18 October 2026

Greetings!

I hope this finds you very well this week! I’m still enjoying my shore leave here in Riga, where the autumn colors are reaching their peak. The season for tourists is drawing to a close, though not of course the season for bachelor parties!

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I’ve been deep in research about how artists brought the Caribbean to the canvas over the centuries, which has been very deep and enjoyable work. The topic is slightly out of my wheel house, which has made it even more enjoyable. This is for a talk in the Caribbean on Seabourn Ovation at the end of the year — I’m also working on a rollicking overview of lady pirates, which is shaping up very nicely.

I discovered a new Italian food shop in Riga, so we’ve been enjoying a lot of pasta, as well as the usual autumn line up of soups and stews. Nothing earth-shattering, but very enjoyable!

This week is an eclectic grouping of books that I felt really needed to be in Books for Travelers, and that urgency is really the only thing that they have in common, except that they are all immensely enjoyable.

Andrew Roberts’s Napoleon: A Life runs to some 800 pages, and it was the first single-volume biography to draw on the full published edition of the Emperor’s roughly 33,000 letters. The result is both encyclopedic and compulsively readable: I just finished it and feel the urge to start at the beginning again. Roberts takes the Corsican boyhood seriously, traces the legal reformer who also muzzled the press, and lets the letters to Joséphine reveal a correspondence that reads more like a business ledger than a romance, before closing with an unexpectedly moving account of the final years on Saint Helena.

Roberts admires his subject openly, and that sympathy sometimes tips into advocacy, particularly where the human cost of the wars is concerned. Read it in chunks, with a decent map of early nineteenth-century Europe at your elbow, before a Western Mediterranean voyage that calls at Toulon, Ajaccio, or Marseille, or before a few days among the monuments of Paris. If 800 pages feels daunting, the audiobook, narrated by John Lee, makes an excellent companion for a long flight.

Tom Holland’s Persian Fire tells the story of the Greco-Persian Wars, from Marathon in 490 BC to Salamis ten years later, and it moves with the pace of a good historical novel. What sets it apart is the room Holland gives to Persia itself: the Achaemenid Empire appears as a sophisticated civilization in its own right, run on roads, logistics, and tribute, rather than as a pantomime villain massing at the gates of Athens.

The Greeks, meanwhile, squabble, scheme, and occasionally change sides, and the so-called Greek miracle emerges from the friction between high ideals and plain self-interest. Holland sometimes chooses the more vivid version of a story where the evidence is thin, so keep a pinch of salt within reach. For anyone bound for mainland Greece, the Aegean islands, or the coast of western Turkey, it is the ideal first book on the reading list.

Most visitors know Mallorca as an island of beaches and beer halls, and Thomas Niederste-Werbeck, a former magazine editor who has known the island since his youth and now runs a design studio in Artà, takes his readers inland, where the cooking is better. A Taste of Mallorca is a map of the island drawn almost entirely in meals: each chapter profiles a restaurant, café, or country house in the Serra de Tramuntana, on the central plain of Es Pla, or in the gentle hills around Artà, with a handful of recipes and an insider tip for a nearby walk, beach, or shop.

Janne Peters’s photographs give courtyards and coastlines as much room as the plates. As a cookbook it is uneven, since many recipes come from ambitious restaurant kitchens, but the pa amb oli, the coca flatbread, and the orange cake reward the home cook handsomely. At some 240 oversized pages, it belongs on the coffee table before you go, and not in your day bag.

Be sure to check in with the Destination Resources Reading Lists, which I update regularly with new books, podcasts, TV and film, and other resources designed to make your travel meaningful. I did a big update recently, changing the format to make it easier to navigate. Visit via this link!

The lemons followed me home from Giardini Naxos, and they have taken over the Giardini Naxos Gift Bag, my new ShopMy collection of what came back aboard with me from Sicily, and a few things I wish had. At the center of the collage sits Vietri’s Magnolia Head, a watchful young woman crowned in white blossom and sculpted by hand in terra cotta, after the old Sicilian custom of setting ceramic heads on balconies and doorsteps. Around her are the pieces I would most like to find under the tree: Borsalino’s Amedeo Panama for the climb up to Taormina, a Muzungu Sisters coffawoven from dwarf palm near Palermo and dressed in yellow pom-poms, a little gold Limoncello necklace, and Jo Malone’s Basil & Neroli, which smells of basil on the windowsill and orange blossom below Etna. For the cook on your list, there is Ursula Ferrigno’s Cucina Siciliana and a tin of hand-harvested Trapani sea salt. For the friend who is impossible to buy for, there is a brass lemon-branch curtain tieback and a Limoncello phone case, which will be photographing lemons all winter in any case.

The collage only scratches the surface, because the Giardini Naxos Gift Bag runs to sixty-four pieces. Dolce & Gabbana’s pistachio panettone, baked by the Fiasconaro family in the Madonie mountains, arrives in a painted tin that will outlive the cake by several decades. It belongs on the table beside the Bialetti x Dolce & Gabbana Sicilian cart moka pot and a jar of Fortnum & Mason’s Sicilian lemon curd. Andrea Brugi’s hand-carved olive wood Dad Spoon, il Buco Vita’s fiore di sale, a Microplane zester for the lemons, The Merchant of Venice’s Sicilian citrus soaps, and Brendratti’s Fiore silk scarfwould fill a stocking or two very nicely. Browse the whole Giardini Naxos Gift Bag at your leisure. It is the easiest way I know to send a little Sicilian sunshine to someone you love this winter.

I am steadily tackling my photo archive and so had a lot of opportunity to listen to great podcasts this week! As I say in my review of Napoleon: A Life, I’m rather tiptoeing towards Napoleon. I’m planning a big talk on him for a Smithsonian Journeys cruise that takes in not only Corsica, but also beautiful Elba. But, as a lifelong Anglophile and someone who spent 20+ years living in Moscow, I’m sort of hard wired to think of Napoleon as the baddy. Napoleon: A Life was a huge help, as was this episode from The Rest is History: Young Napoleon: The Shadow of the Guillotine. I also dipped into a longer series on Napoleon from Noiser, to which I may well return during my two upcoming crossings.

If you are feeling slightly daunted by Persian fire, consider listening to a few podcasts about the topic first. The Ancients have a superb round up episode that will put you in the picture effortlessly. If you want the action and suspense of the spectacular Greek victory at the Battle of Salamis, look no further than this episode on Salamis by In Our Time.

I had trouble finding a lot of source material for my new 8 Hour Guide to Palma de Mallorca, but I stumbled across the charming Majorca Mallorca podcast and enjoyed several episodes about what it is like to live there today.

I jumped for joy when The Rest is History announced they were delving into all things King Arthur — one of my favorite topics and a favorite lecture, which I will be giving on both of the crossings. I love King Arthur to bits, and I’m equally fascinated with how the story developed through the centuries. It is that double helix narrative that I use in my talks, which took a huge amount of time to weld together, but I’m so happy with the results! Enjoy the first episode in the mini-series here.

I’m polishing up a finished outline about lady pirates and wondering why on earth I waited so long to put this together. I found this podcast about Grace O’Malley from Not Just the Tudors very enjoyable and enlightening!

​8 Hours in Palma de Mallorca: The City Mallorcans Call Ciutat​

​A Taste of Mallorca Review: The Island, Kitchen by Kitchen​

​The Transatlantic Reading List: 21 Books for Crossing The Atlantic​

​Regent Grandeur Reading List: 14 Essential Books to Pack​

​Regata Storica: Venice’s Oldest Race, Newest Pageant​

​8 Hours in Málaga: What to Do in Andalusia's Coastal Capital​

I am looking forward to another few weeks in Riga before I have to solve the tricky packing issue of packing one (maybe 2?) suitcases for two months in 3 separate climactic zones.

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