The author of Oblomov spent the years 1852-1854 as secretary to Admiral Putyatin on board the Pallada; they sailed to Java, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Shanghai, the Philippines and Korea. ... read more
Lucy Atkinson (1817-1893) was an English Atkinson was an English nanny working in Russia. In 1848 she set out with her new husband on a six-year exploration of Siberia and Central Asia, by f... read more
There are those who swear he was a spy, others who insist he was too scatty or essentially lazy to be one. Whatever the truth, he was an exceptional linguist (Iranian, Afghan Persian, Arabic... read more
Louis-Antoine de Bougainville and Pierre Magnol to Sir David Attenborough, via Lady Gaga... The author is, amongst other roles, the president of the Linnaean Society.
Is it to exalt the mountain or the climber that the mountain should be climbed? Or to gain a good vantage point for telling things, pace James Baldwin?
Europeans have north at the top of their maps; Islam looked south; the Hebrew culture looked east; the Aztecs had five points. What are compass points? How do they vary and function?
In 1930 a (very) young British explorer led a small team to explore the eastern coast of Greenland - an unknown expanse, mysterious even to the Inuits.
The story of the first contact between the Haida and other indigenous peoples of the Pacific North West with Europeans - and what came after. Told very powerfully in a graphic form that comb... read more