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138 hours in solitude turned out to be just the vacation this writer needed. Here was exactlythe kind of hotel I had never sought to enter: a generic block in [...]

Byline: Pico Iyer One day in my 20s, several decades ago, I got on a plane in New York City and flew across the world. It was dark when I [...]

Byline: Pico Iyer Pico Iyer's latest book, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise, was published this week. The more I listened to my unnervingly fluent guide, Ali, as [...]

Byline: Pico Iyer It's the same as it ever was: To learn that the world is more than the issues that divide us. As colleges throughout the United States reopen, [...]

Byline: PICO IYER Lead Author of 15 books, including The Art of Stillness and two books about his long-time home, Autumn Light and A Beginner's Guide to Japan Walking around [...]

Byline: Pico Iyer Judging the past by the values of today can be its own kind of intolerance. NARA, Japan - In Canada recently, I ran across one of the [...]

Byline: Pico Iyer We treasure autumn days as reminders of everything we must not take for granted. NARA, Japan - Falling in love is the easiest thing in the world. [...]

A Journey Into Greece's Land of a Thousand Stories By Pico Iyer I STEPPED INTO a taxi on my arrival in Athens and mentioned the name of one of the [...]

Byline: PICO IYER NARA, Japan -- We'd just emerged from a long and rather liquid dinner on a barge along the Taedong River, in the heart of North Korea's showpiece [...]

Byline: PICO IYER Author of 12 books, including most recently The Man Within My Head and The Art of Stillness. His next book, Autumn Light, comes out in April. I [...]

The secret to happiness in almost any relationship is knowing what not to say. Ask your new love about her old loves and you'll learn more than you want to [...]

Byline: PICO IYER The secret to happiness in almost any relationship is knowing what not to say. Ask your new love about her old loves and you'll learn more than [...]

In a globalized age -- when a McAloo Tikki is just as Indian as the Taj Mahal -- has the very word lost its meaning? I once spent an unforgettable [...]

Despite its reverence for tradition, Japan has an ambivalent -- and unsentimental -- relationship with its Modernist architecture. Why preparing for the future sometimes means destroying the past. EVERY 20 [...]

Byline: PICO IYER Many of my friends were shocked some years ago when I cut down on my junk-food intake. Even my wise old physician was a little put out. [...]

Byline: PICO IYER The Bone Clocks. By David Mitchell. 624 pages. Random House. $30. 'I don't summon anything up,' protests Holly Sykes, the down-to-earth protagonist of 'The Bone Clocks,' David [...]

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. -- WE'VE most of us, surely, heard all the figures: Humanity now produces as much data in two days as it did in all of history till [...]

Byline: PICO IYER Amsterdam. A History of the World's Most Liberal City. By Russell Shorto. Illustrated. 357 pages. Doubleday. $28.95. The Dutch in the 17th century, Russell Shorto informs us [...]

NARA, Japan -- Hundreds of Syrians are apparently killed by chemical weapons, and the attempt to protect others from that fate threatens to kill many more. A child perishes with [...]

A gold-toothed man of 76 polishes his $300 paddle. The tall, elegant gentleman who is used to overseeing maquiladoras in Tijuana silently pulls three-star balls out of a box. Mrs. [...]

Once upon a time a friend told me about a retreat house in the hills of California. I drove three hours north from my mother's home and came upon an [...]

ONE bright early spring morning this month, I took myself to Ryoanji, the Kyoto temple that is home to the world's most celebrated rock garden. There was not a single [...]

ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of [...]

Byline: Pico Iyer I walked last night into a 12th-century temple set against the eastern hills of Kyoto. It was an illuminated world of wonder: five-pointed maple leaves and camphor [...]

Astately woman with oiled limbs is belting out 'La Bamba' to synthesiser accompaniment near the pool area, which is jam-packed with sunbathing bodies, while couples bob up and down in [...]

You've got to remember we're on an island here,' my old friend Nicolas was saying, as the rains, the worst outpour in nine years, crashed down on Alice Springs, in [...]

Iwas walking with two lion cubs through Mauritius's Casela nature reserve, a wilderness evocative of Africa. The feral creatures were trotting along beside me, completely free, turning around every now [...]

Thirty minutes to the south of the bustling little town of Galle, in southern Sri Lanka, where the single lane road runs along a palmy coastline, I saw a small [...]

NEW YEAR'S Day is the hardest holiday to make sense of precisely because it's the easiest one to sleep through; as the most arbitrary of designations -- New Year's falls [...]

In London, Boris Johnson contemplated life as the mayor; in Tibet, the Dalai Lama's hopes were dashed; and 100m beneath the Franco-Swiss border, scientists prepared to recreate the Big Bang. [...]

You know you're somewhere unusual when the bathroom in your hotel offers, along with a shower cap, razor and vanity kit, some condoms. The people you meet are speaking English, [...]

Some places - we all know their names (and they're generally in grey and wintry climes) - excel at hard work and all the Sunday School virtues, but seem to [...]

He is the world's most experienced political leader, a smiling spiritual guide whose unswerving commitment to peace marks him out to many as a messiah. But his real message is [...]

Perhaps it's a sign of the times that the artist most constantly invoked on my first day at the Sydney Readers' and Writers' Festival last year was not Patrick White [...]

The Malecon, the great seaside boulevard that runs along the edge of Havana, is stretched around the water like an arm around a lover's shoulder. When I first saw it [...]

When you go on retreat - or, actually, when you just spend a long time by yourself - you enter a different universe. It's like looking through a telescope from [...]

What I love about Kyoto is the night. Visitors to the ancient Japanese capital - home of geisha and tea-ceremonies, kimono and 2,000 temples - are shocked by the first [...]

Ionce drove one hour out of central Los Angeles, along the infamous 10 freeway, clogged with long-distance trucks and low-riding gang-mobiles as it moves into and through the dark industrial [...]

The air, sultry, pulsing, hot, even along the pitch-black streets, is redolent of Cuba. The two-storey gingerbread white houses, their leafy verandahs looking out on swampy gardens, hammocks swaying under [...]

Istepped out on to the tarmac in Tibet in 1985 and took a deep breath. Skies so sharp and cobalt they took the wind out of me. A vast, lunar, [...]

At certain times of year, half the population of the tiny Indian hill station of Dharamsala is Israeli. A special section of the menu at the Ashoka restaurant is devoted [...]

This is what an English country town might look like, you think, after it had been emptied out by a nuclear disaster and airlifted down upon a dry and semi-tropical [...]

This is the kind of place where, if anything happens... ' I thought, as many a traveller does. It was the first day of last year. I was at the [...]

The night in Bangkok is like nowhere else. The smell of mint, of jasmine and perfume as I step outside the airport a little before midnight. Stalls still lining the [...]

The night is very dark in Dharamsala, the small hill station in northern India where the Dalai Lama lives, and the shops are so few that after 9pm you can [...]

When I say that I could live in airports, I'm not speaking metaphorically: a few years ago, I worked out that (like many FT readers, I'm sure) I spend 40 [...]

You touch down 2 1/2miles above the sea, in the world's highest international airport, andthe city below is a bowl of shining light cradled between snowcaps. The cholas, or Indian [...]

Growing up in Oxford in the 1960s, I was encircled by children's fantasy lands - Narnia was hiding behind a wardrobe down the street, Middle Earth was coming to light [...]

Iwalked through the streets of East Beirut on a Saturday evening, and felt like a yokel suddenly transplanted to a cosmopolis. Sushi bars and tapas bars, and a cafe where [...]

Aden, the largest port of southern Yemen, once had seemed a centre of the world, the place where every ship from Britain to India stopped for refuelling. The first time [...]