This week on Travel Weekly TV Evan Petrelis gives Nancy the scoop on how special interest tours are planned, and what you can expect on an incredible holiday with Renaissance Tours.
Renaissance Tours encompass the far-reaching ‘arts’ field, operating deep dives on art, archaeology, architecture, music, dance, gardens food and wine!
Quite the list… One which Petrelis jokes are ‘all’ personal passions
RENAISSANCE TOURS’ EVAN PETRELIS ON HOW TO EXECUTE SPECIAL INTEREST TRAVEL: TRAVEL WEEKLY TV
Stream Online Monty Python and the Holy Grail Free on Its 50th Anniversary Open Culture
I’m on the road for the entire month of May, starting off with a keynote Leadership speech in Cincinnati at the home of FC Cincinnati, The TQL Stadium, then crossing the Atlantic for a Leadership session in a Lovemark city – Lisbon, before two days of luxury in Raffles OWO London and a session with Sky’s Entertainment Group. On to one of the World’s Great Cities – Istanbul, for a Fast Company magazine workshop on Lovemarks, and two days of Leadership work with a leading MEA company – Averda, before heading down to Singapore, Auckland and Melbourne for two weeks of Family and AIA work. We finish up on a high in Lake Tahoe for Bob Latham’s beautiful daughter Kira’s wedding to Justin.
A priority on the planning front is ensuring my iPad is loaded with entertainment to help me through a flight schedule no sensible airline would ever put their crews through.
Here’s what I’m watching:
- Gangs of London – Series 2 – from Sky. Violent, edgy, brutal, compelling.
- Black Bag – Amazon Prime. A smart, unusual, beautifully designed spy movie – psychologically fascinating. Michael Fassbender – fresh from The Agency and The Killer (both 2024 favourites of mine) is brilliant. Is he the most intense, irresistible actor in movies today?
- Adolescence – Netflix. Maybe the most talked about series in the UK today. Trudy loved it. It’s on my list. Stephen Graham’s always worth watching.
- Mobland – Paramount+. UK organised crime, offbeat performances from Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren, with True Grit from Tom Hardy. Directed by a lad’s favourite – the great Guy Ritchie.
- The Residence. Light relief. Cluedo on TV! The Butler didn’t do it – it did him!! An eccentric Detective, the White House upstairs/downstairs, Aussies (Kylie Minogue!). Watch this before you go to bed – you’ll be smiling in your sleep.
- 1923 – Series II – Paramount+. Taylor Sheridan on the job again! Helen Mirren again steals the show. She’s maturing like a fine wine.
- And three flight fillers from Netflix – American Primeval, The Are Murders and Helicopter Heist. (And The Gorge from Apple.)
Happy Viewing
Proto’ Review: Ancient Speech, Carried Far
WSJ [no paywall]: “Scholars believe a language used 5,000 years ago on the Asian steppe was the source of many of the world’s modern tongues. Roughly five millennia ago, a small band of nomads set out from their homeland around the Black Sea. On the wide-open grasslands of the steppe, they honed their skills as horsemen and herders and worshiped a god they called Father Sky.
They neither erected great landmarks nor penned any texts. Yet their legacy persists, hidden within the words of the languages spoken by more than three billion people today. In “Proto,” Laura Spinney details the centuries long effort to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European (PIE), what linguists believe to be the mother tongue of a diverse constellation of languages from Sanskrit to Gaelic.
Ms. Spinney, a journalist whose previous book, “Pale Rider” (2017), charted the worldwide spread and cultural impact of the 1918 influenza epidemic, here demonstrates how the language of those humble, preliterate nomads radiated across the prehistoric world and how their myths and rituals may have helped sow the seeds of modern civilization. It’s a comprehensive and at times dizzying account that draws from the latest archaeological and genetic research to craft a compelling portrait of a people thought lost to time.
Thinkers from Dante to Leibniz had long noticed peculiar similarities among languages from far-flung places. But it wasn’t until 1786, when William Jones, a British judge stationed in India, proposed a link among Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, that the idea of a common lingual ancestor was taken seriously. Since then, researchers have developed a hypothetical vocabulary for PIE that consists of about 1,600 word stems, which form the basis of many of our most common words. For example, “daughter” in English, “thugátēr” in Greek and “duhitár” in Sanskrit are all believed to have been derived from a common PIE root that was transformed by local speech patterns over time. In this, Ms. Spinney sees “a seam that connects east and west; a fiber stretched taut between them that thrums in all of us.”
