GAVIN YOUNG Although Gavin Young reckoned that he ‘fell into journalism as a drunken man falls into a pond’ he spent most of his working life as one of the Observer’s best foreign-correspondents, later becoming the author of many successful travel books. Young was born on April 24th 1928 and spent his youth in Cornwall … Read more
K’TUT TANTRI ‘Romance’ was the key to K’tut Tanti’s extraordinary character and life. She jealously protected her history by deliberately obscuring her past, by endlessly changing her aliases and by constantly reinventing herself. From what can be pieced together it seems that Muriel Stuart Walker was born in Glasgow on February 18th 1898; her mother was … Read more
DUNCAN PRYDE Duncan Pryde, who probably knew the Arctic ‘better than any white man of his generation’, was in the middle of the massive task of compiling a dictionary of the 26 dialects of the Inuit (or Eskimo) language when he died from cancer. Pryde, who had four brothers and one sister, had been brought … Read more
ELLA MAILLART ‘To dawdle is my usual fashion, as if I had the whole of eternity before me.’ This sums up Ella Maillart’s approach to travel; she liked travelling slowly, absorbing the culture and she understood the importance of finding the similarities rather than the differences between people. It was this inquisitiveness about other people … Read more
Mary Lutyens, who became the acknowledged world expert and writer on Krishnamurti, was only two years old when her mother, Lady Emily Lutyens, became a theosophist. In 1911 Krishnamurti and his brother Nitya were brought to England by Mrs Besant and as Lady Emily took the two boys ‘under her wing’, the young Mary grew … Read more
Joe Links was a modest man who was extremely wise, versatile and able; he was always polite and worked hard all his life not to make an enemy. ‘I have had a very private life and I hope to go on being private for what’s left of it,’ he said in 1989. He was born … Read more
EMILY HAHN ‘I have deliberately chosen the uncertain path whenever I had the choice…A more important freedom was that which made it possible to travel ‘ wrote Emily Hahn in China to Me (1944). In 1930 after making some money from her first book Seductio ad Absurdum: The Principles and Practices of Seduction (1930) Hahn … Read more
Martha Gellhorn was one of the finest war-correspondents of the twentieth century. She learnt her craft for war reporting in the Spanish Civil War where she worked for Colliers; this was where she grew up politically: ‘We knew, we just knew, that Spain was the place to stop fascism. This was it. It was one … Read more
Ivan Chambers, the witty, erudite and distinguished bookseller has died at the age of ninety five. Chambers was born in Philippopolis in Bulgaria on January 20th 1902, where his father was working on the financial side of a silk spinning factory. He returned to England as a small child and was educated at St George’s … Read more
As a child in London, Lesley Blanch and her parents were often visited by the Traveller, a mysterious Russian, who enthused the young Lesley with Siberian stories and tales of his daring-do. This passion for Russia and things Russian never left her: the ‘Love of my heart, the fulfilment of the senses and the kingdom … Read more