The writers, photographers, artists and stylists who have brought you these stories from around the world
The 81-year-old primatologist, the inspiration for Michael Jackson’s song Heal the World and name-checked on The Simpsons, still spends about 360 days a year traversing the world, fundraising and raising awareness about apes. Her most memorable journey, described in this issue, was sailing to Africa and “seeing for the first time flying fish and dolphins, and smelling exotic flowers and spices wafting from the land”.
Having made her professional debut at the age of 13, the actress has appeared on both sides of the Atlantic, from the London stage in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya to the small screen in Pushing Daisies. She writes about her favourite Italian store: a 17th-century pharmacy. Her most memorable trip was driving from Los Angeles to Colorado, stopping off in Arizona. “The scenery was like nothing else I’ve ever seen.”
The work of this widely published poet, writer and editor, who writes for us about society beauty Babe Paley, has appeared in publications from Art & Antiques to The New York Times. He is executive editor of the design magazine Milieu and is the author of two books about architecture and art. The journey he will never forget was his first business trip to Morocco, “which involved experiences from meeting King Mohammed to hitting golf balls on a one-hole golf course”.
The prolific travel writer’s career began one wet Monday morning in 1985 when he went to London’s Liverpool Street station and caught a train to Hong Kong. Thirty years later he’s still on the road, most recently island-hopping through French Polynesia for this issue’s feature on Paul Gauguin. His most memorable adventure? “Sailing along the Swahili Coast from Lamu to Zanzibar in a 1910 schooner, reeling in yellowfin tuna for dinner and falling asleep on a deck roofed with shooting stars.”
The actress, twice nominated for an Emmy Award and the recipient of a Golden Globe in 2015 for her portrayal of Anna in Downtown Abbey, journeyed to Abu Dhabi for this issue, where she sampled the city’s most popular deli. Her favourite trip ever, she says, “was on a boat around the Whitsunday Islands in Australia. One day, at the end of a day’s diving, my friend and I sat in the hot tub, drinking Pimm’s and watching the sunset. It couldn’t have felt more luxurious.”
The Singaporian painter and critic Sherman Sam was educated in France and California and contributes regularly to Artforum and Art Review. For Beyond, he interviews septuagenarian artist Tan Swie Hian, who now has two major art spaces devoted to his work. Sherman’s most memorable recent trip, he says, was to a German-English wedding on the day of football’s World Cup final, “when I learned pretty quickly, that cheering for the Argentinian team was not a wise thing”.