Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
Nicholas Buccola is a historian of the United States who will still be read 30-40-50 years from now. I regret that I will not be here to see where he takes us. In 2019 he published The Fire is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate Over Race in America.
From a riverboat adventure in Amazonia to an ancient Welsh castle (via pickpockets in Barcelona and a chewy beef tartare . . . )
For the past five years, I’ve belonged to an online book club focused on travel writing. We’re a group of nine, hailing from England, Maine, Naples, Rome and Rabat. Once a year, we meet in person. This October, it was the turn of our Moroccan friend to host; they booked a house for a long weekend in Tangier.
Dar Sinclair, built for English owners in 1926 (and still in the same family) is a dazzling white villa set against Tangier’s cloudless azure skies. The grounds fall away into a magical three-acre garden bursting with palm fronds, agapanthus blues and whirring dragonflies. Pathways thread through corridors of papyrus, seed heads like quivering starbursts, to a secret swimming pool. A hidden terrace becomes a candlelit oasis for evening feasts.
Inside the house, a Bohemian ambush of colours — rose pinks, butter yellows, arsenic greens. Various half-familiar faces glance back from faded photographs, with past guests including Tennessee Williams, the American playwright, and authors Paul Bowles and Mohammed M’Rabet. Staff can rustle up coffees, cocktails and tagines, even a masseuse, who works little miracles with a dandelion puff of a poodle at her feet. It’s a house for artists. Or, to steal a line from Nigerian author and art critic Emmanuel Iduma (I’m advocating A Stranger’s Pose for our next book club read), a home for travellers armed with “a suitcase and a soul”.
Dar Sinclair sleeps 14 and costs from €4,200 a week. Book via Instagram: @Dar.Sinclair
Disappointment: The desert town of Jaisalmer in Rajasthan. I went back after 34 years, and it was devastating. In my 18-year-old’s diary, I describe the golden sandstone walls, the Jain temples and desert silences — my favourite town on a six-month Indian journey. This time, albeit in peak season, I couldn’t escape the ramparts quickly enough. I felt myself panic-attacking, the 12th-century fort a prisoner of its booming 21st-century popularity.
Riverboats are romantic creatures. I had come from Quito, high in the Andes, to the Rio Napo in Ecuadorean Amazonia to sail downstream for a week on the good ship Anakonda. We were heading to places Amazonian travellers dream about, to the remote borders of Peru where the conquistador Francisco de Orellana, trapped in these forests, had gone mad.
Days were spent with a guide in the depths of the great forests, following trails to a cascade of scarlet macaws feeding on a clay lick, to a canopy tower to watch spider monkeys dancing through the treetops, on a night walk where insects and birds were theatrically lit in the beam of a torch.
We visited Kichwa villages along the banks, to hear how they are trying to sustain both the forests and their communities. We camped for a night beside the Rio Aguarico to meet a chief of the indigenous Cofán tribe, resplendent in feathers and strings of beads. “If travellers can bring benefit to the peoples of this river,” said the boat’s owner, Raúl García, “we can help them preserve these magnificent forests.”
Stanley Stewart was a guest of Steppes Travel (steppestravel.com), which offers a week on the Anakonda, full-board and including transfers and internal flights from Quito to Coca, from £5,145
Disappointment: It sounded fun. The treehouse at Alta Sanctuary was billed as a luxury experience in Peruvian Amazonia, on the remote Rio Las Piedras. But it seemed the only luxury element was the price tag — sleeping two, it starts at $1,490 a night. The bathroom barely functioned, the mosquito nets collapsed as you climbed under them, and there was nowhere to put your clothes except the floor.
What began as a gentle meander down scenic roads through autumnal foliage transformed into a brilliantly intense two days of art immersion when we visited Mass MoCA and The Clark, both large-scale but contrasting galleries in the Berkshires, in north-west Massachusetts.
I’d heard of Mass MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) but expected a modest room or two of modern art. Instead we found a hulking complex of vast factory halls, now ambitiously redeveloped and housing work by some of the most exciting artists working today. We’d allowed an hour or two, but immediately cancelled the rest of our plans so we could spend the whole day there, and even then we didn’t manage to give everything its due.
The building’s industrial architecture and monumental scale offer an incredible setting for avant-garde art, and I underwent what can only be described as a transcendent experience in James Turrell’s light installation “Perfectly Clear (Ganzfeld)”. We bitterly regretted not booking into The Porches Inn, a boutique hotel occupying a row of houses opposite the gallery and boasting a four-season pool and sauna.
The Clark, a research institute and museum 8km to the west, has a very different flavour: a sleek, almost sculptural campus housing art from the Renaissance to the early 20th century in serene style. It’s especially known for its collection of French Impressionists. Both institutions are popular among city types from Boston and New York, but less well-known to international travellers — and are so close together and complementary as to present a perfect, logistically elegant weekend trip for art lovers.
Entry to Mass MoCA (massmoca.org) costs $25; The Clark (clarkart.edu) costs $22. Doubles at The Porches Inn (porches.com) start from about $200 per night
Disappointment: During a difficult summer, I was looking forward to an escapist evening of balmy delights at an alfresco performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Glasgow Botanic Gardens. But, alas, I should have guessed that my visions of a mystical Mediterranean forest would prove difficult to realise in the west of Scotland in July. Of course, the heavens opened and the night was a washout — far, far too wet even for umbrellas and mackintoshes. The Bard in the Botanics festival also offers indoor performances in the Kibble Palace glasshouse — a 19th-century marvel — but the local regulars were far more practical than us and those shows had sold out well in advance. We’ll play it safe next year.
Back in May, when I wound down the coast from Glasgow to Galloway, this little-visited part of the country was on the brink of being cast into the spotlight as Scotland’s third National Park. The farmers, at least, weren’t happy and protest banners were lashed to gates by the road. We were heading for its farthest tip, the Rhins of Galloway, a remote hammerhead peninsula that juts out towards Northern Ireland.
There, the Dunskey Estate rambles over 800 hectares just outside the pastel-painted village of Portpatrick and, like many a Scottish estate these days, has been doing up lodges across its land as holiday rentals. We stayed in what had once been part of the stable block, my children’s beds slotted into former stalls. The whole place felt like ours alone to roam: woods filled with waist-high ferns and fairy glens, a maze to get lost in, rowing boats to take out on still lochs.
Footpaths cut through the trees to two empty beaches, and beyond to the ruins of old Dunskey Castle, and to Portpatrick for rounds of putting on the green by the harbour (pop money through the honesty slot in the shed). Venture further to climb the lighthouse at Scotland’s southernmost point, the Mull of Galloway, and walk the coast path around the jagged cliffs, where we saw more sheep than people.
Shortly after our trip, Galloway’s National Park proposal was scrapped. And, for now at least, this beautiful, far-out corner will remain just as wildly overlooked.
Cottages sleeping two from £145 per night, minimum three-night stay; dunskey.com
Disappointment: Reports of artificial intelligence taking over as a travel assistant seem overstated. As usual, come August we piled into the car and headed off to France. As usual, I spent the first day in the passenger seat filing final deadlines from the motorways and neglected my designated role as pit-stop picker. Instead, my husband, who believes AI can do anything, asked ChatGPT where to go for lunch between Lille and Dijon. It picked a restaurant in Châlons-en-Champagne — “4.8 on Google,” he said. In the real world, it was wedged between CBD shops and neon doughnut cafés. The staff looked confused, the beef tartare was slightly chewy, and the real kicker: it didn’t even serve champagne.
It’s a place whose storyline rhymes with Angkor Wat’s: a vast temple complex, built by a mighty dynasty at the apex of Hindu pre-eminence. The dynasty’s primacy wanes, the decades pass, the temples are subsumed in the jungle — until one mid-19th-century day some Europeans, slashing through strangling vines, “discover” them in all their mystery and spectacle.
The Khajuraho Group of Monuments — located in the town of the same name in northern Madhya Pradesh — has long been recognised for the exemplary Nagara-style architecture and superb sculptural ornamentation of its 20 or so surviving temples. Built between about 950 and 1050, their facades are carved with thousands of representations of men and women, birds and beasts, demons and mythical creatures. And gods: particularly myriad avatars of Shiva and Vishnu, occasionally depicted in impressively acrobatic (and extremely explicit) physical union with their consorts — the famous Tantric carvings that gave the Bengal sapper captain TS Burt a serious case of pearl-clutching when he came upon them in 1838. In both their narratives and their artistic virtuosity they are mesmerising: not-quite-identical human or anthropomorphic forms spilling earthward from steep spires in not-quite-repeated sequences, over and over.
Mesmerising, but not a surprise: the temples’ fame precedes them (in my case, back to an Indian art survey course at university). The revelation at Khajuraho was the Panna Tiger Reserve, a conservation success story a half-hour’s drive out of town. The reserve was established in 1994, but by 2011 a nationwide poaching crisis had reduced the population on its near-1,600 sq km to almost zero. A handful of cats were introduced from other reserves to turn things around, and current estimates put the population at more than 90.
Within 20 minutes of driving through the gates, we came across a huge old male sauntering down the soft-sand road. We tracked a young female called P-151 for a spell (her pugmarks were almost as big as my face) before being distracted by the exceptional birding: flycatchers, rollers, herons, eagles, shikras. Fat crocodiles sunned on the banks of the Ken river; dozens of langurs hung their long tails down from high branches.
Two nice fillips that will probably help seal Khajuraho’s place on the 2026 destination list: IndiGo now has several flights daily to its airport from Delhi and Varanasi; and Rajgarh, a stunning 17th-century palace on a hill just outside town, has just been remade by Oberoi as a very elegant 65-room hotel.
Maria Shollenbarger was a guest of Banyan Tours (banyantours.com); it offers private Khajuraho itineraries including three nights at Oberoi Rajgarh Palace with guided temple visits, a tiger safari and flights from Delhi from $2,150 per person, based on two sharing
Disappointment: “It’s like Restoration Hardware did a ‘Tuscany’ collection, and they bought the whole thing,” was how I described Collegio alla Querce to a Florentine friend — who, all too aware of the encroaching Disney-fication of his city, barely smiled. To great fanfare, California-grown Auberge Resorts launched this 83-room hotel in a converted boys’ school — their first in Europe — in April. There are a few lovely suites, some nice food and a warm staff, but the spaces generally felt ablated of almost every trace of patina. Picture perfection, at the expense of some of its soul: a disappointment of (sorry, homeland) the most American kind.
The European sleeper-train renaissance is an awkward marriage, pairing a nostalgic passion for stately, slow travel with today’s wham-bam high-speed rail. Left to their own continent-crushing devices, most sleepers would barrel into their terminus at the deeply uncivilised crack of dawn, and only avoid doing so by fudging the timetable with a prolonged small-hours halt en route.
But as my wife and I discovered this spring, there is nothing contrived about the gloriously unreconstructed Palermo-Rome overnight service. This is a proper old-school trundler, covering around 1,000km in 14 hours on a track laid down in the 19th century, with the refreshing vibe of a real working train.
Our two-berth cabin, adapted from a 1970s couchette compartment, kept it real with bunks and a ladder, but came furnished with a sink, crisply laundered bedding and bottled water. There’s no dining car — we bought wine and paninis at a corner shop by Palermo station — and no showers. Our carriage, bookended by spotless toilets, was shared with modest picnic-packing business travellers, who gave every impression that they were here because €55 (the extraordinarily good-value single fare) was cheaper than a hotel. And this one came with beguiling ride-by views of the moon-dappled Med, plus a thrilling piece of transportational theatre that now stands alone in European passenger rail travel.
Just after midnight, amid much gentle shunting, every carriage on our train was loaded on to the lower deck of a ferry and eased across the Strait of Messina. At the mainland dock the process was reversed. Breathless with boyish excitement, I was still awake when we skirted the palm-fringed, dawn-tinged lower slopes of Vesuvius and, an hour later, when the gracious attendant passed two paper cups of superlative espresso through our door.
Singles in a four-berth sleeper cost from €55, in a two-berth from about €90; see trenitalia.com
Disappointment: Tourists shouldn’t really complain about other tourists, but since my last visit seven or eight years ago, Rome has reached saturation point. The Papal Jubilee can’t have helped, but my wife and I found the entire historic centre a shuffling, log-jammed nightmare. Having previously just wandered into places such as the Pantheon, it was dispiriting in the extreme to behold snaking queues that presented an unthinkable wait. The crowds at the Trevi Fountain were concertinaed between belt barriers like a very bad day at airport security, chivvied by megaphone not to tarry when they finally had their selfie moment at the front.
In the end we took refuge in the Keats-Shelley House at the foot of the Spanish Steps, sitting shell-shocked and knackered on a terrace waiting in vain for the multilingual tide below to recede. It’s sad to say, but I don’t think I’ll go there again.
Across the Lowveld we drove, in search of 48 hours of respite from the emotional rigours of recent months. The “celebration of life” had gone as well as these things can. But having lost their mum way too early, my wife and South Africa-based sister-in-law were now also contending with their own parting: our flight back to London was imminent.
It was trailing this complex assortment of baggage that we arrived at Abelana, in south-east Limpopo, in the under-explored hinterland of Kruger National Park: 15,000 hectares of bush framed by towering skies that glowed wildfire red at dusk. At its solitary, riverside lodge — all statement lamps and enveloping alcoves of caramel leather — we sat out late into the night, toasting and reminiscing as the crackling boma illuminated the boughs of the giant sycamore fig. At dawn we joined game drives to witness the stirrings of a stark, desiccated world braced for the first rains of summer.
Elegantly skittish impala, a martial eagle silhouetted on its dead knobthorn perch, the brief thrash of a croc or twitching satellite-dish ears of a submerged hippo. We marvelled at the impossibly delicate colours of the malachite kingfisher and at the monitor lizard that crossed our path with a disdainful lack of urgency, an interloper from prehistory. And we found ourselves drawn to the reserve’s revered baobab: the trunk as broad as a Springboks pre-match huddle, yet smooth to the touch and with the sheen of glazed pottery — a living being thought to be as old as the dawn of Christianity.
Everywhere lay reminders of the resilience, and ephemerality, of life. It was a remarkable find — and inexpressibly cathartic.
Abelana (abelanagamereserve.com) offers stays in its tented safari camp from R3,800 (£167) per person per night or from R12,900 in its riverside lodge, both full-board
Disappointment: Its reputation precedes it, of course. But to witness the almost comical ubiquity of petty criminality while in transit through Barcelona recently was a resounding lowlight. Three times in 25 minutes, a yelp of anguish and a commotion signalled a pavement pickpocketing or bag theft. Conspicuously laden, I sought refuge in a café and watched in my periphery as two men — seemingly engaged in a Faginian version of grandmother’s footsteps — inched closer to me and my laptop every time I resumed typing. The barista shouted some words of caution to me, pointing at the two men. Undeterred, they simply continued to watch me from behind their unread newspapers. Brazen, predatory and profoundly depressing
Wales, it’s often said, is the country with the most castles per square mile in the world. At a rough count, I’ve been to about 60 of them. From the front door of my mother’s house on Anglesey I can see the octagonal towers of Caernarfon. At university I revised on the lawns beneath the grim Gothic ramparts of Cardiff Castle. So it came as a small surprise to happen across a Welsh castle I had never been to before, and which, moreover, was among the most poetic and beautiful of them all.
Castell y Bere lies in a green valley in southern Eryri (Snowdonia) National Park, enclosed by the foothills of Cader Idris. It is in a state of advanced ruin: its stonework slumped, its stairways dropping into thin air. There is no entrance booth — only a kissing gate — and no visitors the late autumn day I visited, but for sheep munching under the North Tower.
Castell y Bere belongs to the less appreciated club of Welsh-built castles in Wales. It was first constructed by Llywelyn the Great in the 1220s to guard the southern frontier of Gwynedd, but was abandoned a mere seven decades later. Far more than subsequent, more muscular English-built castles (such as Harlech, Caernarfon or Beaumaris), it seems a structure in accord with its landscape. Its masonry rises almost imperceptibly from mossy crags, its battlements encircled by oakwoods, the trees conspiring to hide Llywelyn’s old stronghold from the eyes of passing motorists.
Mine was not an original discovery, of course. But it did feel liberating exploring a castle without interactive exhibits, gift shops or fanfare of any kind. And instead being free to imagine sentries, horseback messengers, fireside figures muttering of foreign armies approaching from the east.
Disappointment: I loved a spring trip to the Isles of Scilly, but one island in particular, the privately owned Tresco, left me feeling somewhat cold. The comings and goings of golf buggies, the immaculately kept gardens, the uniformity of the seaside cottages — it all felt more like an upmarket resort than a real, living island.
Once I’d committed to joining the loose convoy of ski families who drive from the UK to the Alps rather than pay eye-watering prices for the joys of a rammed Geneva airport in the Easter school holidays, the next decision was where to stop on the way. I had assumed that my family of four would bed down in some nondescript French motorway hotel, and that the pay-off for the two-day slog would be the chance to ignore baggage restrictions and sample the full range of LU biscuits at a series of pleasant aires de service.
Instead, we followed a recommendation and rolled into Troyes in an Easter heatwave. The medieval town sits in the Champagne region, at the end of the A26 “Autoroute des Anglais”, which starts in Calais — and about halfway into our 1,000km drive from London to the Trois Vallées. To our delight, it was really rather nice.
Arriving in time to explore before dinner, we checked into our (still nondescript) hotel and then strolled along the Canal des Trévois, past Gothic churches into the old town. My kids gambolled across a square towards a carousel before we lost ourselves in alleys between 16th-century half-timbered houses in pastel shades leaning at improbable angles.
We found a sunny table outside a crêperie in search of something palatable for our children (no andouillette de Troyes, an offal sausage, for them). My wife and I were so taken by our unexpected pre-holiday break that we ordered a glass of local fizz, and set about determining which among the ambling Brits about us were travelling in the other direction, based on the appearance of dodgy suntans.
Disappointment: While on assignment last June, I stayed for a night in Manchester’s Britannia hotel. Promisingly situated in a grand former textiles warehouse on Portland Street, in the 1980s it had been compared to the Ritz. The FT once described its “stunning decor and spectacularly elegant, gold-leafed flying staircases”.
Well, let’s just say it has fallen on hard times. As I read in a more recent piece in this newspaper about its controversial owner, the Britannia is now notorious for its rodent interlopers and an outbreak of the legionella bacteria. On the plus side, rooms go for as little as £30 a night, not including breakfast, which I wouldn’t have stayed for anyway.
It seems odd to wake up in the Bahamas and not see the sea. In February, I stayed at The Farm, a new boutique hotel on the wild outer island of Eleuthera, emerging from my perfectly proportioned cabin to gaze out over 203 raised plant-beds that filled the morning air with scent. Then I walked between rosemary, watermelon and star fruit to an ice-blue pool, serenaded by a mockingbird.
It belongs to Bahamian Ben Simmons and his Irish wife Charlie, who have built this new 12-room property close to a spring where pirates once collected fresh water. It’s a few minutes walk through a wood from another 12-room inn they have, the Other Side, which opened in 2016, and across a bay from star-studded Harbour Island, the famous rustic getaway where free range chickens amble across the gardens of $25mn holiday homes.
Such property prices mean it’s still quite rare for Bahamians to own high-end hotels on their islands, so Ben, whose brother runs the primary school, provides a fairly unique, direct line into the islands’ hugely courteous culture. He’s taken advantage of an Eleuthera law that allows those whose family history runs back to the 18th century to make use of common land, so long as they look after it.
The Farm feels like a retreat. Much of the menu is drawn from those raised beds. The eggs — served with tomato, rocket pesto and garden greens — come from the family flock. And on Sundays a table for 60 is laid out, where fish and grits are served for family, locals and visitors. Afterwards, the sea is all of five minutes’ walk away.
Ruaridh Nicoll was a guest of The Farm (littleislandhotels.com); doubles cost from B$500 (£378)
Disappointment: The price of the laundry service in good hotels is infuriating. There have been places this last year where I’ve felt I could buy a new shirt for what’s being charged to clean one. Clearly hoteliers hate doing it — many boutique hotels such as the Lime Tree in London’s Belgravia don’t even offer the service anymore — but it’s kind of crucial for those of us who are on the road for more than a week. I hear you cry: “Wash your own socks!” I do, but then — somewhat understandably — I’ve been told off for hanging wet clothes on the balcony. Laundry should be part of the deal, like breakfast. Oh . . .
Last summer I realised a long-held ambition to see Borobudur, the monumental Buddhist temple, 40km north-west of Yogyakarta on the Indonesian island of Java. With its nine levels, 72 stupas and thousands of metres of narrative frieze, it is a place of wonder and worth the three flights from London. But it’s a rushed experience: to prevent the site from being overwhelmed by tourists, you’re allowed just an hour on the temple itself. (Your wristband is scanned as you enter and leave to deter overstaying.) It is nothing like enough.
Next day, we headed to Prambanan, the second-largest Hindu complex in south-east Asia. More or less contemporaneous with Borobudur but abandoned less than a century after its completion around 850 and then devastated by a succession of earthquakes, it has been under restoration on and off since 1918. And even if the towering structures at its heart — dedicated to Shiva, Brahma, Vishnu and the mythical animals on which they rode — now appear broadly intact and can be entered, the better to appreciate their architects’ sophisticated play of light and shadow, it still has the air of a ruin. Thousands of its dark volcanic stones lie in piles on the ground. It is a powerfully affecting sight.
As at Borobudur, it’s the exquisitely carved bas-reliefs that really fascinate. Based on the Ramayana and Bhagavata Purana, they can be read like story boards (it helped that we had an excellent guide), and we were absorbed for hours, tearing ourselves away only because there is a neighbouring, even older Buddhist sanctuary, Sewu, an 800-metre walk away within the same complex.
So don’t miss Borobudur but schedule a day at Prambanan too. It claims to get two million visitors a year, but my hunch is that most come for the Ramayana Ballet, a telling of the epic through Javanese dance and gamelan, that also takes place on the site, several evenings per week. During the day, even on a public holiday in June, we had parts of this powerfully atmospheric site to ourselves and encountered few other Europeans. I wish we could have stayed till sunset.
Disappointment: I had high hopes of Jewel, the “tranquil retreat” in Singapore’s Changi airport that promises the world’s tallest indoor waterfall. But the reality has all the charm of a shopping mall, admittedly one with a 40-metre water feature. It’s nothing like as impressive as the Wonderfall, airside in the same airport’s Terminal 2, a 14-metre by 17-metre LED screen showing a crashing Niagara-like cascade. A virtual waterfall, it turns out, can be more spectacular than a wet one
To try to find a tourist-free restaurant on the French Riviera in spring is a lesson in foolhardiness. Waiters prowl the streets waving laminated menus and tables crowd the cobbles. But up a backstreet in the town of Villefranche-sur-Mer, I finally succeeded.
It was mid-May and I was interrailing with my children aged eight and six. For all the glamour and glitz of the French Riviera the one thing in short supply is quiet, golden-sand beaches. Nice is pebbled and hard underfoot; Cannes, while sandy near the Plage de la Bocca, is rammed from April onwards. So it was with great care that I trawled the coastline, settling on the beach at Villefranche-sur-Mer with its hip-height clear water and silky sand.
After a long morning of scooping up hermit crabs and swimming, the girls were starving so off we went, around the bay and up the steps into the old town. Spotting a green awning over lemon walls, we walked halfway up Rue du Poilu to find La Grignotière, where a single waitress was wiping down wooden tables. Jovial with children — always a good sign — she led us into a terracotta-tiled dining room with no more than a handful of local diners wearing pince-nez glasses and drinking Bandol rosé.
It wasn’t long before she served me a saffron-scented bouillabaisse so thick and rich I could almost bite the broth. Bobbing with pink shrimp tails and plump mussels, it was tastier than any I’d tried in Marseille, the dish’s original home. Eschewing the ravioli aux champignonsand gnocchis à la Daube Provençale, my six-year-old was soon rubbing raw garlic cloves on crisp baguette and dunking it into her fish soup, spooning on spicy yellow rouille and scattering wisps of Gruyère. My elder daughter twirled a nest of spaghetti vongole, flecked with spring onion, snips of tomato and butter-drenched clams, with all three of us cracking into the Îles flottantes to finish. Family-run, with unusually warm and welcoming staff, it’s worth seeking out — followed by an afternoon flop on the beach.
La Grignotière, 3 Rue du Poilu, Villefranche-sur-Mer
Disappointment: Having travelled on most of Europe’s night trains over the past three years, I’m becoming immune to their nostalgic charms, and turning into a nitpicker. Austria’s state railways have pioneered the renaissance of sleeper services on the continent with their Nightjet service which operates 20 routes. Back in December 2023 they launched a new-generation Nightjet with high-spec Siemens carriages and capsule-style mini cabins for enhanced privacy, lockers operated by key cards, wider berths and en suite facilities.
But what they still haven’t got right is the bedding: the pillow is as flat as a postage stamp and just as square. On a recent journey from Vienna to Rome my head was lower than my neck when I lay on it, and I eventually got so fed up I bundled up my coat and shoved it underneath. The blankets are not much better. “Dream now. Enjoy tomorrow”, it says on the red fleecy cover. Well I would love to, but it’s so thin and insufficient that next time I’m going to pack an extra silk sleeping bag to ensure my sweet dreams.
Uzbekistan is unquestionably the most involving place I’ve seen in years. Not just for the Silk Road splendours you’d expect: blue-tiled mosques and craftily restored madrassas, filled with faces that are Persian and Mongolian and Russian and Tibetan all at once. But more in unexpected ways: the impeccable service, the graciousness and innocence on every side, the self-contained quiet and sense of order.
Right at the heart of Samarkand, surrounded by leafy boulevards thronged with students (all in white shirts and black trousers), I found myself at the Zarafshon Parkside Hotel. At first glance, it had some of the white-pillared extravagance of a Turkish love-hotel — and its gardens’ coloured fountains, ornamental pools and pavilions were popular with wedding parties and their video crews. But inside were spotless white bathrooms, delightful service in perfect English, black-gloved waiters and food so reliably good that I chose to take seven straight meals in the hotel. My room had a huge terrace and a minibar filled with free Mars bars.
Uzbekistan disarmed at every turn, and we enjoyed the friendly efficiency of the Lotte City Palace hotel in Tashkent, the elegant Alexia in Bukhara, the celebrated Orient Star (set within a madrassa) in Khiva. But the Zarafshon was the stylish surprise.
Double rooms at the Zarafshon Parkside Hotel (zarafshonparkside.com) cost from about €80 per night
Disappointment: Nobody wants to be an old fogey moaning, “You should have seen Bali/Goa/Kyoto way back when.” Over five trips to the Indonesian island between 1984 and 2007, I always reminded myself that people had been decrying the loss of paradise here since the 1920s. On returning to Ubud this autumn, however, I was shocked: the worst traffic (along one-lane rural roads) I have ever seen, an infrastructure collapsing under the weight of its visitors, barely an Indonesian face to be seen at times. Too many of us colonise an Eden and it begins to look like a global shopping mall.
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Researchers at the Faculty of Medicine at Masaryk University have succeeded in "programming" stem cells to transform into cells that form dental tissue. They directly intervened in the cells’ genome.
Understanding the processes behind the development of a functional organism is a fundamental prerequisite for being able to control and utilize them — for example, in regenerative medicine or tissue engineering. For Associate Professor Jan Křivánek, this has been a long-standing research focus. He was the first to describe in detail the development of odontoblasts — the cells that form the main hard dental tissue, dentin. Now, his team has managed to create these cells deliberately — by directly altering the genome of pluripotent stem cells, which are found at the very beginning of organism development and are capable of turning into any cell type found in the adult body.
“We identified four regulatory genes — genes that control the expression of other genes — and wanted to find out whether we could use them to prompt stem cells to transform into tooth-forming cells,” explains Jan Křivánek, head of the research group at the Institute of Histology and Embryology of the Faculty of Medicine, Masaryk University. Today, he can confirm the hypothesis as validated. The process, which began in vitro (by culturing cell lines “in a test tube”), was subsequently studied in vivo (in a living organism) in mice, into which the lab-modified cells were implanted. It turned out that even in mice, these artificially modified stem cells developmentally differentiated into dental tissue-forming cells — bringing the experiment closer to what happens in a living organism.
The innovative approach by the Brno scientists lies in how they influenced the stem cells. While most similar projects expose the cells to external factors, Křivánek and his colleagues intervened directly inside the genome. They used so-called lentiviruses — a group of retroviruses capable of causing chronic diseases in humans (such as HIV), characterized by a long incubation period. “What’s essential for us is that these viruses can integrate their DNA permanently into the host,”Křivánek explains, and adds: “They have the capacity to carry foreign genetic information — the so-called cargo space — into which we inserted the selected regulatory gene sequence. We used the resulting virion to infect the stem cells and thereby introduced the necessary genetic information into their genome.”
With these infected cells, the researchers gradually “switched on” the four selected regulatory genes, trying to find a combination that would lead to the transformation of stem cells into odontoblasts. “In the early phase, the cells began expressing genes characteristic of odontoblasts. Then they started producing collagen, and we later observed that they were also capable of forming mineralized deposits via calcium accumulation,”explains Mgr. Josef Lavický, Křivánek’s PhD student and the first author of the study, which has just been published in the Journal of Dental Research. A similar process occurs in the formation of bones or tooth enamel — generally in the development of hard tissues.
According to the researchers, the study could open new pathways not only in dental regenerative medicine. More broadly, it demonstrates a new method of deriving different cell types — various functional cells from stem cells. “We focused on odontoblasts, but I believe that if an appropriate combination of transcription factors — i.e., other regulatory genes — is carefully selected, it should be possible to derive other cell types similarly, whether epithelial cells or even neurons,” Křivánek anticipates.
Researchers at Masaryk University’s Faculty of Medicine have discovered a way to prompt stem cells to form dental tissue. Led by Jan Křivánek, the team used lentiviruses—retroviruses capable of permanently inserting their DNA into host cells—to introduce genetic information directly into the cells’ genome.
Once “infected,” the stem cells began behaving like those producing dentin, creating collagen and calcium deposits, key components of tooth structure. The breakthrough could pave the way for new approaches in regenerative dentistry, and the method may also be applied to generate other cell types for medical use.
Baby-faced Lebanese Australian influencer Mario Nawfal has a knack for getting Elon Musk’s attention online, and for turning that into big business.
When far-right Romanian politician Calin Georgescu was arrested in February, during a failed run for president that led to accusations of campaign fraud, he made an important phone call.
The man on the other end of the line – Mario Nawfal – wasn’t a lawyer or political adviser. He wasn’t even Romanian. But he offered Georgescu something few others could: the chance to get his story spread by the world’s ultimate influencer, Elon Musk.
“Mario, the police is here arresting me on the streets,” Georgescu said in a call that Nawfal later posted on X.
Before this year, Musk had never mentioned Georgescu on X, the social media platform he owns. But over two months starting around the time of the arrest, Musk replied to or recirculated at least 15 posts about the politician, most of them originated by Nawfal.
Collectively, those posts racked up more than 100 million views and helped transform Georgescu, at least momentarily, into a darling of the global right.
The phone call had paid off.
Nobody has gotten more online engagement from the world’s richest man over the past several years than Nawfal, a baby-faced Lebanese Australian influencer and entrepreneur who lives in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Since last year’s US presidential election, Musk has reposted, shared or commented on posts originating from Nawfal’s X account 1311 times, according to an analysis by The New York Times, more than any other account.
Nawfal’s output, which in great part mixes reverential praise for Musk and his companies with sensationalised recaps of major news events, is far from unique; social media is riddled with accounts pumping out nearly indistinguishable content. Yet, it is his account that Musk – for no specific reason the billionaire has ever enunciated – has elected to highlight above all others.
Nawfal, 36, has recognised that attaching his brand to the single largest account on X, like a digital remora feeding on likes and reposts, is the best business decision he or any other online influencer could possibly make. For him, the content is entirely subordinate to the attention it generates.
“Mario moulded himself to be exactly what Elon wanted out of his creators,” said Chet Long, a former employee of Nawfal.
Until recently, Nawfal was best known, when he was known at all, for his luxurious lifestyle, his relentless promotion of crypto products and a series of claims of wrongdoing.
In recent years, critics and former colleagues have accused him of using bots to artificially elevate engagement on his X account, of ripping off investors with misleading sales tactics, of having an uncomfortably close relationship with Russia and of being among the web’s most frequent spreaders of misinformation.
Yet, he has used his talent for capturing Musk’s eye to build a following of 2.6 million on X – and to turbocharge his cryptocurrency marketing firm and media brand, according to hundreds of pages of documents from Nawfal’s companies obtained by The New York Times and more than two dozen interviews with former employees, associates and clients.
Nawfal’s companies, like his own social media account, are finely calibrated to capitalise on that attention. His media firm, Citizen Journalism Network, produces audio and video news shows that feature interviews with right-leaning political figures such as President Javier Milei of Argentina and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth. Musk regularly reposts and comments on those interviews on X.
Those activities work in concert with his crypto firm, International Blockchain Consulting Group, or IBC, which Nawfal has said is his primary source of income. The firm touts Musk’s frequent social media engagement with Nawfal to help sell six-figure marketing deals: would-be clients are encouraged to believe that they, too, can expect similar attention from the world’s richest man.
A confidential company sales deck from late last year mentioned Musk no fewer than 20 times. Those references included screenshots showing him promoting Nawfal’s posts and appearing on his program that streams on X, The Roundtable Show. One post from Musk in the deck referred to Nawfal’s commentary on a failed coup against President Vladimir Putin of Russia in 2023.
“Best coverage of the situation I’ve seen so far is from Mario,” Musk wrote.
Over three interviews, two via videoconference as he reclined in bed in his Dubai penthouse, Nawfal said all of the past accusations about him and his business practices were “fabricated” but declined to discuss his relationship with Musk. He would not even discuss whether the two men had a real-life relationship – or had ever met in person – and Musk and X did not respond to requests for comment.
But Nawfal made it clear that he wanted to stay on the good side of his biggest benefactor.
“One thing I’ve learned, I don’t comment on anything related to Elon,” he said.
‘Is that the real Elon Musk, guys?’
On November 12, 2022, Nawfal was hosting The Roundtable, a live audio program about crypto that he created on the social network that was still called Twitter.
The episode focused on the bankruptcy filing by the giant FTX crypto exchange the day before and the resulting panic in the industry. Tens of thousands of people had logged in to listen. Then someone new entered the chat.
“Is that the real Elon Musk requesting to speak?” Nawfal asked excitedly. “Is that the real Elon Musk, guys?”
It was a watershed moment for Nawfal, who immigrated to Australia from Lebanon at a young age, dropped out of college and started a company that sold blenders and juice makers. The firm, Froothie, which is still in business, reached eight figures in annual sales in less than two years, Nawfal said, and by 2016, he had moved to Dubai for what he described as tax reasons.
After Froothie, Nawfal founded companies that sold, among other things, hoverboards and aromatherapy diffusers. He also built up a small but dedicated following on social media for his passion for bachata, the sensual Latin dance. In 2017, he incorporated IBC, which he calls an “incubator” that has helped more than 600 startups introduce cryptocurrency-related products like meme coins and non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.
IBC’s main business is selling marketing packages to startups hoping to publicise their crypto products, according to five former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements. Sales materials reviewed by the Times show IBC offering promotion by Nawfal in exchange for cash or equity, an arrangement akin to advertising or product placement.
Key to that proposition was expanding Nawfal’s reach on Twitter, a preferred platform for crypto investors: the more people who followed him, the more attention he could potentially deliver to clients.
By the fall of 2022, IBC was charging customers $10,000 for a marketing package that included “three tweets from Mario,” an unspecified number of “shout-outs” – name-drops by Nawfal on The Roundtable – and the chance to “pitch your product summary for 90 seconds” on the program, company documents show.
IBC’s staff worked hard to build up Nawfal’s following, which had reached 100,000, according to internal company messages and former employees. Among other efforts, the staff focused on luring prominent guests to The Roundtable, one of the more popular programs using Twitter’s interactive audio feature, Spaces. Employees sent out thousands of invitations and scored appearances from crypto entrepreneur Changpeng Zhao, who later pleaded guilty to money laundering; Kim Dotcom, an internet activist; and other major tech figures.
Musk was on an entirely different level.
Just two weeks earlier, he had completed his purchase of Twitter, and he had its second-largest account, with around 115 million followers. (He now has more than 229 million.) Every one of his posts, reposts or likes was intensely scrutinised by legions of fans. His endorsements moved markets. Former IBC employees recalled that they had tried repeatedly to get Musk’s attention, with no luck until the marathon Roundtable episode about FTX.
In total, Musk stayed on the show for about 10 minutes, talking about crypto and his vision for Twitter, which he would soon rename X. Later that day, he replied to a post by Nawfal for the first time, referring to The Roundtable as “Twitter at its best.”
The impact was instantaneous. In a matter of weeks, Nawfal’s following tripled, breaking 300,000. A sales deck from that December showed that the cost of IBC’s entry-level marketing package had jumped as well, to $25,000.
And that same month, Nawfal sent a direct message to Musk, according to a screenshot that was shared with the Times and metadata that the Times viewed. “Hey Elon, thanks again for all your support!” the message reads. “Anyone from Twitter I can speak to re support (not financial) to scale the show (and spaces in general)?”
Nawfal said in November that the message was not authentic, claiming it could have been created by artificial intelligence.
Musk continued engaging with Nawfal, amplifying his political posts or those praising Musk’s companies and popping up periodically on The Roundtable. By April 2023, Nawfal had reached 432,000 followers, and the price for IBC’s marketing package had soared to $60,000, a third sales deck shows. The price for a deluxe package, with more posts and shout-outs, was $190,000.
In an interview on an internet marketing podcast late last year, Kalynd Dougherty, who according to his LinkedIn profile worked as a “senior growth hacker” for IBC until last March, said the company at the time charged $250,000 or “even more” to sponsor The Roundtable.
By then, Nawfal’s following on X had surpassed 2 million.
Nawfal said Thursday that he was “eternally grateful” for Musk’s attention but that some of the greatest increases in his following had come from content Musk did not actively promote.
“One should not discount how diversified our business is and the huge engagement we receive from many other world leaders and corporate titans,” he said.
‘What Elon wanted’
Until late 2022, Nawfal largely avoided politics.
Then he took a cue from Musk, who soon after buying Twitter had started amplifying right-leaning political content, disparaging traditional media and promoting accounts that delivered news primarily on his platform.
“That’s when Mario pivoted from crypto to media,” said Long, the former employee, who served as a frequent Roundtable co-host and left his job as head of security at IBC at the end of 2022.
In short order, Nawfal began hosting Roundtable episodes focused on political topics, starting with one discussing the release of the so-called Twitter Files, a project initiated by Musk that involved disclosing internal company messages about alleged censorship on the platform under its previous ownership.
That episode drew 2.6 million listeners and participants, including Musk. Soon, the crypto personalities who had dominated the Roundtable gave way to politicians and pundits like Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Tucker Carlson.
An episode that Nawfal hosted in December 2023, featuring Musk, right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, drew 15 million listeners. Six months later, Nawfal’s interview with white supremacist Nick Fuentes attracted more than 2 million people.
As Nawfal’s following rose, he began hiring researchers and ghostwriters, spread across time zones from Canada to the Philippines, to compose the vast majority of his posts and make sure his account was always active and drawing engagement.
“I’m too busy,” Nawfal explained, noting that he has a rotating crew of at least four people managing his X account 24 hours a day and, at times, putting out as many as 300 posts an hour. But he has lately made an effort to read most of the posts that go out under his name, he said, “to make sure the integrity is there”.
In 2023, Nawfal incorporated the Citizen Journalism Network to oversee his rapidly expanding media efforts. About 80 people work for CJN, with an additional 120 or so on IBC’s crypto marketing efforts, he said. Pay varies widely; a business development officer in North America hired this year was offered just shy of $9,000 a month, plus commission, an employment contract reviewed by the Times shows. Others make far less. Three former employees in Venezuela told the Times that they were paid $3 an hour to work for Nawfal.
In the spring, Nawfal also began using artificial intelligence to write some of his posts, and in July, he promoted a service that gives subscribers access to an AI tool that will write “viral posts” for them. “I built the tool I wish I had from day one,” he posted.
On Thursday, Nawfal said the project was not his but from a company that IBC had “incubated,” adding that he was no longer involved with it.
His account is frequently accused of spreading false or unverified information. In mid-June, for example, it posted a video that it said showed emergency workers flooding a street in Tel Aviv, Israel, after missile attacks from Iran. In fact, it was a video of immigration protests from the previous week in Los Angeles. Another post, during last year’s presidential race, falsely suggested that Kamala Harris might be “ineligible to serve as president”.
Nawfal said that the rate of errors for his account had decreased of late and that, relative to his high volume of posts, it was quite low.
He has also frequently been accused of juicing his engagement with bots.
Cyabra, a social media intelligence company based in Israel, found what it called “significant presence of fake profiles attempting to boost visibility and manipulate narratives.”
Over one month this spring, Cyabra analysed more than 7000 accounts that commented on Nawfal’s posts and identified 30 per cent as “fake”. It also determined that two-thirds of the accounts engaging with a separate X account for The Roundtable were most likely bots, far above “the typical 7 to 10 per cent fake engagement rate seen across general online discourse”.
Nawfal denies ever using bots, and in 2023, he filed a defamation suit against a YouTube creator in New Hampshire who had posted a series of videos alleging that Nawfal had artificially increased his following and taken part in crypto pump-and-dump schemes. The suit was settled for undisclosed terms.
But internal text messages posted online appear to show his staff negotiating with a firm in mid-2022 to create a “Mario Nawfal Growth Strategy” that would boost his Twitter following to 100,000 using “inorganic engagement” and increase Roundtable audiences with a “Twitter space hack”.
“They look good, huh? :),” the outside firm’s representative wrote, referring to the inauthentic accounts.
“Not bad yeah,” responded the chief operating officer at IBC, Ibrahim Wazneh. “I like.”
“We spend a lot of time making sure they all look unique/real/etc.,” the representative added.
Wazneh did not respond to a request for comment. Nawfal acknowledged that IBC had hired the firm for three months but said the service had not used bots. “We were very kosher, and nothing was done with artificially inflating our numbers,” he said.
‘Insane access’
When he took Georgescu’s post arrest phone call, Nawfal was in a hotel room in Belarus, having just concluded a rare in-person interview with that country’s president, Alexander Lukashenko.
Three days earlier, Nawfal had introduced a video news format show on X; his staff had scrambled to make it from scratch in just a few weeks after Musk posted, “Anyone want to create a hard-hitting show on X called 69 Minutes?“.
The show, which Nawfal named “69X Minutes,” is centred on interviews with high-profile figures. In the first episode, Nawfal spoke to Robert Fico, the prime minister of Slovakia, an ally of Putin who portrayed Russia as the victim of the war in Ukraine. Since then, guests have included Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov; Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary; and President Paul Kagame of Rwanda.
“It’s just insane access,” said Eric Bolling, a former Fox News and Newsmax host who is a frequent contributor to “69X Minutes.” “I can’t believe some of the people they can get in the room with.”
Nawfal said Thursday that “69X Minutes” had been “paused” for the moment. He added that he had recently started a public relations firm, New Media Ltd, which works for corporate clients to produce paid campaigns leveraging his contacts in social media.
That access has not gone unnoticed.
This spring, NASK, a security institute run by Poland’s Ministry of Digital Affairs, began investigating possible ties between Nawfal and the Russian government after he interviewed two members of Poland’s far-right Law and Justice party. Researchers grew concerned about his friendly contacts with allies of Putin, his access to Russian government officials and his tendency to post content sourced to Russian state media.
A review by the Times found that Nawfal’s account had cited RT and Tass, prominent Russian media outlets, more than 1200 times and that Musk had amplified dozens of his posts touching on Russia and related issues in the past year. To a post by Nawfal noting that Lavrov had arrived in Saudi Arabia for talks on the war with Ukraine, Musk responded, “This is what competent leadership looks like.”
“I would say that he’s quite active promoting Russian narratives about the war that Western countries shouldn’t help Ukraine,” said Magdalena Wilczynska, managing director of NASK’s Cyberspace Information Protection Division. “It looks like something in connection with Russia, but it’s difficult to prove.”
Nawfal laughed off such allegations, saying that he has “never been paid” for any political interviews, that he has no ties to Russia and that he makes an effort to have left-leaning guests on his shows.
Representative Ro Khanna has twice sat for interviews with Nawfal, including in early September to discuss the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein. In a statement, Khanna said his “philosophy is to engage civilly with people on the right and the left – and find a way to model how we can treat our fellow citizens when we have disagreements”.
Still, the vast majority of Nawfal’s guests tilt decisively rightward. After Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September, Nawfal interviewed Tate about whether the shooting would usher in a civil war. “America is no longer safe and secure for anybody,” Tate said.
The next day, he interviewed Tommy Robinson, a far-right British activist who had recently been arrested in connection with an assault. Robinson used the occasion to criticise the judicial system, the left, the antifa movement and, especially, the traditional press, which he called corrupt.
“Just imagine,” Nawfal said, “what would happen if Elon didn’t buy X.”
