The steady rhythm of the boat and the drone of its engine were just about to lull me to sleep when they appeared.  A school of dolphins, eight in total, their dorsal fins breaking through the surface of the water, followed us as we made our way around Tapeka Point and headed towards Motuarohia.  This was what we had come for but feared we might not see, this and a close-up look at Motukokako, the Hole in the Rock.  I willed the beautiful creatures to continue their journey with us but after a few minutes they circled the boat and headed back to the quiet bay from which they came, leaving us delighted and disappointed.

We continued around Cape Brett Peninsula, the boat idling so we could admire the lighthouse and the keeper’s abandoned cottage, and from there headed directly to the Hole.  It was obvious immediately that the churning of the Pacific waters was too strong to allow us safe passage, so the engines were cut and we bobbed for a few minutes to enjoy the extraordinary cliffs of the place that Captain Cook called Pierce Island.

An hour or so later, the boat arrived at Russell.  Now a quiet, slightly genteel place, it’s  hard to imagine how it might have earned the name by which it was known in the 1830s, the hellhole of the Pacific.  Not a bad place in which to end a wonderful day, but what could ever compete with those dolphins?

Whoever came up with the expression “it’s a small world” never traveled from New York to Auckland via Hong Kong.  After twenty seven hours on the plane and a few more spent waiting around, I landed in Auckland on an autumn afternoon desperate for fresh air, exercise, and sunshine.  A walk to the waterfront and specifically to Wynyard Quarter seemed like the right idea.  The neighborhood, close to Auckland’s downtown, still has a strong industrial character with its many storage tanks for petrol and liquid chemicals dominating that part of the harbor.  But transformation is underway with dozens of restaurants, bars, and apartment complexes starting to sprout.

It’s entirely right that city governments should want to re-vitalize former industrial neighborhoods, especially when they fall into decline.  Waterfront property is always desirable to developers, of course, and city authorities benefit from the taxes that re-development brings.  Is it too idealistic to hope that Auckland’s leaders might choose a different path from others around the world and ensure that at least some of Wynyard Quarter be set aside for affordable homes for local people?  Is there any chance Auckland might set an example and avoid yet another of those cookie-cutter waterfront developments aimed exclusively at the very affluent and tourists looking for pretty bars and restaurants?  Having seen the homeless on Auckland’s city streets, I hope so.

Although I knew of their long and close friendship, it was only recently I learned that some of my favorite painters – Freud, Bacon, and Auerbach – were part of a movement called The School of London.   The term, coined by one of its other members, R.B. Kitaj,  was intended to apply to a group of British artists who championed figurative painting at a time when abstraction dominated the art scene.  Michael Andrews, Leon Kossoff, and David Hockney complete the group.

Ordovas, a commercial gallery in London, recently put together a very small show (twelve pictures in all) that celebrated not only the group’s brilliance, but its unwavering commitment to the human figure and to the cityscape at a time when abstraction prevailed elsewhere.  Every painting featured is a gem and a handful of them masterpieces.  At the center stand two extraordinary paintings of the same sitter: Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of George Dyer (1966) and Lucien Freud’s Man in a Blue Shirt (1965).

The paintings have never before been exhibited together.

Having been recently to several “blockbuster” exhibitions (for example the Picasso 1932 and Modigliani shows, both at Tate Modern), with hordes of visitors and scores of paintings, the Ordovas show was the perfect miniature counterpoint.  Alone in the gallery, I had time and space to look closely at each and every picture and marvel not just at the extraordinary talent of The School of London but also at the art of curation.

I went to Lagos in 2013 to speak at a conference, my only visit so far to Nigeria.  Friends and colleagues with experience of the country were keen to warn me of the dangers and filled my head with horror stories of lawlessness and chaos.  The trip was uneventful but I’ve often thought how I allowed others to influence my experience of the country.  I arrived in Lagos with a single story in my head, a story absurdly incomplete and prejudiced, but powerful enough to constrain what I saw and what I experienced.  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has spoken beautifully about “single stories” and how they twist our thinking about others.  Listen to her TED Talk here (if you haven’t already) and be amazed.

Her much-praised novel, Americanah, also amazes.  It tells the story of Ifemelu, a young and gifted Nigerian woman, who heads to America and becomes a Princeton scholar and celebrity blogger about race.  The plot of the novel centers on her decision to return to Nigeria, but its heart is the prolonged reflection on life as a black African woman in contemporary America.  It’s an unusual achievement: often charming and funny, but filled with sharp insights.  At nearly 600 pages, it’s undeniably over-long and could have been shortened without any loss to its overall power, but it’s a feat of wonderful storytelling and marks the arrival of an important new voice in fiction.

Coincidences, whether they amaze, unsettle, or delight, can have extraordinary power.  Some of that power, it seems to me, comes from the messages they deliver or the influences they can have on our thoughts, feelings, and actions.

I’m interested in what friends and acquaintances read.  I recently stayed in England with some old and dear friends I hadn’t seen for several years.  Jet lag woke me earlier than usual, so I used a little of the time before breakfast to browse their bookshelves for inspiration.  My friends, both keen walkers and lovers of remote places, had several books by an author previously unknown to me, Robert Macfarlane.  As I flicked through the pages of his books, reading occasional passages, Macfarlane’s voice spoke clearly and loudly in the quiet of the pre-dawn of his love for landscape, language, and the connections between both.  I made a note of the titles, planning to buy copies on my return home.

A day or two later I traveled to London and went to an exhibition at the British Museum I had been intending to see for several weeks about a writer whose books I love, Patrick Leigh Fermor, and his friendship with two painters, John Craxton and Niko Ghika.  The thrilling exhibition celebrated their friendships, their shared love of the Hellenic world, and the influence of both on their writings and paintings.  I recall leaving the museum and walking into the chill and winter greyness of London and feeling the warmth and brightness of Crete, Hydra, and the Mani still warming me.  I walked a mile or so to Hatchards in Piccadilly, planning to browse the new releases and to look for a gift to send to my friends to thank them for their hospitality.  There, face up on a table, were copies of a tiny book by Macfarlane called The Gifts of Reading.  Without opening it, I bought a couple of copies, one for myself and one for my friends, pleased with the coincidence.  It was only a week later, flying back to New York, that I read the book and discovered that it’s partly about Patrick Leigh Fermor.

It felt like the completion of a circle.  The discovery of a new writer in my friends’ house, the lovely exhibition, the serendipitous appearance of Macfarlane’s book on a Hatchards’ tabletop, and its celebration of the author featured in the exhibition.  The Gifts of Reading is an exquisite miniature, a tiny meditation on friendship, generosity, and the power of books, and for me a reminder of my extraordinary good fortune.

When I lived in Cambridge, some twenty years ago now, I used to visit Kettle’s Yard fairly frequently.  It made a big impression on me.  It’s the former home of Jim Ede who was a curator of the Tate Gallery in the 1920s and 1930s, but who is now best known as a collector and as a friend to artists such as Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and David Jones. After a period living abroad, mostly in Tangier and the Loire, Ede returned to England in 1956 to look for a home where he could create “a living place where works of art could be enjoyed, inherent to the domestic setting“. He found what he was looking for in Cambridge, a city he knew from his schooldays.  Four slum cottages were bought, knocked together and transformed into a home and into a showcase for the extraordinary collection of artworks he’d acquired from friends and contacts.

It’s not the paintings and sculptures that draw so many visitors to Kettle’s Yard, though its collection of works by the likes of Alfred Wallis and Ben Nicholson is outstanding.  Rather it’s Ede’s unique aesthetic, which he communicated so brilliantly in the book he wrote about the house, A Way of Life, that captivates and makes the place unique and so memorable.  It’s not an easy spirit to summarize, but it seems to me to have nothing to do with the sterile “interior design” that so many people strive for when creating the spaces in which they live.

Ede believed that the organization of a living space, the careful positioning of paintings, furniture, sculpture, and natural materials such as pebbles and driftwood, should speak about the life lived in that space: its purpose and meaning.  He looked to reflect in his surroundings a harmony that he saw as an ideal elsewhere.  It’s that harmony – and the calm, contemplative spirit that comes with it – that delights visitors to Kettle’s Yard and draws them back. Ede bequeathed the house and its contents to the University of Cambridge so that future generations could enjoy the unique space he created and the spirit that infuses it.

Other than Virginia Woolf, I can’t think of a central figure in The Bloomsbury Group who achieved real greatness. Many of those whose lives touched the fringes of the Group, T.S. Eliot, for example, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Maynard Keynes, grew into painters, poets, philosophers, and economists of huge distinction and global reputation, but Bloomsbury’s core members were mostly minor figures.

Yet the Group’s hold on the popular imagination continues to be huge, far greater than the work of its individual members merits.  The likes of Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, and Vita Sackville West are known by a large audience, but I wonder how many now ever read their books or look at their paintings. To explain the persistent power and appeal of Bloomsbury, you have to look beyond the work and focus on a word that would have meant nothing to Bloomsbury: lifestyle. The group’s contempt for suffocating social mores, its embrace of sexual freedom and equality, and its elevation of artistic effort seem perennially avant-garde, attracting new followers in every generation, regardless of the accomplishments of Bloomsbury’s leaders.

Dora Carrington is for many a standard bearer of the code by which Bloomsbury lived.  She was a minor painter, though she has loyal admirers and her reputation has grown over the years. A handful of her portraits (the best known of which is of Lytton Strachey – see below) can be found in prominent galleries and collections.  Her significance for those who admire her lies in the independence of her spirit and her determination to live on her own terms as both an artist and a woman.

Those qualities shine through this wonderful collection of letters.  Carrington’s life wasn’t a conventionally happy one.  Her work got little recognition beyond Bloomsbury and her love for Strachey, a gay man, brought little real fulfillment for her.  Her suicide at the age of 38, only two months after his death, has come to define her in the eyes of many as a tragic figure.

Anne Chisholm has done an outstanding job editing the letters of this strange, complex, and uncompromising artist.  At their center stands her besotted and passionate commitment to Strachey, but there are also some lovely vignettes of Bloomsbury’s key figures, including Virginia Woolf and Mark Gertler, among others.  This isn’t a book to be read cover-to-cover, but something in which to dip occasionally to remind oneself of the extraordinary ideals of Bloomsbury and the fierce dedication of those who lived by them.

Peter Guillam, a long-retired British spy living in quiet retirement in Brittany, receives a letter from his former employers, asking him to return to London to account for his part in a murky operation in Berlin in the early 1960s.  And so begins what seems to be Le Carré’s final visit to The Circus.

There’s plenty of the traditional “trade craft” here to delight fans of espionage novels, as well as bags of Cold War atmosphere, but this is a world away from the silliness of James Bond and Jason Bourne.  This is deeply serious stuff;  about growing old, about deceptions, disloyalty, and coming to terms with the past.

A Legacy of Spies feels like a long and final note of farewell.  It’s extraordinary to think that nearly fifty years have passed since Le Carré’s debut novel and the start of a writing career in which he has amassed millions of devoted followers and countless accolades.  If this proves to be the last we hear from The Circus, there’s at least some solace seeing an author bowing out with his powers undiminished and in complete control of a genre that he mastered a long time ago.

I made my second visit to Petra last week.  It’s one of the world’s unique places, a monument of incomparable beauty and grandeur. Like many popular historical sites, it attracts every year a huge number of tourists who contribute much-needed money to the fragile local economy. But mass tourism isn’t an entirely innocent or trouble-free phenomenon, an uncomplicated boon for visitors and locals alike.  Government agencies are becoming more and more aware of the environmental damage tourists do in places such as the Galapagos Islands, Iceland, and the Great Barrier Reef, and are taking steps to do something that would have been inconceivable a few years ago: discourage tourism.

The pernicious effects of tourism go beyond the environmental impact on fragile places.  In Petra last week, there were scores of children skipping school to sell worthless trinkets to visitors.  I saw a man kicking, viciously and repeatedly, one of the horses that take tourists around the monument.  These weren’t isolated incidents.  Signs around the site indicate the Jordanian government’s awareness of such abuses.

What’s the proper response to such things?  Stay at home, denying oneself the experience and the local economy the money it needs?  Complain to local authorities?  Refuse to use abusive services and find less harmful ways to contribute to local development?  None of this is easy.  A starting point is to be thoughtful and to recognize that each of us is part of a growing problem: the ugly underbelly of tourism.

Very few of the millions who visit Agra every year to see the Taj Mahal make the short journey across the Yamuna river to visit I’timad-ud-Daulah.  It was an article by Simon Schama in the Financial Times that alerted me to the tomb commissioned by Nur Jahan and built in the 1620s to house the remains of her father, Mirza Ghiyas Beg.  I had missed it on four previous visits to Agra, but it was top of my “must see” list when I returned there recently.  It’s a little bit of a stretch to call it “forgotten”, as Schama does, but I had to myself on the morning I visited.

The locals refer to it as Baby Taj.  It’s easy enough to see why but the comparison is slightly insulting because it diminishes a monument that in some respects surpasses its much more famous neighbor.  While the building’s exterior is gorgeous, decorated with onyx, jasper and topaz, it’s when you step inside that you’re likely to be thunderstruck. The richly painted ceilings and walls, covered in plants and flowers, are a riot of color, and make the interior of the Taj itself seem restrained and monochrome.  Next time you’re in Agra, ask your tuk-tuk driver to head to I’timad-ud-Daulah, and take an hour to pay homage to the artists and craftsmen of seventeenth century India who created what is truly one of the wonders of the cultural world.