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When Australian journalist David Hirst died in 2013, he was roundly celebrated, in this newspaper and others, as one of the few mainstream commentators to have predicted and warned against the 2008 financial crisis. His Fairfax column Planet Wall Street
In 2012, on the 26th anniversary of the evacuation of Pripyat, the city at the heart the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, I boarded a bus with a group of tourists and headed out to the site of the disaster. I had
Even before I arrived in Varanasi, I knew I wanted to reread the Varanasi section of Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. A freelance writer is always on the lookout for potential story ideas that will allow him
I was supposed to be in Raxaul, on the Indian side of the Nepalese border, at eight o’clock in the morning. There had been difficulties from the get-go. The Mithila Express, the direct train from Kolkata, had been fully booked
It has been a good year for the obituarists among us. I suppose every year is, when you think about it, though it nevertheless seems that there have been more obituaries than usual lately, at least within my own particular
In his controversial book War is Beautiful, David Shields took aim at the New York Times. He wrote that the newspaper’s photographic coverage of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq both “enchanted and infuriated” him, arguing that many of the
The Ganges flow faster in Rishikesh. It is the first thought I have as I cross the Ram Jhula bridge to the eastern bank of the river, where the ashram ghats lead down to the water. I was recently in
From Janpath Road in the centre of Delhi, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts appears almost deserted. I’m at the wrong gate, but the security guard manning it lets me slide through anyway and points me in the