Some places feel like home even if you’ve never been there before. Buenos Aires was like that for me. I arrived at the end of my first visit to South America, a life-shifting backpacking trip through Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Chile and Argentina after giving up a job as a news and sports reporter for the Evening Standard. In some sense, part of me never left the city.
These travels cemented an interest in South America that developed in childhood from a disparate patchwork of sources. Growing up in South London, I was captivated by stories of the Amazon and the Inca Empire, by The Mysterious Cities of Gold cartoon, Willard Price’s Amazon Adventure and fleeting clips of Diego Maradona, Gabriel Batistuta and Carlos Valderrama. Later I devoured Michael Palin’s TV travelogues, David Attenborough’s documentaries, Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt and Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express.
My time in South America also prompted a change of career. I moved into travel writing and ultimately relocated to Buenos Aires for a year. There, I frequently came across fragments of British history and culture: the English-language Buenos Aires Herald newspaper, a shuttered Harrods store on the main shopping strip, the nearby Richmond café.
Close to my apartment in Villa Crespo were streets named ‘Thames’, ‘Darwin’ and ‘FitzRoy’. Farther afield, there were intriguingly titled suburbs, towns and cities (‘Hurlingham’, ‘William C. Morris’) and football clubs (‘River Plate’, ‘Newell’s Old Boys’).
I came across British schools, polo clubs and rugby teams, as well as a Welsh-Argentine community in Patagonia. It soon became apparent that Britain and Argentina’s links ran far deeper than simply conflicts in the South Atlantic and rivalries on the football pitch.
These experiences were echoed across the continent. Everywhere I went, I stumbled upon forgotten stories and unexpected connections between Britain and South America, a history I wasn’t taught about in school and didn’t see represented in the media or popular culture.
As I travelled across Bolivia to research my first book, Crossed Off the Map, I came across a graveyard of British-built trains on the edge of the world’s biggest salt flat, a notorious Amazonian rubber trader with a home in Hampstead, a tall tale about a British diplomat stripped naked, tied to an ass and kicked out of La Paz.
I read about Walter Raleigh’s search for El Dorado in what would become the British colony of Guyana, a land laboured by enslaved Africans and indentured South Asians; British soldiers who fought alongside Simón Bolívar in the continent’s wars of independence; a town built by a British railway company in southern Brazil.
But the stories that most captured my imagination come from the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. Travelling from the Atacama Desert to Tierra del Fuego, Easter Island to SouthGeorgia, I slowly unearthed a shared history spanning five centuries and featuring nitrate kings and wool barons, footballers and pirates, polar explorers and radical MPs, cowboys and missionaries.
From ghost towns in the desert to far-flung ranches in the sub-polar tundra. Rusting whaling stations in the South Atlantic to an isolated railway built by convicts. The southernmost city on the planet to a crumbling port known as the ‘Jewel of the Pacific’.
On the way, I learned about Britain’s enduring impact on Argentina, Chile and Uruguay – from sparking wars, forging national identities and redrawing borders to a tangled role in their colonisation and decolonisation – and how these countries have shaped Britain in profound and unexpected ways.
Eventually, after 10 years of writing and research, these places, characters and stories came together in Small Earthquakes.
Long before Sanctuary was published, I worked in immigration and asylum law at a top-ranked firm in Tottenham. There, I developed an indignant, sometimes self-righteous disdain for our government’s treatment of vulnerable migrants and asylum seekers. If we are the protagonists of our own lives, the Home Office was my antagonist. We fought them day in, day out on our clients’ behalf, essentially to protect basic human rights. It was rewarding, while also gruelling.
Following the recent sad death of 
Continuing the theme of travel, Daniel Stables’s article for the National Geographic Traveller, 
We start with Seth Thevoz, whose work continues to rattle the crockery in Westminster. An archived extract doing the rounds captures his characteristic mix of archival ferreting and wry prose, reminding readers why his investigations travel so well beyond the committee room 
On geopolitics, Joe Luc Barnes has been charting the EU’s renewed attention to Central Asia. His recent video explainer lays out the energy, security and trade stakes with clarity, the sort of briefing you can watch over a coffee and come away feeling properly briefed. 
In music and mythmaking, Sean Egan’s Decade of Dissent has drawn nods from both niche and mainstream outlets. All About The Rock spotlighted the book’s case that 1960s Dylan changed more than just chord progressions 
And then there is Tim Willasey-Wilsey, everywhere at once. Reviews have been generous, from The Telegraph’s take on The Spy and the Devil 
For nearly eight decades, the Royal family has been gracing the red carpet to see the most eagerly anticipated film of the year. Since 1946, the Royal Film Performance has been an annual highlight of the entertainment social calendar, where cinema’s most famous icons have come face to face with royalty.
Atop the Ozark Mountains, Rolland Comstock lived in what was described as “a Grimm Fairy tale.” With his pet wolves roving the estate and a world-famous book collection to obsess over, Rolland was no ordinary country lawyer. When he was murdered, Rolland’s story turned into a tragic mystery; one some did not want to see solved. This intimate true crime tale not only seeks to resolve the question of who killed this man but also to examine his life. It is a thriller from the perspective of the one character who can no longer tell the story himself.
After a painful breakup, Lena escapes to an artists’ colony on a remote Scottish island, but as the idyllic retreat unravels into paranoia and decay – with dead birds washing ashore and tensions rising – she discovers that the quest for wellness may be more toxic than healing. In an age obsessed with wellness, escapism, and curated perfection, The Colony offers a chilling, thought-provoking reflection on how easily utopias can become dystopias.
Author Andy Boot says: “I have always thought we forget that police dogs are more than just the heroes we occasionally see in the media. They are that and much, much more. They are all remarkable. In writing this book the intention is to tell a select series of stories about a few amazing animals that defined the history and purpose of the dog in service to the public. These canine crimebusters speak for the history of all these incredible dogs. It was a privilege to record this history and just a few of the many stories they could tell.”
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