Literary city guides, bookshops, writers’ haunts and travel inspired by books and authors
There are cities where literature is something you go looking for. And then there is Vienna. Here, it is difficult to walk very far without stumbling across a place where someone wrote, argued, read, drank too much coffee, fell in love, developed a theory about the human mind or decided that civilisation was probably doomed….
Budapest is the sort of city that makes reading feel like an activity rather than a way to kill time. You can sit beneath gilded ceilings in a café once crowded with poets and newspaper editors, browse a bookshop occupying the site of another famous literary café, then cross the Danube and drink coffee in…
A slow literary weekend in Paris, from the bookstalls of the Seine to the cafés of Saint-Germain, with time for a notebook, a glass of wine and the pleasure of getting a little lost. Paris has always belonged to writers. They came for cheap rooms and long afternoons in cafés. They argued over manuscripts, borrowed…
Prague has the kind of atmosphere that feels literary before you know anything about its writers. Narrow passages disappear between Gothic towers. Dark doorways sit beneath elaborate façades. Old cafés still feel like places where someone might spend an afternoon filling a notebook. Then there is the Vltava, the castle above it, and a city…
Bath is the sort of city that can make you feel as though you’ve accidentally wandered into a novel. There are crescents of honey-coloured stone, narrow passages disappearing behind grand façades, old assembly rooms, gardens made for promenading and streets that seem almost suspiciously well suited to chance encounters. And writers noticed. Jane Austen lived…
Old Bookshops, Writers’ Pubs, Oscar Wilde and a Little James Joyce There are cities with literary histories, and then there is Dublin. For a relatively small capital, Dublin has produced an almost ridiculous number of writers: Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw, Bram Stoker, Jonathan Swift, Seamus Heaney and plenty…
Paris has always belonged to writers. They came for cheap rooms and long afternoons in cafés. They argued over manuscripts, borrowed money from booksellers, drank too much wine and filled notebooks at tiny tables overlooking the street. Hemingway came here. So did Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Oscar Wilde, George Orwell and countless others. Some…
There are cities that have literary histories, and then there is Edinburgh. Dark stone buildings rise above narrow closes. Medieval lanes disappear beneath archways. Secondhand bookshops seem permanently caught in another century, while Gothic spires puncture a skyline that can turn from golden to brooding grey in the space of an afternoon. It is difficult…