Writing Worth Reading
Last updated 11 pm GMT
Writing Worth Reading
Photo gallery of London's East End in the 1960s. "My father was a docker – everyone worked in the docks, did a bit of boxing or they were villains. I used to meet my mum after work, and you couldn’t see the next street in the fog"
What's required is intelligent reform, not floods of extra financing for moon shots and high-speed railways to nowhere. Here are seven ways to improve transportation in America (also applicable to other industrialised nations)
Some lovely shots of the northern hemisphere winter in this photo gallery – a few sporting, but most recreational as North Americans and Europeans strap on skates and get out on frozen lakes and canals
"I worry that after years of resettling, I will forever be looking backward and missing the place I am not. That I will forever be in past tense. My idea of home, the home I am sick for, is a mysterious, shifting place"
When HBO decided to use RL Burnside's "Woke Up This Morning" as the theme for The Sopranos life changed for him. He had to padlock his fridge. You'd still have a fighting chance of catching him in his local bar though
"I climbed the stairs to find two adjacent doors on a landing. There was a sign on one door: 'Prof Dr Freud'. As I pushed open the door and walked into the deserted museum I knew one thing for sure – I had the idea for a novel"
Writer tours Germany's Fairy-Tale Road, of Brothers Grimm fame. "The fairy tales encode strands of history, saints' lives, legends and pagan myths, half remembered and twigged together like the nests Disney's singing birds build"
O'Hagan takes a tour of London's Olympic park. Previously a site of industrial dereliction. "Never has so much dirt been scrubbed so expensively and with so much hope invested in the particles. You could almost eat the soil now"
Searching for the remains of a refugee camp in Thailand, used by Cambodians who fled from the Khmer Rouge. "It was swampy-hot. I was an hour from the nearest city and I couldn’t see anything but grass"
Social history of the cruise ship industry, from the 1960s to the wreck of the Costa Concordia. Ships as "giant floating theatrical bubbles" in which ordinary people could behave for a while as though they were upper class
Enjoyable account of a culinary adventure in Japan. Writer travels to Tokyo aiming to sample the best sushi, tempura, yakitori, shojin ryori, foraged vegetables, teppanyaki, kaiseki and bento boxes. This is what he found
Writer recalls visit to Varanasi, India, one of seven holy sites of the Hindus. Short history of the city, followed by reflections on the traditional cremations that still take place daily along banks of the Ganges
Image by Pierre Metivier on Flickr
Whistlestop tour around sites associated with Dickens's life
Colin Thubron, on the changing world
"The world’s changing all the time. It’s never seen once and for all, it has to be interpreted again and again, like Dante’s Divine Comedy"
