10 Great "New Yorker" Travel Pieces: #5 Anthony Bailey's "Island Walk"

Illustration based on photo from thegeorge.co.uk

In this series, I choose ten of my favorite New Yorker travel pieces, one per month, and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is Anthony Bailey’s great “Island Walk” (September 8, 1975)

In this evocative piece, Bailey circles the Isle of Wight on foot, tracing its resorts, ruins, poets, ferries, prisons, and family history. The island is located a few miles off the south coast of England. Bailey walks it in five days. He starts and ends in Ryde. Here’s a summary of each of his days:

Day 1

Bailey crosses from Portsmouth, on the mainland, to Ryde. He goes by hovercraft: 

The hovercraft dashed with a buzzing, chain-saw noise and a mushy, limousinelike motion across Spithead. The March morning was clear, but spray flew in thick sheets past the windows. There was no view. The twenty passengers looked at each other for their reactions. Then the driver, who had a veteran-R.A.F.-fighter-pilot mustache, throttled back, and the machine climbed Ryde beach like a fat crocodile, scattering shingle, and finally—as if punctured—settled slowly with its engine cut.

He walks through Ryde, stopping at the entrance to the golf course “to choose a path that would start me counterclockwise around the island, along the north shore—with the wind, if not quite at my back, at least behind my right shoulder.” He takes a path that runs between hedges across the links. The path becomes a lane in Binstead Village and then a path again through a grove of trees. Bailey keeps walking and comes to the meadows of Quarr Abbeys:

The church, built in 1911-12, has Catalan motifs, while the gables of the nearby abbey rise in steps, like those of houses in Amsterdam. The effect of the buildings was strong, though for me diluted by the trees, and not at all displeasing. No monks were visible. In their stead, a herd of Friesian cows ambled up to a hedge and peered at me in a friendly fashion as I walked by. 

Bailey continues on toward Osborne House, “a favorite hideaway of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.” He’s not impressed with the place: “Osborne is ugly.” He heads downhill into East Cowes, “a scrappy collection of houses, factories, and boatyards on the east bank of the Medina River.” He takes a ferry across the river and books in at the Gloster Hotel: “From my room at the Gloster Hotel I looked out over the mouth of the Medina. Out in the Solent, large ships passed on their way to Southampton.”

He has dinner on the Medway Queen, a paddle-wheel ferry steamer that has been converted into a club and restaurant. It’s moored in a former millpond a few miles up the Medina. The Medway Queen reminds him of other old paddlers he used to see when he visited the island as a child. In one of the piece’s most beautiful passages, he writes,

None of the old Isle of Wight paddlers were rescued from the breaker’s yard, but the Medway Queen furnishes an upstanding example of the type—plumb-stemmed and flush-decked, with a skinny twenty-five-foot-high yellow funnel, sharply raked aft, and an open bridge lined with brass handrails and white canvas dodgers. The white wooden paddle boxes are elegantly made, with the ship’s name set into the curved top, and the crest of her first owners—a white horse rampant—surrounded by scrollwork over the hub of the paddle wheel. Below, the engine room can be seen from open alleyways. The engine frames are painted bright green, the pistons, rods, and cranks are polished steel, and the controls and steam gauges are shining brass and copper. There is checkered steel plating underfoot. Without much difficulty, you can imagine steam whistling up from the cylinders, bells ringing, the handles of the engine-room telegraph moving, and then the pistons going slowly in and out and the long, polished arms cranking the paddle wheels round. Coming to the island as a child, I would watch this and then run up the companionways to stand on deck behind the funnel out of the wind or perch on one of the seats that looked like rolltop desks and also served, if needed, as life rafts. The decks were of pine laid over steel and caulked rather sloppily with black tar. Approaching Ryde Pier, I used to watch the lad who had the job of heaving the line used by men on the pier to haul up the first mooring warp. He had a dedicated expression, and wore black boots, navy trousers, and a coarse black turtleneck sweater with the words “Southern Railway” curved across his chest in red.

After dinner, Bailey returns to the Gloster and has a nightcap in the bar.

Day 2

He has breakfast at the Gloster and then heads out, walking by the Royal Yacht Squadron and along the stone-walled Princes Esplanade. He walks on: 

Then the mid- and late-Victorian houses suddenly stopped, and, past a pink marine beacon, the Solent stretched away to the mainland—marked by the three-hundred-foot-high chimney of a power station. To judge from the tilt of a buoy off Egypt Point, the tide was rushing east. Small waves sucked and splashed between moss-and-seaweed-covered rocks. A group of men, wearing the tieless shirts, pullovers, and old suit jackets favored by British laborers, were working at the end of the footpath. 

He heads inland, “past some quite horrible little corrugated-iron bungalows, several old railway carriages converted to living quarters, and small houses covered with the stucco pebble dash that was the popular between-the-wars facing material.” This is Gurnard. 

Beyond Gurnard, he walks south for a mile or so:

A westerly fork brought me right through a muddy farm, where two milkmaids, quite fetching in white smocks and hoots, were moving churns into a shed. And then, abruptly, I was on top of a rise looking south toward the interior of the island: green fields with white gulls and black crows sitting in them; the dark woods of Parkhurst forest; and, farther distant, the range of downs, now patchily illuminated by shafts of light that fell dramatically from a thick group of curdling creamy-gray clouds. What British forecasters term a “bright” day had quickly become what they call “unsettled” and was on the way to becoming “showery.” Two schoolboys bicycled past, wearing blue gabardine raincoats of a kind I remembered as being not altogether waterproof. I donned my black lightweight plastic mac. Rain fell for a minute, and afterward the air was sweet with it—it hung in the grass verges and bramble hedges. A second shower fell—big drops this time, splashing me in the face while the sun shone in the fields beyond.

His road passes through a wood: “tall trees with a northeasterly tilt and, in their tops, a rookery, full of noisy, gregarious black birds with ragged wings.” Then he’s in Porchfield. He follows a road that parallels one of the arms of Newton Harbor: “The smell of marsh and mud envelops the village, which lies at the head of a network of creeks.” 

For lunch, he stops at the New Inn, in Shalfleet, the village at the southwestern fork of Newtown Harbor. He spends the afternoon walking from Shalfleet to Alum Bay, near the western extremity of the island. He passes through Yarmouth, crosses the River Yar bridge, and follows a path through fields to Colwell Bay, and the village of Totland, “a shabby-genteel region of bungalows, holiday chalets, caravan camps, and boarding houses.” At Alum Bay, he views the Needles, “worn chalk pinnacles that form the ragged western point of the island.” Here he boards a bus and returns to Cowes and the Gloster “in time for a restorative drink and dinner.”

Day 3

Next morning, Bailey’s father, who grew up on the island, drives him back to Alum Bay to resume his walk. They agree to meet up that evening at the Savoy Hotel in Shanklin. Bailey sets off up the north face of Tennyson Down. This is near the western end of the hills that run all the way across the island. He climbs diagonally, “occasionally using a well-anchored clump of grass for a handhold.” At the top, he takes in the view “of everywhere,” and notes the presence of “a stone Saxon-type cross, with a lightning rod at its top, a beacon to mariners and a monument to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, raised ‘by the people of Freshwater and other friends in England and America.’ ” He then descends to Freshwater Bay where he sees a kestrel “high on a thermal above the downs, winging across the wind with its wings still, banking and unbanking in easy flight.” He goes along the beach, “smooth, oval, oyster-colored stones, a few inches long, cracking together dryly” as he walks over them. He heads uphill again, across the golf course which covers the west flank of Compton Down. 

He walks six miles across the downs— Compton, Brook, Westover, Brighstone, and Limerstone—in two hours, “on the best walking surface in the world: turf planted on chalk.” Past a radar station on Limerstone Down, he descends into Shorwell and visits the Church of St. Peter. He climbs out of Shorwell on the road to Chale. After a mile or so, he turns off at a place called Beckfield Cross and heads eastward along a muddy lane, past a farm, and across fields into a broad valley. This is the headwaters of the Medina River:

There was no bridge, but a small embankment carried the footpath across the low, wet ground. At one point, where the two-foot-wide stream trickled through a conduit, short, ivy-covered brick walls made a place to lean and look down the valley, an unprepossessing area of scrubby copse called the Wilderness. The hand of man was more visible in the ditches here, with clean mud showing on their sides, roots cut, bracken and branches stacked in neat piles, and black ash on the ground where hedges had been burned back. 

He comes out beyond the Wilderness onto a country road by Great Appleford Farm, “whose house and buildings seemed to grow out of the ground in the same fashion as the surrounding trees.” After a slight jog to the northeast, he follows a course he hopes will bring him to a disused railway line running south from Newport to Ventnor. Past a farmyard and a village, past a site on which new bungalows were being built, past the Yarborough Arms public house, he reaches the track—or, rather, he reaches the embankment on which the track had been: “There were no rails or sleepers left—only a suspicion of a footpath, which wandered through brambles, gorse, and bracken, and was occasionally crossed by a barbed-wire fence, under which I slithered.” This location, where the railroad tracks used to be, triggers a vivid memory:

Long ago, when I travelled on the island trains, the Newport-Ventnor line had already been abandoned, but the trains on the rest of the system were recognizably trains, with three or four small carriages, each divided into perhaps a dozen compartments, and a locomotive with a late-Victorian smokestack at one end and a coal bunker at the other, behind the cab. The cab had porthole-like windows front and rear, for the engines ran forward up the line and back in the other direction. Each passenger compartment was lined with facing banks of heavily upholstered straight-backed seats, behind whose plump, stiff cushions I always as a child ran my hands, having once found a ten-shilling note. Above the seats was a handle, to be directed one way to cold, the other to hot, connected haphazardly to heating pipes underneath. Next, set behind glass in mahogany frames, came a row of faded brown photographs depicting the delights of, say, Seaview Pier, Blackgang Chine, or Sandown High Street. Above them was a luggage rack of net strung from wrought-iron supports. In the curved ceiling three small light bulbs glowed a dim yellow when the train passed through Wroxall tunnel. The carriage doors had handles only on the outside. To get out, you had to seize a leather strap and lower the window sash so that you could reach the outside brass handle, which always seemed stiff. Having failed to get out in time, you could resort courageously to the red emergency cord running above the windows (“Penalty for Improper Use Five Pounds”). Most of the railway system was single-track. To avoid accidents, the engine drivers had to collect a handle from a signalman at one end of a single-track section and hand it over at the other; oncoming trains could not work the switches to enter the section without the handle. My father took the train to school in Ryde, and had to put up with a lot of joshing because en route he delivered milk from my grandfather’s Shanklin dairy to his store in Ryde. When Grandfather took the train, he annoyed the engine drivers (and embarrassed my father) by never using the underground passageway between platforms but always crossing the tracks in front of the engines, at the last moment. Like the paddle-wheel ferry steamers, the engines bore the names of island towns and villages. It was my hope as a boy to ride behind each one of them—Ashey, Havenstreet, Godshill, Calbourne, Chale were the names of some—but I didn’t make it, and they are gone. 

He walks the old track for a while and then, when it gets boggy, heads off across several fields – “thickly hedged and fenced” – that slanted down in one corner. He writes, 

I should have realized what this tilt meant: the field drained that way. But I had a nervous, trespassing feeling and kept going, for the road was now visible. I began hopping from dry clod to dry clod, and soon was clodhopping in a morass. My last hop landed me shin-deep in something like quicksand, but stickier. I glucked slowly forward, reaching at, last the bank of a little stream and what looked like a footbridge, made of a single pipe, with a sign beyond it facing the road. I thought I should peer round at the sign before setting foot on the bridge. It said, “11,000 Volt Cable.” Well, it was perhaps thoroughly insulated, but I did without it, gathering my reserves and visions of old Olympic feats—I swung my arms and lifted the weight of my muddy shins across the brook, and, with a slither and flump on the far brink, just made it.

Covered with mud, he heads for St. Lawrence, on the south shore, just round the tip of St. Catherine’s Point. He briefly stops at St. Lawrence Old Church, “a little twelfth century stone shed stuck, like a root barn, under the shoulder of the road,” and then carries on to the south shore. Here there’s a formation called the Undercliff, “a giant step formed in the edge of the island when long sections of cliff face collapsed and slid down.” He walks along a “rough, rabbit-warreny path” through fields and then down past “putting greens, a miniature artificial waterfall, tea gardens, and a series of little lawns with dinky green-and-yellow shelters, seats, and benches” into Ventnor. He takes a bus back to Shanklin, gets a room at the Savoy Hotel, and dines with his father.

Day 4

Bailey has breakfast at the Savoy, in Shanklin. He talks on the phone with his Uncle Jim, “who apart from running his chain of stores is a local magistrate and chairman of the Board of Visitors at Parkhurst Prison.” At the invitation of Uncle Jim, Bailey visits the prison that morning. His account of his visit is omitted from “Island Walk”; it appears in the longer version of the piece (retitled “The Isle of Wight! The Isle of Wight!”) included in Bailey’s 1986 collection Spring Jaunts.

In the afternoon, Bailey walks with his father from Godshill, a few miles in from Shanklin, to Appuldurcombe, where his grandfather used to rent pasture for his herd and his father had come daily for milk. They return to Godshill and have a drink (Burts Special Bitter) at the Griffin pub. On their way back to Shanklin, they visit Horace Hoare, the town’s meteorological observer and have drinks (homemade curacao, raspberry wine) with him. Following that, they return to the Savoy and have dinner together. After dinner, they go for drinks at the Wine Lodge, where they’re joined by Uncle Jim. 

Day 5

Bailey walks from Ventnor out through Bonchurch, pausing in St. Boniface churchyard to look at Swinburne’s grave: “Time is dense here, and even the road, called Bonchurch Shute, is deep between banks and hedges, like a river worn into the ground.” He walks through Shanklin, “past the Savoy and Bailey’s, past private hotels with names like Sandringham and Manor Lodge, past the tumbled gardens of the Chine, and past the thatch and bargeboards of the few cottages left from the Shanklin of Keats’ time.” The tide is out. He walks along the beach from Shanklin to Sandown. He stops at the boathouse of Ivan Hooper, his uncle’s father-in-law, for a short visit, and then carries on to Sandown Pier: “I walked out over its weathered planking, between whose cracks one could see the sea rising and falling like a concertina.” He has half a pint of Double Diamond draft bitter, two Scotch eggs, a cold sausage, tomatoes, and some pickled onions in the Islander bar, and then walks up Sandown’s curving, hilly streets. He stops in front of a candy store window and notes the ranks of tall glass jars on the shelves – 

butter Brazils, acid-drop thins, mint scotch, mint bonbons, sherbet fruits, chocolate dragons, butter mints, kop kopps, butterscotch, assorted butters, chocolate-éclair candies, glacier mints, mint lumps, old-fashioned humbugs, chocolate toffees, clear mints, fruit drops, Brazil patties, licorice all-sorts, almond crescents, and barley sugars, not to mention innumerable brands and types of chocolate bars and indescribable cheap confections for children. 

He walks north from Sandown to Culver Cliff. He descends the north side of the cliff and walks the last ten miles of his trip – Bembridge, St. Helens, Seaview, and Ryde. He pauses at Brading Harbor to take in the view:

At Brading Harbor at low tide is a muddy creek, lined with houseboats— old patrol boats, fishing boats, cabin cruisers, and wartime floating bridge pontoons with all-year-round bungalow superstructures. Struts and posts hold the slimmer craft upright in their mud berths. Stovepipes come out at odd angles; decks are covered with tarpaper; one boat had a letter box where its anchor hawse pipe might once have been. At the head of the harbor, where the smell of the gasworks was strong, two swans and three pearl-gray cygnets cruised in the fresher waters of the eastern Yar.

Then onwards through St. Helen’s, “a pleasant and unpretentious village set round a long village green, across a muddy field and past a holiday camp,” and through the wet woods behind Node’s Point. At Seaview, he goes to the water. On Ryde East Sands, the tide is out a long way. He walks along the shorefront promenade, with its stone railings and sheltered seats, past Puckpool Point and St. John’s Park, and into Ryde. His father is waiting for him at the entrance to Ryde Pier, at the far end of which the ferryboat to the mainland is waiting.  “We’re in no hurry, are we?” his father says, over the racketing noise of a hovercraft coming in. “How about going the old way?” Bailey agrees. 

I love this piece. I love its details. I love its structure. I love its deep sense of place. Nothing dramatic happens. It’s just a vivid, wonderful, leisurely journey through a walker’s paradise. 

Tables for Two Tango: Hannah Goldfield's "Lhasa Fresh Food"

Photo by Christaan Felber, from Hannah Goldfield's "Lhasa Fresh Food"

This is the sixth post in my series “Tables for Two Tango,” a celebration of Hannah Goldfield’s and Helen Rosner’s wonderful New Yorker restaurant reviews. Each month I select a favorite piece by one or the other of them and try to say why I like it. Today’s pick is Goldfield’s delightful “Tables for Two: Lhasa Fresh Food” (May 20, 2019). 

I love soup. Two of the best soup descriptions I’ve ever read are in this piece. Lhasa Fresh Food is a Tibetan restaurant in the Elmhurst neighborhood of Queens, New York City, that serves dumplings, soups, stir-fries, and noodle dishes. Goldfield likes the dumplings and the noodles. But what she really savors are two soups – thenthuk and karsod. She writes,

Better yet is a traditional Tibetan soup called thenthuk, thick with hand-torn wheat noodles—described charmingly on the menu as “not longer than a thumb”—a few strands of glass noodles, bright-green bok-choy leaves, wood-ear mushrooms, translucent triangles of radish, red onion, and your choice of browned lamb, chicken, beef, or pork. Fresh cilantro floats on the surface of the cloudy, rich beef or vegetable broth, which is redolent of ginger, celery, and garlic and carries a subtle heat; the same beautifully balanced flavor profile is at work in a brothless, stir-fried version of the dish.

Of the karsod, she says,

But my favorite dish might be the karsod, another soup. With a putty-pale sheet of lightly oiled dough stretched over the top of the bowl, it resembles an uncooked potpie, a broadcast of blandness. To pierce the surface and access the piping hot broth inside is to be reminded that mild does not necessarily equate to boring. In a version with lamb, the simple, slightly gummy pastry and the clear, fragrant liquid, dotted sparingly with scallion, cilantro, and translucent coins of potato, provide an optimal canvas for the gently gamy flavor of the simmered meat—as humble yet surprising as the restaurant itself. 

What impresses me about these descriptions is their details. These soups may appear simple, but they’re not. Goldfield notes their subtle ingredients: “hand-torn wheat noodles”; “few strands of glass noodles”; “bright-green bok-choy leaves”; “wood-ear mushrooms”; “translucent triangles of radish”; “red onion.” That “clear, fragrant liquid, dotted sparingly with scallion, cilantro, and translucent coins of potato” is pure poetry. I’ve never forgotten it. 

March 30, 2026 Issue

For those of us hoping for regime change in Cuba, Jon Lee Anderson’s report, in this week’s New Yorker, is discouraging. He seems to say that even though the situation in Cuba has never been more dire, the Cuban people blame Trump, not their own rotten Communist government. Anderson says, “During my visit, everyone I talked to was worried about the country’s vulnerability, but few were worried about whether the government would survive.” His point that “Cuba has been through hard times before. The mythos of the Revolution is built around the people’s ability to endure” is true. My son-in-law Dayan, who is Cuban, says the same thing: “We’ve been through this before.” He’s quite fatalistic. He doesn’t see any change coming out of it. Is he right? Anderson seems to think so. He says, 

Even if negotiations with the U.S. yield an agreement to hold elections, Cuba has no organized political opposition that could run against the Communist Party, let alone take over the country. As a friend in Havana pointed out, there is no local equivalent of María Corina Machado, the opposition leader who helped encourage the intervention in Venezuela. The best-known dissidents are dead, imprisoned, or in exile, too far removed from recent politics to be taken seriously. The likelier scenario is that the next ruler will come from within the existing power structure—which, my friend suggested, means that little will change.

It’s too bad. What a waste of a golden opportunity to overthrow the bastards.

Postscript: Rossana Warren’s poem “Coots,” in this week’s issue, is excellent. I love that “Jagged surface of the city reservoir.” And “It would snow soon, / we walked fast, night was spreading its cloak, / the western skyline sparkled its broken glass, / and the birds in their tuxedos tightened their rings / so the water rippled glossily / out around them, catching glints” is inspired! I’m going to pay more attention to her work. She appears to be a sharp observer of nature. 

3 Great Thematic Travelogues: Structure

This is the fourth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite travel books – Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (1999), and Lawrence Osborne’s The Wet and the Dry (2013) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their structure.

These three travelogues are different from the ones I’ve considered in previous series. They don’t tell about a single journey down a river or across a land. They tell about a number of trips that share a common theme. The Old Ways comprises sixteen chapters, each chronicling one of Macfarlane’s excursions on an ancient footpath or sea lane. For example, in Chapter 4 (“Silt), he’s on an off-shore path called the Broomway. In Chapter 7 (“Peat”), he walks Manus’s path on the Isle of Lewis. In Chapter 11 (“Roots”), he’s in Spain, walking a branch-line of the Camino de Santiago. The chapters flow chronologically, starting with a walk along the Icknield Way in May, 2009. 

Chapter 15 (“Ghost”) is an exception. It doesn’t chronicle a Macfarlane journey. It’s a fascinating account of the poet Edward Thomas’s last days before he’s killed in the Battle of Arras, April 9, 1917. Thomas is the book’s guiding spirit. Macfarlane says of him, “He ghosted my journeys and urged me on.”

One structural feature of The Old Ways that I relish is the summary of narrative elements at the beginning of each chapter. They’re gorgeous abstract assemblages. Here, for example, is the summary of Chapter 3 (“Chalk”): 

An exultation of skylarks – Solid geology – Chalk dreams – The earliest paths – Departure – The accident – Bone for chalk – Path as direction of the spirit – Apocalypse & lockdown – A skylark’s eggs – Blind roads & shadow sites – Aerial photography as resurrection – The long-barrow sleeping place – Trench art – A ghost sense of stride – The wallabies of Buckinghamshire – An illusion of infinity – Late-day light – A strange collection of votaries.

Those are all ingredients of Chapter 3. You’d wonder how Macfarlane makes such an extraordinary assortment cohere, but he does. “The accident” refers to a mishap he experiences early in his travel as he sets out to explore the ancient chalk path known as the Icknield Way. Here’s what happened:

I was cycling downhill along the Roman road, near the Iron Age ring-fort, when the accident happened. Happy to be on the move, I let the bicycle gather speed. The rutted path became rougher, my wheels juddered and bounced, I hit a hunk of hard soil the size of a fist, the front wheel bucked and twisted through ninety degrees, the bike folded in upon itself and I crashed onto it, the end of the left handlebar driving hard into my chest.

This could’ve been a serious accident, ending not only Macfarlane’s journey that day, but his ensuing travels as well and this very book we’re reading. Fortunately, Macfarlane’s injuries aren’t as severe as he first thought; he manages to carry on. “So I cycled on to Linton, slowly,” he writes. “A warning, I thought superstitiously, had been issued to me: that the going would not be easy, and that romanticism would be quickly punished.”

Roger Deakin’s Waterlog is structured in the form of a journal. Like The Old Ways, it unfolds chronologically. Each of its thirty-six chapters is dated, except for the introduction and the conclusion. Deakin’s swimming journey begins April 23, 1997, in the Scilly Isles, and ends eighteen months later in Suffolk. In between, he swims in Hampshire, Cambridge, Norfolk, Wales, Worcestershire, Dartmoor, Cornwall, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Argyll, Jura, Northumberland, Essex, Kent, Somerset, London, and many other places as well.  

I love the journal format. To me, it’s the form most suited to conveying a journey’s sequential flow through time and space. It’s also quite straightforward – no fancy flashbacks or flashforwards. As Deakin says in Chapter 1 (“The Moat”), “Like the endless cycle of the rain, I would begin and end the journey in my moat, setting out in spring and swimming through the year. I would keep a log of impressions and events as I went.” That’s exactly what he does, in detail after marvelous detail. Here, for example, he tells about descending the Hell Gill gorge:

Courage up, I returned to the turbulent rim of the gorge and did what I knew might be an unwise thing. I couldn’t help it. I began to slide into the mouth of the abyss itself. I found myself in the first of a series of smooth limestone cups four or five feet in diameter and anything between three and five feet deep, stepped at an acute angle down a flooded gulley of hollowed limestone that spiralled into the unknown. In the low light, the smooth, wet walls were a beautiful aquamarine, their shining surface intricately pock-marked like the surface of the moon. All my instincts were to hold on, but to what? The ice and the water had polished everything perfectly. The torrent continually sought to sweep me with it, and so I slithered and climbed down Hell Gill’s dim, glistening insides, through a succession of cold baths, in one long primal scream.

That’s just one of Waterlog’s many vivid set pieces – descriptions of Deakin’s experiences as he swims his way through the British Isles.

In terms of structure, Osborne’s The Wet and the Dry is quite a cocktail – part travelogue, part memoir, part meditation. It comprises fifteen chapters, many of which are set in the Middle East. But there are also chapters that delve into Osborne’s personal history (“England, Your England,” “The Little Water,” “Bars in a Man’s Life”). And there’s a chapter (“The Pure Light of High Summer”) that discusses the Greek god Dionysus – god of intoxication. The structure is more thematic than chronological. The theme is drinking – a drinker’s journey through time and place. 

For me, the most memorable aspect of that theme is Osborne’s search for bars in dry or semi-dry countries such as Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Pakistan, Turkey, and Egypt. For example, in Chapter 8 (“New Year’s in Muscat”), he and his girlfriend Elena desperately scour Oman for a bottle of champagne to celebrate New Year’s Eve. They come up empty. In the end, they settle for watermelon juice. Osborne writes,

Elena had calmed a little, and when she had accepted the idea that we would not be drinking a bottle of champagne, she felt less hysterical, and we sipped the watermelon juices and waited. A great calm, suddenly. Midnight, and nothing happened. Everyone kept talking, eating, and smoking, and no one even looked up. We kissed and wondered if we had miscalculated the time. The orgy of midnight never happened.

In Chapter 10 (“My Sweet Islamabad”), Osborne is in Islamabad, one of the most dangerous, alcohol-hostile cities in the world. He decides he wants to have a drink there. He goes to a bar called Rumors in the Marriott Hotel, site of a brutal suicide truck bomb attack on September 20, 2008. Osborne comments, “No one doubted that the Marriott’s famous bar and it’s long-standing association with alcohol were one reason it was hit so viciously.” Osborne puts us squarely there in the Marriott as he makes his way to the bar:

I was taken there by a bellboy. Down an immensely lonely corridor, down a flight of stairs, turning left at a desolate landing with a lone chandelier, and down another flight of steps. At the bottom, like an S&M club buried under the sidewalk, was the neon for Rumors and the doors of the bar, shielded by security cameras designed to pick up errant Pakistanis. “This is bar,” the boy whispered firmly, pointing up to the door.

I went in, expecting a riotous speakeasy filled with drunken CIA men and off-duty Marines perhaps abetted, I was hoping, by a smattering of loose Pakistani Hindu women. But no such luck. There was, as always, no one there. I took in the fabric walls, the fringed seats, the two pool tables, and the foosball, as well as the dartboard next to a plasma TV playing an episode of the British sitcom EastEnders. It was a very British and homey pub. A barman in a waistcoat stood at his post cleaning beer glasses and watching me with great interest. He was Muslim, and it took him little time to joyfully admit that he had never tasted the nectar of Satan even once.

Osborne goes on to say that the bartender “made a mean gin and tonic.” The two men converse. Suddenly the power goes out. Osborne writes, “The barman lit a ghostly match, and we stared at each other across the bar in total darkness. Monday night at Islamabad’s hottest spot. He managed a fatalistic smile.” I savor this scene. Osborne’s search for bars is a form of quest that shapes the book’s narrative. 

My next post in this series will be on action. 

Acts of Seeing: Fuseta

Photo by John MacDougall

I love graffiti. I’m always on the lookout for it when I’m cycling. A few weeks ago, when I was in Portugal, I saw this work on the side of an old garage near the town of Fuseta. It stopped me in my tracks. I love the images of the horse and cacti. It’s like a scene from a spaghetti western. The colors are ravishing: marsala, ochre, lavender, orange, tan, hints of pale blue. That old armchair with the deep russet cushion is part of it, as are the other mysterious objects. The brick pattern, the flecked paint. It’s an amazing assemblage! My eyes devoured it. 

March 23, 2026 Issue

This week’s issue features a cover by the great Maira Kalman. An ecstatic bouquet of fuscia, magenta, hot pink, yellow, orange, purple blooms, with a profusion of green leaves, in a blue vase, it delights my eyes and lifts my spirits. Kalman is a supreme colorist. She painted one of my all-time favorite New Yorker covers – the March 14, 2005 “Just Duckie” – showing a blue-billed duck nesting on a woman's green-haired head. 

Inspired Sentence 9

Beauty lives, surely, in a harmonious excitement of particulars.

I believe this is true. It’s from John Updike’s “Logic Is Beautiful” (included in his 2005 essay collection Still Looking), a review of an exhibition of sculptures by Elie Nadelman. The essay’s title is Nadelman’s credo, not Updike’s. Nadelman believed that “All that is logical is beautiful, all that is illogical is inevitably ugly.” Updike disagreed. He says, “There is a hermetic quality to Nadelman’s statues, as if they have been sealed against infestations of illogical detail. In his later work, the layers of sealant get thicker and thicker, and toward the end his figures, fingerless and all but faceless, seem wrapped in veils as thick as blankets.” 

Updike argued for specificity. His own exquisite writing exemplified it. 

Tables for Two Tango: Hannah Goldfield's "Peter Luger Steak House" and Helen Rosner's "La Tête d’Or"

Photo by Gabriel Zimmer, from Hannah Goldfield's "Peter Luger Steak House")

For my fifth post in this series, I want to compare two “Tables for Two” pieces – one by Goldfield, one by Rosner – on the same subject – the steak house.

Goldfield, in her “Peter Luger Steak House” (March 29, 2021), says she heard from a friend that Brooklyn’s venerable Peter Luger Steak House was delivering takeout. She writes,

Until a few weeks ago, Peter Luger, which was founded in 1887, was just about the last New York restaurant I would have associated with takeout. I had loved it, once, but before the pandemic I hadn’t been in years. A family tradition of steak-fuelled birthday celebrations had fizzled out. On my last visit, in 2015, I’d sat in the overflow space upstairs, where wall-to-wall carpeting and generic banquet chairs were a sad substitute for the well-worn wooden floors and furniture that give the main dining areas the charming feel of a German beer hall. Luger’s atmosphere had always been at least half of the appeal; without it, the steep prices were hard to justify.

Goldfield decides to try it. She says, “My expectations for delivery were measured. Then they were exceeded.” She describes her experience:

Opening a plastic-and-aluminum deli container to find the iconic wedge salad was like seeing an old friend: the refreshing crunch of tightly coiled ruffles of iceberg, the surprisingly juicy chopped tomato, the chunky blue-cheese dressing, the unmistakable, thick-cut, heart-clogging bacon. I was similarly exhilarated by the creamed spinach, the fried potatoes, and the chocolate mousse, with its enormous dollop of schlag (suspiciously if delightfully reminiscent of Cool Whip).

It wasn’t so much that any of the dishes stood out on their own—although I did note, as ever, how easily a knife slid through rosy slices of the dry-aged porterhouse—as it was that they shouted “steak house” loud and clear, making for a combination that I would never replicate on my own and that brings me the coziest pleasure. One of my favorite parts of my earliest Peter Luger visits was when an inevitably brusque yet joke-cracking veteran waiter would toss a handful of gold chocolate coins on the table with the check. In a paper bag of condiments, I found my beloved foil-wrapped disks.

That detail about the gold chocolate coins is marvelous. I’ve never forgotten it.

The takeout meal inspires Goldfield to go to Peter Luger and have a meal there. She writes,

The other day, I ventured back to headquarters. To mark the return to limited-capacity dining, Peter Luger announced a corny gimmick: celebrity wax figures, on loan from Madame Tussauds, would be seated between tables of warm-blooded customers. My lunch reservation was for a booth outside, but, freshly vaccinated and double masked, I could steal a peek at Audrey Hepburn.

At my table, in the shadow of the historic Williamsburgh Savings Bank building, I ordered another wedge salad (rapture, again) and a burger, a beautiful mass of luscious ground beef whose iodine tang played perfectly off a sweet, salty slice of American cheese, a fat cross-section of raw white onion, and a big, domed sesame bun. Inside the restaurant, there were no wax figures to be found; they’d gone back to Times Square after just five days. The dining room looked the same as ever, if subdued.

That “beautiful mass of luscious ground beef whose iodine tang played perfectly off a sweet, salty slice of American cheese, a fat cross-section of raw white onion, and a big, domed sesame bun” is ravishing! 

The piece ends charmingly with a Holy Cow sundae and some savvy advice from a waiter:

Before dessert—a Holy Cow sundae, with vanilla ice cream, hot fudge, and walnuts, plus schlag and a cherry on top—I asked for a burger to go, a spirit lifter for my husband, hard at work at his desk. “How do you want it cooked?” my slightly surly server asked. I hesitated. Medium? Medium rare? No, medium. “Get it medium rare and it will be medium by the time you get it home,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye.

Now turn to Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two” review of La Tête d’Or (March 31, 2025), a Manhattan steak house owned and operated by the famed French chef Daniel Boulud.

Photo by Amy Lombard, from Helen Rosner's "Tables for Two: La Tête d'Or") 

Rosner begins by describing the restaurant itself:

Housed on the lobby level of a Flatiron office tower, La Tête is Boulud’s farthest-downtown restaurant, though there’s little downtown about the restaurant itself: it is vast, formal, and luxurious, très Boulud, from the plush, hotel-like reception area to the plush, burgundy-swathed lounge to the plush, sweeping dining room decorated in brown marble and blue velvet. The ceilings soar, the art is large and muted and gently abstract, the white linens on the tables glow like cream in the halo of Art Deco sconces and dramatically tubular chandeliers.

She likens the dining room to a stage:

A proscenium-size cutout in one wall reveals a dreamy tableau of a steak-house kitchen: butcher block and white tile, countertops artfully arranged with carnelian hunks of meat. It’s mostly for show: the real action of the real kitchen is hidden behind the rear wall of the diorama, though movement is visible, occasionally, around the edges of the backdrop, and white-jacketed cooks occasionally step into the show kitchen, plating and finishing this or that with the stoic composure of actors playing out a silent scene. A horizontal line of mirrors mounted periscopically across the top of the aperture allows diners to gaze at the workstations without any need to leave their very comfortable seats. Besides, much of the action comes to you: several of the restaurant’s dishes are prepared or plated tableside, on wheeled carts that servers glide showily around the dining room, dispensing Caesar salad and Dover sole in intimate command performances.

Rosner refers to the restaurant’s starter dishes as “foreplay.” “The meat is the thrust of the thing,” she says. The star of the menu is the prime rib. Rosner writes,

As the various table-service trolleys zigzag through the dining room, few diners look up from their conversations (or their phones). Not so when the wagon carting the “primal” of beef, from which each slab is sliced, comes around. Boulud takes his prime rib extremely seriously: only one primal is cooked at a time, a long, slow process that demands exacting attention; on one of my visits, a server sorrowfully conveyed the news that the most recent cut hadn’t been up to chef’s standards, and so none would be available for at least two more hours. Once carved and plated, each slice is draped on one end in a yellow veil of béarnaise from a copper pot, and on the other end in wine-dark bordelaise. The flesh of the meat shades from a carnation-pink medium-rare center to a deep, herb-scented outer crust. The near-melting fat cap shines like polished quartz. Bite for bite, it is truly one of the most beautiful steaks I’ve had the pleasure to consume, and it nearly earns every silly, self-serious flourish. Ignore the climate-ravaging effects of cattle ranching; ignore the plaque building up in your arteries; ignore the hundred-and-thirty-dollar price tag (which gets you sauces, two sides, and a black-pepper-inflected popover—something of a deal, compared with the nickel-and-dime exorbitance of a meat-and-sides meal à la carte). A well-prepared steak is goddam delicious.

That last line makes me smile every time I read it. 

Like Goldfield, in her Peter Luger review, Rosner ends her meal with an ice-cream sundae:

It is a strict rule of the steak house that dessert should be both childlike and wondrous, a reprieve after all the posturing and peacocking that came before. A menu might offer chocolate cake, apple strudel, a slice of cheesecake, a sticky slab of bread pudding, or, as at La Tête d’Or, a selection of oven-warm cookies. But just as essential to the steak house experience as the steak itself is the sundae—complex, frilly, multicolored, slightly absurd, an indulgence earned through innocence rather than through brute force. La Tête d’Or’s features soft-serve, your choice of swirled-together chocolate and coffee or swirled-together vanilla and a seasonal fruit flavor, their alternating stripes spiralling upward like a circus tent. It’s served in a metal coupe surrounded by a roulette of toppings in little bowls: tiny marshmallows, dehydrated berries, little bits of brownie, house-made rainbow sprinkles. The ice cream is, of course, magnificent, the chocolate sauce luscious, the bits of brownie divine. But something about this version was off, unsteady, a little wrong. There was no whipped cream—is it still a sundae without it? And there was no cherry on top.

Such a simple thing, the sundae, yet so crucial to the steak house experience. Peter Luger gets it right. La Tête d’Or doesn’t.  

Susan Sontag's "Pilgrimage" - Fact, Fiction, or Faction? (Part II)

Illustration by Aldo Jarillo, from Alex Ross's "What Went Wrong When Susan Sontag Met Thomas Mann?"

A few years ago, I posted a note here asking if Susan Sontag’s “Pilgrimage” is fact, fiction, or faction. The question arose as a result of Erin Overbey including Sontag’s piece in her anthology of New Yorker personal essays called "Sunday Reading: Personal Reflections" (December 19, 2021). In my post, I noted that “Pilgrimage” originally appeared in The New Yorker as fiction, and that it’s also included in Sontag’s posthumous collection Debriefing: Collected Stories (2017). The editor of that book, Benjamin Taylor, in his Foreword, refers to the contents as short stories. He says, “Craving more uncertainty than the essay allowed for, Sontag turned from time to time to a form in which one need only persevere, making up one’s mind about nothing: the infinitely flexible, ever-amenable short story.”

Now there’s another opinion to be considered. Alex Ross, in his recent “What Went Wrong When Susan Sontag Met Thomas Mann?" (March 14, 2026) describes “Pilgrimage” as “semi-fictional.” According to Ross, Sontag’s meeting with Mann did take place, but not exactly the way she said it did in “Pilgrimage.” For one thing, at the actual meeting, there were two people accompanying Sontag, not one, as she says in the story. For another, the person she airbrushed from the piece, Gene Marum, was the person who cold-called Mann and requested the interview. It appears that Sontag’s “Pilgrimage" is that unreliable hybrid called faction.  

March 16, 2026 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Sarah Larson’s “Talk of the Town” story “Big Time.” It’s a mini-profile of master rigger Joe Vilardi, who installed Michael Heizer’s new exhibition “Negative Sculpture” at a Gagosian gallery in Chelsea. The show, Larson says, “features ‘Convoluted Line A’ and ‘Convoluted Line B’ (2024), two eighty-seven-and-a-half-foot curved steel troughs that wend through the gallery’s floor like a figure skater’s tracks on ice.” These sculptures weigh more than eighteen tons. That’s nothing for Vilardi. Larson says that he’s worked with “a Who’s Who of colossal sculpture: Heizer and Serra, but also Simone Leigh, Jeff Koons, MOMA. The biggest and heaviest stuff can involve cranes, hydraulic gantries, barges, and police escorts.” 

Vilardi talks about the time he installed a Richard Serra work at Kenyon College:

“The vertical of the sculpture was sixty feet tall—massive. Years of planning, really difficult. A beautiful sculpture. We were all in awe as we were doing it,” Vilardi said. “You’re bringing in steel plates that weighed close to a hundred thousand pounds each, that had to be then stood up and then one leaned against the next. We had five cranes there, balancing these plates, guys up in baskets working the clamps and lining things up and welding. At the end of it, it’s pretty impressive. It’s crazy when you think, Look what we just accomplished. Who are we? We just started out as a bunch of riggers—and riggers are really what we are—and here we are assembling something, a combined weight of three hundred and fifty thousand pounds, sixty feet tall, in the middle of a courtyard of a school, that will be there—it could be there forever.”

Larson’s delightful story reminded me of another New Yorker piece on Michael Heizer’s work – Dana Goodyear’s brilliant “The Earth Mover” (August 29, 2016). Goodyear visits Heizer’s monumental “City,” in Garden Valley, Nevada, and describes it in detail. Here’s a taste:

In every direction, at every angle, wide boulevards disappeared around corners, to unseen destinations, leading me into depressions where the whole world vanished and all that was left was false horizon and blue sky. Fourteen miles of concrete curbs sketched a graceful, loopy line drawing around the mounds and roads. Ravens wheeled, and I startled at a double thud of sonic boom from fighter jets performing exercises overhead. I sat down in a pit; flies came to tickle my hands. It was easy to imagine myself as a pile of bones. Before no other contemporary art work have I felt induced to that peculiar, ancient fear: What hand made this, and what for?

Michael Heizer, City (Photo by Jamie Hawkesworth)

James Wolcott on John Updike

Portrait of John Updike by David Levine

A special shout-out to James Wolcott for his brilliant, witty, perceptive “What you can get away with” in the February 19 London Review of Books. It’s a review of John Updike: A Life in Letters. Actually, it’s more than that. It’s a reconsideration of Updike’s life and work. Wolcott says, “Updike’s standing in the literary hereafter remains profoundly iffy. It’s one thing to fall out of fashion, another to fall out of favour, and Updike seems to have fallen out of both while still being suspended mid-air, cushioned by the thermals while posterity figures out what to do with him.” 

Reading that, I found myself getting annoyed. Updike is one of my heroes. He hasn’t fallen out of fashion or favour with me. But as Wolcott proceeds with his review, it becomes clear that he, too, is an admirer, subject to certain caveats. Of the letters, he says, 

It’s easy to peck and paw at the letters, that’s what these cockspurs are for, but there’s no belying the tremendous heft of this selection, amounting to an authoritative autobiography supplemented with photographs, chronology and an index that doesn’t skimp. It’s all here, Updike in full, and almost none of it has gone stale. An unbroken arc from boyhood to infirmity, the gravity’s rainbow of a life, career and mind.

Wolcott is excellent on Updike’s relationship with The New Yorker. He says, “The longest, purest romance of Updike’s life was with the New Yorker, which began as an ‘adolescent crush’ – pre-adolescent, really: ‘I fell in love with the NYer when I was about eleven, and never fell out’ – and ripened into one of the most inspiring matings of man and magazine in the annals of troubadour song.”

He says further, “Updike went on to become one of the magazine’s most prolific contributors, his sentences nimble, airy and balletically turned out, his observational acuity on a whole other optical level, as if Eustace Tilley’s trademark monocle had conferred X-ray vision.”

The one aspect of Updike’s work that Wolcott deplores is his misogyny. He says, 

The reason Updike has fallen out of favour is more resistant to remedy. His stature as a literary artist precariously balances on a Woman Problem that was zeroed in on by Patricia Lockwood in the LRB (10 October 2019), piloting the Millennium Falcon through the corpus. 

Yes, I remember that Lockwood piece. What a bloodbath! Wolcott’s review provides a more positive, congenial view of Updike. Highly recommended. 

Postscript: See also Wolcott’s superb “Caretaker/Pallbearer” (London Review of Books, January 1, 2009), a review of Updike’s The Widows of Eastwick. Wolcott says that Updike’s eye and mind are “the greatest notational devices of any postwar American novelist, precision instruments unimpaired by age and wear.” This piece contains one of Wolcott’s most inspired lines: “America may have lost its looks and stature, but it was a beauty once, and worth every golden dab of sperm.”   

3 Great Thematic Travelogues: Lawrence Osborne's "The Wet and the Dry"

This is the third in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite travel books – Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (1999), and Lawrence Osborne’s The Wet and the Dry (2013) – and compare them. Today, I’ll review Osborne’s superb The Wet and the Dry.

Begin in Milan, at the mega-swank Town House Galleria. 6:10 pm, Osborne is in his element, in the lounge, having a gin and tonic:

In Milan that summer, as the temperature reached almost ninety-five every day in the deserted streets and squares around the hotel, I forced myself to stop dreaming of the fjords of Norway and the ice hotels of the Arctic Circle and, gritting my teeth, went instead to the lounge where gin and tonics were served to the guests of the Town House Galleria from a moving tray equipped with buckets of ice, lemon rinds, and glass stir sticks. I liked to go at an hour when I knew the place would be empty, and this movable bar would be for me and me alone. The tall windows would be opened an inch, the gauze curtains flapping, the flowers wilting on the restaurant tables. The drinks trolley had stoppered crystal flagons of unnamed cognac, a bowl of marinated olives, Angostura bitters, and bottles of Fernet. It was like being in a luxury hospital where, because you are paying so much, you are entitled to drink yourself to death privately. You go right ahead, because you are human and drink is sweet.

I love that passage. It’s the book’s opening paragraph. What an opener! I love its celebration of drink. I love its celebration of pleasure. Osborne is a hedonist. His god, as he says later, is Dionysus – “god as summer’s light itself.”

What happens when a Dionysian travels in the Muslim world? How does he respond to prohibition? Where does he find a drink? Does he find a drink? These are the questions that drive Osborne’s narrative. In his view, the relevant dichotomy isn’t East/West; it’s Wet/Dry. He struggles to comprehend Dry. At one point, remembering a time when he was in the religious city of Solo, in Java, he says, “Six hundred thousand people, I kept thinking, and not a single bar. It seemed like a recipe for madness.”

The Wet and the Dry consists of fifteen chapters. Each one tells about a particular trip and a particular drinking experience. For example, chapter 2, delectably titled “A Glass of Arak in Beirut,” finds Osborne in his natural element – a bar. This one is in the Bristol Hotel, Beirut. He writes,

At Le Bristol, as soon as I am alone and the lights have come up, I order a vodka martini shaken and chilled with a canned olive speared on a stick – being shaken in the Bond manner, the drink is actually less alcoholic in its effects because more of the ice passes into the concoction. I am resolutely solitary at the hotel bar at ten past six, and the international riffraff have not yet descended upon its stools. It is l’heure du cocktail, and I am content.

Osborne likes drinking alone. Later in the book, he approvingly quotes Luis Buñuel’s definition of the perfect bar: “The bar is an exercise in solitude. Above all else, it must be quiet, dark, very comfortable – and, contrary to modern mores, no music of any kind, no matter how faint. In sum, there should be no more than a dozen tables, and a clientele that doesn’t like to talk.”

Sipping his vodka martini at the bar in the Bristol, Osborne is content: “I light a cigarette and wonder if it is still allowed – even here in Beirut – and then I melt like a raindrop into the vodka martini itself. Vodka and smoke go well together, they seem to have been conjured out of the same essence.”

Wherever he is, whatever city he’s visiting – Milan, Beirut, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Muscat, Islamabad, Istanbul, Cairo – Osborne seeks bars. “One needs a bar almost as much as one needs oxygen,” he says. Some are mentioned just in passing, others are fondly described in detail. Here, for example, is his depiction of the Windsor bar in Cairo:

The Windsor is my favorite bar in the Middle East. It is, when you first enter it, still an officer’s mess equipped with all the expected decorations of a male space: dozens of large and small antlers protrude from its walls, some so small they are like bones of tiny extinct species unique to the Sahara. The chandeliers are rings of enmeshed antlers. Antelopes, gazelles, ibex, dark wood, low bookcases, shaded lamps, and bar shelves filled with dusty bottles of Omar Khayyam wine and Stella, the Egyptian national beer. It is a perfect anachronism. It must have been one of the bars of Fermor and Durrell in 1942.

He goes on:

The Windsor sits unnoticed within the backstreets of Cairo’s downtown, the core of the nineteenth-century city that has for decades decayed like compost until it is almost unrecognizable as the downtown that was once magnificent, the city of King Farouk and Omar Sharif and Om Kalthoum. A city of Parisian boulevards and balconied apartment blocks lifted from the Rue Réaumur. The city of the Café Riche and wondrous hotel bars and a life of flaneurs rarely inconvenienced by religion. The Paris of the East, pace Beirut.

Interestingly, in a book drenched in alcohol, one of its most transfixing parts has nothing to do with drink. It’s an account of Osborne’s visit to the Nurettin Cerrah Tekkesi, a little-known dervish school in the back streets of Istanbul. Osborne’s friend Sébastien de Courtois, a French scholar of Islam, takes him there. Osborne writes,

Sébastien took me through the first of the prayer rooms. It was crowded on a Thursday night, the men all in white skull caps, listening to a recitation in the Arabic of the Koran relayed through the adjoining rooms by small speakers. The walls were covered with gilded framed Koranic verses, with the slightly crazed faces of former leaders caught by ancient cameras long ago. The men began to kneel and incline forward in prayer. Sébastien and I moved into other rooms until we were in a kind of salon next to the main prayer room. Into this heavily embellished salon the practitioners were flowing as they tried to press their way into the room beyond. An imam read there before a wall of dark blue Iznik tiles, amid lamps fringed with green glass beads.

Eventually, Osborne and Sébastien move into the main prayer room where they witness an astonishing event:

A series of circles had formed, the men holding hands. They turned slowly clockwise, their heads still turning to left and right, dipping, the bodies bending slightly to the right as they uttered the same words. In the salon, the old men seated on the sofas made the same motions with their heads, their eyes closed. They were inducted into the same trance. The sema, the ceremony. Drummers had appeared, in white turbans. At the center of the circle stood a single dervish in his tall camel-hair sikke hat symbolizing the tombstone of his ego. He was younger than the leaders conducting the chants, the mustache carefully trimmed.

The chanting ebbed and flowed, changed rhythm and speed. The men began to sweat and half-dance as they turned. Something had clicked between them, and they were now fused into a single whole. The man in the sikke began to rotate in the center of the space. His arms wide, dressed in white, he spun like a sycamore seed falling: an expression of pure intoxication.

Osborne is an excellent describer. In the book’s final chapter, “Twilight at the Windsor Hotel,” there’s a long extraordinary passage that takes us deep into Cairo’s back alleys. Here’s an excerpt:

In downtown once can keep moving from baladi to baladi, because they have not yet been closed down, but you have to know where they are: using them requires a casual street knowledge that can be picked up only orally or through incessant trial and error. None of them are advertised. Most lie at the bottom of narrow unlit alleys and passageways, and no city is more a labyrinth than Cairo. Off 26th July, again, but closer to Tahrir Square, there is a strange place called the Nile Munchen, with its outdoor restaurant closed in all sides by the backs of tenements and its ground floor belly-dance bar. There is the touristy El-Hourreys, where the foreign journalists like to pose, and the seedier and more heartfelt Cap d’Or off Abd El-Khalik Tharwat, a den of dark varnished wood paneling and glaring light, where men pass between the all-male tables selling pistachios.

There is the splendid gloom of the Horris, a bar elevated above 26th July by a flight of steps and concealed behind anonymous glass doors, and the lofty hotel bar of the Odeon near Marouf, with its decayed oil paintings and terrible food and a terrace where sooty winds embrace the drinker.

I go one night to the Greek Club and find that it has closed. I go to the finely named Bussy Cat or to Estoril – a barman in a neat white turban – and hang about inside them like a fly that cannot quite decide where to alight; then, with a sort of desperation born of indolence, I push on to other even grimmer holes: the Alf Leila wa Leila off El Gomhoreya, the excruciating Rivera, the Victoria Hotel, or the Hawaii on Mohammed Farid. A whole evening can be spent in this misanthropic pursuit, wandering from places like Stella Bar to Carol and on to the Bar Simon or the Gemaica. But as often as not, I will come back to the calm sanity of the Cap d’Or, a bar that is not signposted and that is entered through a side door, where one can sit unmolested for hours without music or harassment, doing what one does in a bar: contemplating death and the inconsequential things that come just before it.

I love the tables here piled with nutshells, the smell of dogs and oily ful, and the sinister bar with its filthy bottles. The floors crunchy with the same pistachio shells. The men disheveled and worn-down looking in their cheap leather jackets and woolly hats. There is no question that Cap d’Or is a great bar of a certain kind because there is no sexuality, no women, no flirting, no frivolity, no beauty, no cuisine on the side, no clocks, no well-dressed bohemians and pretty young men with nothing to do. It’s a place of quiet but pungent pessimism, where the drinker at best can divert himself with a backgammon board but where he usually sinks sweetly into his own meditations.

Osborne worries that bars like Cap d’Or are endangered by the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power. This is the issue that haunts his book. What if religious fundamentalism becomes the norm, not just in the Middle East, but across the world? For him, bars represent freedom.

In future posts, I’ll explore this remarkable book further. My next post in this series will be on structure.