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| New York - Around Town : The Outer Boroughs (part 2) - Museums |
| Take the No. 2 or 3 subway train to Eastern Parkway – Brooklyn Museum, for the world-class Brooklyn Museum . The museum is part of a civic complex that includes the stately Grand Army Plaza, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden , with its well-known Japanese garden, and neighboring Prospect Park. |
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| New York - Around Town : The Outer Boroughs (part 1) |
| Manhattan is just one of New York’s five boroughs, each of which has its own unique attractions. Brooklyn alone, with its fine brownstone neighborhoods and numerous top-class sights, would be one of the largest cities in the U.S. |
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| London - Around Town : Heading East (part 2) - Best of the Rest |
| Start at Old Spitalfields Market, close to Liverpool Street station, where a mixture of stalls hold sway during the week, and many more, selling clothes, food and collectibles, fill the floor on Sundays. Have a delicious English breakfast at St John Bread & Wine opposite the market at 96 Commercial Street . |
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| London - Around Town : Heading East (part 1) |
| The East End is booming. Always a vibrant, working-class area and home to London’s dockworkers, the area has also prided itself on providing a refuge for successive generations of immigrants, from French silk weavers to Jews and Bangladeshi garment workers. |
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| Paris - Around Town : Greater Paris (part 1) |
| Central Paris has more than enough on offer to keep any visitor occupied, but if time permits you should make at least one foray out of the centre, whether your interest is in the sumptuous Palace of Versailles, former home of the “Sun King” Louis XIV, or in the Magic Kingdom of Disneyland Paris. |
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| London - Around Town : South and West (part 1) |
| The palaces that once graced London’s river to the south and west of the city centre were built in places that remain popular today, from Hampton Court and Richmond in the west, downriver to Greenwich. |
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| New York - Around Town : Upper West Side (part 1) |
| This area did not begin to develop until the 1870s, when the 9th Avenue El went up, making it possible to commute to midtown. When the Dakota, New York’s first luxury apartment building, was completed in 1884, it was followed by others on Central Park West and Broadway, while side streets were filled with handsome brownstones. |
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| Paris - Around Town : Montmartre and Pigalle (part 1) |
| Painters and poets, from Picasso to Apollinaire, put the “art” in Montmartre, and it will forever be associated with their Bohemian lifestyles of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There are plenty of artists around today too, painting quick-fire portraits of tourists in the place du Tertre. |
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| London - Around Town : Heading North (part 1) |
| Beyond Regent’s Park and the railway termini of Euston, King’s Cross and St Pancras, North London drifts up into areas that were once distant villages where the rich built their country mansions to escape the city. |
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| Paris - Around Town : Chaillot Quarter (part 1) |
| Chaillot was a separate village until the 19th century, when it was swallowed up by the growing city and bestowed with wide avenues and lavish mansions during the Second Empire building spree. |
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| London - Around Town : The City (part 1) |
| The ancient square mile of London, defined roughly by the walls of the Roman city, is a curious mixture of streets and lanes with medieval names, state-of-the-art finance houses and no fewer than 38 churches, many of them, including St Paul’s Cathedral, designed by Sir Christopher Wren. |
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| Berlin - Around Town : Potsdam & Sanssouci (part 1) |
| Potsdam is an important part of European cultural history – a splendid centre of European Enlightenment, which reached its climax in the 18th century in the architectural and artistic design of Frederick the Great’s palace. |
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| Rome - Around Town : Beyond the City Walls (part 1) |
| The 3rd-century Aurelian walls are still largely intact and served as the defence of the city for 1,600 years until Italian Unification was achieved in 1870. After that, the walls were pierced in several places so that traffic could bypass the old gates and the modern city quickly sprawled far and wide in every direction. |
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| New York - Around Town : Midtown (part 2) - Places to Shop, Midtown Architecture |
| Start at the Morgan Library & Museum , and see Morgan’s opulent study, then proceed to 42nd Street and turn east for a tour through Grand Central Terminal . Continue east on 42nd Street, stopping to look at the outstanding lobbies of the Chrysler Building , the Daily News Building, and the Ford Foundation, and climbing the stairs to see the Tudor City complex. |
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| New York - Around Town : Midtown (part 1) |
| The lights of Times Square, The Spires of the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, Rockefeller Center, the United Nations Headquarters, stores on 5th Avenue, museums, theaters, and grand buildings galore – all are found in the midtown area between 34th and 59th streets, extending from the East River as far as Broadway. |
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| Paris - Around Town : Jardin des Plantes Quarter (part 1) |
| Traditionally one of the most peaceful areas of Paris, the medicinal herb gardens which give the quarter its name were established here in 1626. It retained a rural atmosphere until the 19th century, when the city’s population expanded and the surrounding streets were built up. |
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| London - Around Town : Regent’s Park and Marylebone (part 1) |
| North of Oxford Street and south of the park are the grand mansion blocks of Marylebone. Once a medieval village surrounded by fields and a pleasure garden, now it is a fashionable and elegant inner city area. In the 19th century, doctors started using these spacious houses to see wealthy clients. |
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| Berlin - Around Town : Berlin's Southeast (part 1) |
| Berlin’s East and South are remarkably different in character. Friedrichshain, Lichtenberg and Hohenschönhausen in the east are densely built-up, former working-class areas, while green Treptow and idyllic Köpenick in the far southeast seem like independent villages. |
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| Rome - Around Town : Trastevere and Prati (part 1) |
| Trastevere, which literally means “across the Tiber”, is Rome’s left bank and Bohemian neighbourhood. The former working-class ghetto has retained its medieval character better than any other part of Rome, despite having become one of the most restaurant- and nightlife-packed zones of the city. |
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| Mad About India |
| India is on the boil. There is no other country that offers the diversity, the complexity, the weirdness and human drama as India. Not least among its virtues is the balm of spirituality, not always evident on the surface of daily life, but real just the same. |
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