The Passenger is a weekly dispatch on travel — places, hotels, restaurants, the strange logistics of being elsewhere. It is written by Bergotte. Why serious travellers go to Sicily in September August in Sicily is a fact of nature rather than a choice. The island sits in the middle of the Mediterranean like a stoneContinue reading “The Sweetest Month”
Category Archives: Culture & Events
Exit Through the Gift Shop
The Passenger is a weekly dispatch on travel — places, hotels, restaurants, the strange logistics of being elsewhere. It is written by Bergotte. The Guilty Pleasure A confession about museum gift shops, and the twenty best ones in the world Let us be honest about this. The museum gift shop is not supposed to beContinue reading “Exit Through the Gift Shop”
The City That Comes Back to Itself
The Passenger is a weekly dispatch on travel — places, hotels, restaurants, the strange logistics of being elsewhere. It is written by Bergotte. Paris, and why September is the only month that matters There is a particular quality of light in Paris in late August that travel writing has never quite managed to capture, perhapsContinue reading “The City That Comes Back to Itself”
The Culture Now: Sudan
The world’s largest displacement crisis has scattered Sudanese artists across three continents — and, from Cairo to Nairobi to Aberdeen, they have kept working Sudan rarely leads a news cycle, which is itself part of the story. Since war broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces on 15 AprilContinue reading “The Culture Now: Sudan”
The Culture Now: Palestine
Across Gaza, the West Bank and a scattered diaspora, the past five years have produced an unusually intense body of work — made, in large part, out of catastrophe A note on scope before anything else: “Palestinian culture” today is made across more places than any single capital could hold — Gaza, the West BankContinue reading “The Culture Now: Palestine”
The Ten Photographs That Capture the Soul of America
America has always been a country obsessed with images of itself. It is not enough for America to exist; it must be seen existing. It must be staged, framed, printed, reproduced, circulated, believed. From the battlefield photograph to the fashion spread, from the Depression migrant to the moonlit desert, from the civil-rights witness to theContinue reading “The Ten Photographs That Capture the Soul of America”
The Ten Songs That Capture the Soul of America
America has often sung what it could not admit in speech. Its songs have carried grief before the law recognised suffering, desire before society permitted freedom, rage before politics found language, and longing before the country had earned the ideals it claimed for itself. If the American novel is a courtroom of conscience, and AmericanContinue reading “The Ten Songs That Capture the Soul of America”
The Ten Novels That Capture the Soul of America
America has always been a country unusually dependent on story. Before it became a superpower, before it became a marketplace, before it became a screen onto which the rest of the world projected desire and dread, it was already narrating itself: as wilderness, covenant, republic, frontier, refuge, opportunity, innocence, exception, destiny. No nation has beenContinue reading “The Ten Novels That Capture the Soul of America”
The Ten Films That Capture the Soul of America
America did not merely invent Hollywood. It invented one of the most persuasive dream machines in human history. More than any other modern art form, cinema allowed America to export itself: its landscapes, faces, appetites, terrors, fantasies, violence, tenderness, vulgarity, idealism and loneliness. The American film is not simply entertainment. At its most revealing, itContinue reading “The Ten Films That Capture the Soul of America”
The American Imagination: 100 Groundbreaking Moments in the Arts
American art has never been a single tradition. It is not one style, one canon, one language, one race, one city, one market, one mythology, or one moral direction. It is a field of struggle: Indigenous geometry and settler expansion, enslaved song and constitutional rhetoric, Puritan severity and surrealist nightmare, Black rhythm and white appropriation,Continue reading “The American Imagination: 100 Groundbreaking Moments in the Arts”
My World of Interiors 