through republics whose names are synonymous with violence, extremism and warfare. He joins me to discuss the
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Nothing symbolizes freedom in America like the open road. Richard Grant joins me to discuss frontiersmen and plains Indians, riding the rails, and the role of the Scotch-Irish in forging the utterly unique American vie
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Why have nomads gotten such a bad rap? And why is their knowledge essential for us today? Anthony Sattin joins me to discuss nomadic empires, cycles of history, pastoral peoples, and how steppe nomads contributed to th
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If you think the world's largest desert is an empty wasteland, then you’re in for a surprise.
The Sahara has been home to cattle pastoralists, mighty empires, and trade routes that connected the Mediterranean world wi