Kate Whitehead

North Korea’s top end has enough stunning scenery to make you almost forget you are in the world’s most repressive state. Almost. North Korea has been open to tourists since 1987, but it is only in the past few years that the hermit kingdom has seen visitors arrive in any significant number. Those who come…

The chairman of Heywood Hill, a London bookstore, tells Kate Whitehead about the snake in the bath at his Shek O ‘shack’ and playing Scrabble in Myanmar with diplomats sacked by the SLORC.

Dapiran covered Article 23, the government’s campaign of ‘lawfare’ and the expulsion of pro-democracy lawmakers at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, but says he still has great hope for the city’s future

Kate Whitehead talks to three specialists

Transformative travel enables people to break away from the stresses of modern life by finding eco-villages, social projects and farms David Casey was in his early 20s, a fresh University of California, Berkeley, graduate, when he first encountered the gift economy through the phenomenally successful Couch Surfing website. He was blown away by the way…

Sedaris, an author and long-time contributor to The New Yorker, says he is trying to avoid becoming a cranky old man who always complains David Sedaris sounds as though he’s got the post-holiday blues – or perhaps it’s just the dry, laconic tone in which he speaks. His house in the south of England has…