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 book we’re talking about today explores the web that has stretched across Britain for over 11,000 years, as prehistoric routeways evolved to Roman roads and pilgrim paths.

We’ll also learn how land-grabbing Norman barons began the enclosure of the countryside, and how national parks and long-distance trails emerged from the ashes of two world wars.

A story like this wouldn’t be complete without firsthand accounts of hikes into the icy Cairngorms and along the remains of Hadrian’s Wall.

After all, our guide to this hidden history once spent a year and a half walking the chain of mountains that wind across Europe, from Cap Finisterre in Spain to Istanbul. We’ll talk about that remarkable journey, too.

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.

These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:

• The Path More Travelled: The Secret History of Britain’s Footpaths

• Clear Waters Rising

We also mentioned:

• The Travels of Celia Fiennes

• Nick’s BBC television show on Celia Fiennes

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.”

National disasters like pandemics and recessions spread across a digitally interconnected world beset by urbanization, mass migration and great-power conflict, causing a crisis in one part of the planet to instantaneously become a crisis in all.

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.

How did we get here and where are we going? That’s what we’re talking about today.

Robert D. Kaplan is the author of twenty-four books on foreign affairs and travel, including The Loom of Time, The Tragic Mind, The Revenge of Geography, Asia’s Cauldron, The Coming Anarchy, and Balkan Ghosts. He reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic for three decades, and he was a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the U. S. Navy’s Executive Panel. Foreign Policy magazine twice named him one of the world’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.”

You can read more about him on his website.

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.

These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:

• The Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

We also mentioned:

• Ibn Khaldun

• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

• The Last Train to Zona Verde by Paul Theroux

• Amitav Ghosh

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.

The living goddess is the stuff of legend, and the stuff of rumour. Did she really walk barefoot through bloody courtyards scattered with the severed heads of buffalo while demons leaped and howled in the shadows? How was she chosen? And what happens to her after the goddess inside her disappears?

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 Tree 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.

You can read more about her on her website, and follow her on Instagram.

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.

These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:

• The Living Goddess

We also mentioned:

• The Knepp Wildland project

I was obsessed with Easter Island as a teenager.

I read every book about it in my small town public library, and every English-language book at my university.

They all 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 a forgotten archive of interviews and excavations by a woman who spent sixteen months there between 1914-15, a time when there were still people old enough to remember a functioning island society before slavers and missionaries.

Pitts also 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.

It’s one of my top reads of the year, and I couldn’t wait to talk to him about it.

Mike Pitts is the author of Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island. He’s written for The Times, Telegraph, Sunday Times, Observer and Guardian, and magazines including New Scientist and BBC History. He edited British Archaeology magazine for twenty years, and continues to conduct original archaeological research.

You can read more about him on his website, and follow him on X.

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.

These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:

• Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island

We also mentioned:

• How to Build Stonehenge

My Substack followers know that I’m working on a novel set in the 1980’s.

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the world when I was 15. I’ve always been a reader first, but two television shows shaped my teenage years.

One was early MacGyver, the adventurous hiker and climber who carried a Swiss Army Knife, drove a black Jeep YJ, and made me want to learn about everything.

But the biggest influence was Moonlighting.

I loved David Addison’s effortless cool, his brilliant comebacks and his taste in Motown music. And in some ways, I wanted to be him.

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.

Moonlighting really is a time-capsule of what was great about the 80’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, the author of Moonlighting: An Oral History, The Last Days of Letterman, Always Music in the Air, and other books. He is the host of the YouTube series Tiger Talk, and co-president of Fayetteville Mafia Press and Tucker DS Press.

You can read more about him on his website.

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

It’s a really fun conversation, and I think you’ll enjoy it even if you don’t remember the show.

These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:

• Moonlighting: An Oral History

We also mentioned:

• Moonlighting streaming on Hulu

• The Return of Bruno

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 melancholy that I’ve always felt.

Cavafy wrote about human desire, inglorious epochs of Greek history, and civilizations in decline, using plain factual descriptions undressed by metaphor.

He never published his poems in a book, but circulated carefully chosen specimens in broadsheets that he printed himself. And yet this seemingly isolated man living in an obscure post-colonial backwater became the best known Greek poet in the world today.

How did a writer who showed little promise in his youth find a place in the literary canon and become ‘the poet of Alexandria’?

I’m joined by Gregory Jusdanis, co-author of Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography. Gregory is also the author of The Poetics of Cavafy, Fiction Agonistes: In Defense of Literature, and A Tremendous Thing: Friendship from the Iliad to the Internet. He teaches Modern Greek and Comparative Literature at the Ohio State University.

We spoke about Cavafy’s childhood of faded aristocratic grandeur, the Mediterranean Greek world he grew up in, and his lifelong poetic preoccupations.

These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:

• Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography by Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys

• The Complete Poems of Cavafy

We also mentioned:

• The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell

• ‘Walls’

• ‘Ithaka’

• ‘The City’

• ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’

• ‘An Old Man’

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 different areas.

He co-founded The Paris Review and spied for the CIA.

He’s best known for The Snow Leopard, his book about a Himalayan journey, but he thought of himself as a novelist. Others focused on his nature writing, his environmental advocacy, and his staunch defence of Native American rights.

He was a serial adulterer, a neglectful parent, short-tempered and self-absorbed, and yet his writing students praised his generosity, and he had wonderful lifelong friends.

He was also a spiritual seeker who reached the highest ranks of Zen Buddhism.

How do you come to grips with a life as varied as Peter Matthiessen’s? It’s no surprise that it took today’s guest eight years and nearly 800 pages.

Lance Richardson is the author of True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen, and House of Nutter: The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row. He teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Bennington College, Vermont.

You can read more about him on his website.

We spoke about Peter Matthiessen’s privileged background, his life-changing journey to Nepal, his serial womanizing, and his greatest books.

These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:

• True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen

• The Snow Leopard

• Under The Mountain Wall

• At Play in the Fields of the Lord

• Far Tortuga

• Shadow Country

We also mentioned:

• The Paris Review

I’ll never forget the first time I stepped off the edge of my personal map.

I must have been five years old when I wandered away from my yard one summer with two neighbour kids. Until then, the limit of my independent world was the single block around my house.

We made our way street by street to the farthest side of my hometown, a place I’d never been to and didn’t know how to get back from. A strange sense of pleasure fluttered in my stomach as I walked, and it grew stronger the farther I went.

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 draws on the latest insights from neuroscience and behavioural psychology to show how the urge to explore shaped our species, and how it continues to direct our actions, even when we’re sitting on the sofa.

Alex is the author of The Explorer’s Gene, and Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. He’s a National Magazine Award-winning science journalist and columnist for Outside magazine. He was also a long-distance runner for the Canadian national team.

You can read more about him on his website, and follow him on Instagram, Facebook and X.

We spoke about the explore-exploit dilemma, memorizing a route versus mapping a landscape, and how to find the sweet spot between predictability and chaos in your own exploring life.

These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:

• The Explorer’s Gene

We also mentioned:

• Ghost Riders by Richard Grant

• The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew Crawford

• Filterworld by Kyle Chayka

Film noir is is my favourite silver screen genre.

These downbeat stories of ordinary lives gone hopelessly astray crackle with hard-boiled dialogue.

They're set in modern urban wastelands, usually at night, in claustrophobic rooms where the actors are framed in tight shots that create a mood of entrapment.

Films like Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon reflected America’s postwar mood. The classic period only lasted from 1941 until the mid-1950s, but their visual style continues to influence movies today.

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 these silver screen gems since I started Personal Landscapes.

Who better to speak to than the film historian who wrote the definitive study?

Foster Hirsch is the author of 16 books on film and theatre, including Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties, and Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen. He is a professor of film at Brooklyn College, and a frequent host and moderator at repertory cinemas and film festivals.

You can read more about him on his website.

We spoke about film noir’s roots in hard-boiled fiction, how German Expressionism shaped its aesthetic, and what was happening in 1950s Hollywood as film noir — and the studio system — came to an end.

These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:

• Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen

• Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties

We also mentioned:

• Hard boiled writers: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Cornell Woolrich

• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; Metropolis

• Fritz Lang: Scarlet Street

• Billy Wilder: Double Indemnity; Sunset Boulevard

• Night of the Hunter

• Crime Wave

• Touch of Evil

• Call Northside 777

• The Asphalt Jungle

• The Killing

• Side Street

• Detour

• The Harder They Fall

• Sudden Fear

• Out of the Past

• Point Blank

• French Crime Films: Rififi; Bob le Flambeur; Elevator to the Gallows

• Breathless

• On The Waterfront

• My Son John

• Little Fugitive

• French New Wave

• Imitation of Life

• Incredible Shrinking Man

• Roma

• Cold War

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 Bowie narratives, shining a light on the legendary artist’s conscious and subconscious influences.

His multilayered book is a fascinating look at David Bowie’s cultural significance, as well as the poets, painters, artists, and musicians who shaped the spaces he inhabited.

Peter Carpenter is the author of Bowieland: Walking in the Footsteps of David Bowie, and of several volumes of poetry, including Just Like That and After the Goldrush. His work as appeared in Agenda, Critical Survey, The English Review, London Magazine, and The Notre Dame Review.

You can read more about him on his website.

We spoke about Bowie’s Berlin years, how the suburbs shaped his sound, and the Growth Arts Lab in Beckenham.

These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:

• Bowieland: Walking in the Footsteps of David Bowie

We also mentioned:

• My Family and Other Rock Stars by Tiffany Murray

• Beside Bowie: The Mick Ronson Story film

• Psychedelic Suburbia by Mary Finnigan

• London Orbital by Iain Sinclair

• Worple Press

• The Prelude by William Wordsworth

• William Burroughs: Naked Lunch, Soft Machine, Junky

• The Brücke-Museum

• Berlin Music Tours

• The Sound of Being Human by Jude Rogers

• Cracked Actor film

When we think of slavery, most of us imagine overcrowded Atlantic ships hauling human cargo to a cruel plantation economy.

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.

Hereditary slavery still exists in Mali and Mauritania, and the Arab states have the highest prevalence of forced labour in the world today.

Why do we know so little about this? And what forms did it take?

Today’s guest set out to answer these questions — and more — in a compelling new book that traces the extraordinary variety of slavery in the Islamic world and brings life to voices of enslaved people, from 8th century concubines to 20th century pearl divers.

Justin Marozzi is the author of Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World, Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World, and Islamic Empires: Fifteen Cities That Define a Civilization. He is a regular contributor to the Financial Times, Spectator, Guardian, Standpoint and Prospect.

You can read more about him on his website and follow him on X.

We spoke about courtesans and slave soldiers, the trans-Saharan slave trade, and how the Quran addressed slavery.

These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:

• Captives and Companions

This is Justin’s second appearance on Personal Landscapes. We spoke about Tamerlane and Samarkand in Episode 38.

Guidebooks are utilitarian things. Paper bricks we crammed in our backpack when wandering the world in the analog era. But every once in a while I come across one that changes the way I travel.

Europe By Rail is a beautifully-published book that covers 50 key rail routes across Europe, blending practical advice with narrative storytelling, and a focus on slow travel by local trains.

You’ll also find country information, off-beat diversions, sidebars on historic railway stations and carriages, and tips on fares and ticketing that’ll help you navigate Europe’s complex rail network.

This wonderful resource has been inspiring travel dreams for over 30 years. The 18th edition was published in October 2024.

It’s one of my favourite guidebooks, and I’m happy to be able to share it with you today.

Co-authors Nicky Gardner and Susanne Kries are Berlin-based writers with a passion for slow travel and sustainable tourism. They were also co-editors of hidden europe magazine from 2005 to 2023.

You can read more about them on the Europe By Rail website, and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

Nicky joined me to talk about spontaneity versus pre-planning, the pros and cons of rail passes, and the return of night trains.

These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:

• Europe By Rail: The Definitive Guide

We also mentioned:

• Hidden Europe magazine

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’.

Man and horse negotiated untrodden partisan paths in the Ligurian Alps, surviving storms, snow and rampaging wolves, until their solitary world was broken by the arrival of a young woman cast adrift by the death of her sister.

They continued together, united by the mysteries of the horse. With every step and every fall, the two are forced to trust in their horses and, eventually, each other.

In Green is a classic adventure story and a wonderful travel writing debut. I think you’ll enjoy it.

Louis D. Hall is the author of In Green: Two Horses, Two Strangers, a Journey to the End of the Land. His work has appeared in The Guardian, National Geographic and The Scotsman. He’s also the founder of The Big Hoof, a Scottish charity that that facilitates healing journeys though long-distance horse treks.

You can read more about him on his website, and follow him on Instagram.

We spoke about crossing the Ligurian Alps, the mysteries of the horse, and the kindness of strangers.

These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:

• In Green: Two Horses, Two Strangers, a Journey to the End of the Land

We also mentioned:

• Don Quixote

• The Big Hoof

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.

I came across so many of his stories over the years while leafing through my favourite magazines, and I reviewed his excellent first book, The Longest Way Home, for Outpost.

His writing is introspective, vulnerable and self-deprecating. He weaves memoir with vivid descriptions of people and place, and grapples with questions like how to balance a solitary nature with the desire for intimacy.

I reached out to ask him about walking across Spain, a journey he made twice: first alone, and then with his teenaged son. That’s the subject of his latest book, Walking With Sam.

I thought he might give me some insights and inspiration as I prepare for a long farewell-to-Europe trudge.

Andrew McCarthy is the author of Walking With Sam, The Longest Way Home, and Brat: An 80s Story. He was editor-at-large for National Geographic Traveler magazine, and guest editor of a Best American Travel Writing anthology. He’s written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Travel+Leisure, and many other publications. He also appeared in dozens of iconic films, including Pretty in Pink, St. Elmo’s Fire, Less Than Zero, and Weekend At Bernie’s.

You can read more about him on his website, and follow him on Facebook, Instagram and X.

We spoke about his Brat pack years, walking the Camino with his son, and how a hike can change your life.

These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:

• Walking With Sam

• The Longest Way Home

• Brat: An 80s Story

We also mentioned:

• Pretty in Pink

• St. Elmo’s Fire

• Brats documentary

• The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux

• Claude Chabrol

• The Breakfast Club

• Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED Talk

• Orange Is The New Black

Germany’s post-war recovery was an economic miracle.

It didn’t just put the nightmare Nazi years behind it. The modern country rose from the ruins with astonishing speed, rebuilding shattered cities and transforming companies like Mercedes-Benz, Bayer and Siemens into titans.

Germany was on the rise in a good way. And then it all started going wrong.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine ended the cheap gas Nord Stream dream, plunging the country into an energy crisis so severe that politicians were pressing their thumbs and hoping for a warm winter.

The social contract also shattered as frustration with high levels of immigration and a decline in living standards stoked tensions that fuelled the rise of the right wing AfD party.

But signs of trouble were visible long before the covid pandemic pushed us over the brink.

Journalists Will Wilkes and Chris Reiter have spent decades reporting on Germany’s problems, and they lay it all out in Broken Republik.

Will Wilkes has spent his working life writing about Germany, from terrorism to economic crises to the resurgence of the far right. He currently writes for Bloomberg and has previously written for Market News International and The Wall Street Journal.

Chris Reiter is a Berlin-based senior editor for Bloomberg. He covers economics, politics and business news, and has previously reported for Reuters and Dow Jones Newswire.

We spoke about Germany’s worrying lack of national identity, its reliance on structure to manage interpersonal relations, and why it has Europe’s worst social mobility.

Don’t worry, it’s not all bad news. I came away from this book with renewed respect for German culture and a bit more hope for the future. Listen to our conversation to find out why.

These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:

• Broken Republik: The Inside Story of Germany’s Descent into Crisis

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 what gets seen and what gets shared.

Ever wonder why trendy cafes all look the same no matter what city you visit?

Are you tired of the relentless sameness that has cursed books, art, music and film since the early 2010’s?

I read paper books and watch old films — the only time I bother with something new is when a trusted friend recommends it — but my life is afflicted with it, too.

We are all trapped in Filterworld, even those of us who aren’t addicted to smartphones.

My guest today traced this creeping, machine-guided curation as it infiltrated the furthest reaches of our digital, physical, and psychological spaces.

And he has a few ideas for escaping it that might surprise you.

Kyle Chayka is the author of Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture and The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism. He’s a a staff writer at The New Yorker covering technology and Internet culture, and his work has appeared in The New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, and Harper’s, among other publications.

You can read more about him on his website, and follow him on Substack, Instagram and X.

We spoke about how digital algorithms work, why they flatten culture and how to take back control of our own taste.

These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:

• Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

We also mentioned:

• The Criterion Channel

• Idagio

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 transport cargo in place of vast armies of porters.

It’s a tale of ineptitude, hypocrisy and greed filled with powerful chiefs, ivory dealers, Catholic nuns and dissolute colonial officials set against the beautifully described landscapes of Tanzania, the Congo, Brussels, Iraq and India.

Sophy Roberts is the author of A Training School for Elephants and The Lost Pianos of Siberia. She was editor-at-large of Condé Nast Traveller and also writes regularly for Financial Times Weekend, covering remote destinations from Papua New Guinea to Kamchatka. When not on the road, she hosts the excellent Gone to Timbuktu podcast.

You can read more about her on her website, and follow her on Instagram. There’s also a website for the book featuring behind the scenes photos and videos.

We spoke about Frederick Carter’s forgotten journey, Leopold II’s Congo land grab, and oral memory keepers as custodians of the past.

These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:

• The Lost Pianos of Siberia

• A Training School for Elephants

We also mentioned:

• King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild

• Abdulrazak Gurnah

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 vivid photos of the Prague Spring led to a twenty year period of exile, wandering Europe as a stateless person, sleeping rough, and photographing vanishing worlds.

His work is permeated by feelings of tragedy but the man himself is surprisingly optimistic, seizing on the present moment while appreciating the beauty of life.

I was intrigued by his wandering artist’s existence. And so I reached out to his biographer to get a sense of the man behind the ascetic legend.

Melissa Harris is the author of Josef Koudelka Next. She is editor-at-large of the Aperture Foundation, and was editor-in-chief of Aperture magazine for over a decade. She’s edited over forty books for Aperture, and has curated photography exhibits throughout the United States and Europe.

You can see Koudelka’s work on Instagram and on the website of the Josef Koudelka Foundation.

Josef Koudelka: Next is co-published by Aperture and Magnum Foundation and is available at aperture.org/books.

We spoke about Koudelka’s wandering life, his remarkable network of friends, and his interest in capturing the end of things.

These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:

• Josef Koudelka Next

• Exiles

• Gypsies

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 why.

She pieced the story together from forgotten anecdotes, dim memories and institutional archives spanning four generations of her own family, and the history of Ireland from the 1890s to the 1980s.

Her memoir explores questions of memory and loss, motherhood and emigration, guilt and blame — and it may change how you think about your own family, and your family secrets.

Clair Wills is the author of Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets, The Best Are Leaving: Emigration and Post-War Irish Culture, and other books. She is the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge, and a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and other publications.

We spoke about Ireland’s mother and baby homes, the stigma of illegitimacy, and how secrecy can shape a family and a society.

These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:

• Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets

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 to the story is authentic, drawn in part from a seemingly innocent diary her mother wrote in 1958 while working at the British Embassy in Moscow.

It’s an exciting high stakes thriller with insightful social commentary and a vivid sense of place. Exactly the sort of novel she excels at.

Deborah is the author of Songs of Blue and Gold, The Lantern, 300 Days of Sun, The Secretary and other novels. She trained as a journalist on the Kentish Times and worked for The Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and Woman’s Journal before becoming a full time novelist.

You can read more about her on her website, and follow her on Instagram, Facebook and X.

We spoke about Cold War Moscow, growing up as an embassy child, and the shock of discovering her mother’s cloak-and-dagger past.

These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:

• The Secretary

• 300 Days of Sun

We also mentioned:

• Kim Philby press conference video

• A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre

• The Billion Dollar Spy by David Hoffman