Sara Wheeler @saradwheeler Twitter profile

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 months

I was buying onions at a market stall in north London yesterday when a man next to me holding a pineapple said, 'I met you 16 years ago today on the terrace of the Hotel Nacional in Havana. I asked you if you minded my cigar smoke' 1/3

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 months

I couldn't remember the meeting but I was at the Nacional that week. So I thought, what a great writer I could be if I could access all those layers of silt embalming all those hundreds of forgotten meetings. 3/3

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 months

He said, 'I can date it so precisely as I was getting married the next day and was nervous which is why I was smoking the cigar. It is our wedding anniversary tomorrow and that is why I have bought a pineapple.' 2/3

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

9 months

I was the only one just now outside John Lennon’s childhood home. The National Trust keeps his bedroom light on every year on the anniversary of his death. Imagine.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 years

@IanDunt At sixty, I like to say, 'My current boyfriend'

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

Klaxon. My travel memoir - life on the road from my 20s to my 60s - out this March. I think of it as Nubility to Invisibility. (Stand by for vol 2: Immobility)

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

I'm writing a travel memoir, to be published next year - about a woman's life on the road from nubility (my twenties) to invisibility (60). Handily, that means I have dressed today, for World Book Day, as myself.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 months

When writer Isabella Bird (1831-1904) married, she gave up travelling. Someone commiserated about a cancelled trip east, and she said, ‘New Guinea is not the sort of place you could take a man’. Morning girls!

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

6 years

A reporter asked Nobel laureate #VSNaipaul why he had never written an autobiography 'Oh, you can rearrange the facts in non-fiction, so there's no point', he said. 'Whereas fiction never lies.'

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

Why can’t we have more 3-D maps? Helps SO much to understand the world

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

6 months

Good morning from the foothills of the eastern Himalaya. These mts have never been named or climbed.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 years

Hey #dervlamurphy Happy 90th. Still leading the way.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

RIP Shackleton, 101 years today. Little-known modernist. 'During that . . . march of 36 hours over the unnamed mountains of South Georgia, it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.' Adapted in The Waste Land.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 years

This year marks the glorious centenary of #ApsleyCherryGarrard 's The Worst Journey in the World. Thinking of the book and its dignified wisdom in this gruesomely unheroic age. 'You will march your winter journeys, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg.'

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 years

Don't know how to finish a book you're writing? Joan Didion advises: 'Pretend it's like Vietnam. Say you've won and leave.'

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

1 year

How did I get to 62 without this? It’s the real thing, isn’t it? For once the Nobel committee got it right

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

4 years

Hurrah! Paperback publication day of my 'Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin and other Geniuses of the Golden Age'. 'Superlative' – Sunday Times; 'Fascinating' – Guardian; 'Side-splittingly funny' – TLS; 'Nicely packaged' - Amazon

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

At the starting gate for my authorised Jan Morris biog: 30 of her 50 titles installed in my office so far, orange-stickered with pub date, here ranging from 1957 to posthumous 2021. Yikes

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

Pilot spots my passport and asks in flawless English, 'Going home to take your turn as PM?'

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

1 year

6/14. Heroines of 'Glowing Still'. Martha Gellhorn. Writing the fighting for six decades. 'I do not want to be good. I want to be hell on wheels, or dead.' Go girls.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 years

Best letters from readers? A man from Texas writes, 'I've waited years for a really good book on the Antarctic, and yours is not it.'

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

Born this day 1886: Apsley Cherry-Garrard. 'It is "the response of the spirit" which is interesting rather than what they did or failed to do: except in a superficial sense they never failed. That is how I see it and I knew them pretty well.'

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

Full tilt indeed. I learned it all from her. RiP Dervla.

Eland

@ElandPublishing

2 years

1931–2022 Celebrating and remembering the life-force that was Dervla Murphy, who has died at home at the age of 90. Thank you for your friendship, your principled wisdom, your questing conversation and your unflinching books.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 months

Writers! Unsure how to finish your book? Take a tip from top girl Joan Didion. 'It's sort of like Vietnam - say you've won and leave.'

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

Thanks to @uclh for fixing up my Dupuytren's today. Especially superstar nurses Abigail, Rosa, Fomma and Tony. Respect. 🙏

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

1 year

Robert Adam’s Mavisbank, which I stumbled on by chance today as it decays with dignity in Midlothian

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

1 year

A shelfie keeping you up to date with my Jan Morris volumes for the authorised biography-in-progress, each stickered by date. Up to 51 books (middle shelf) detailing, as Morris put it in 1990, 'travels from coast to coast in search of generalisations'.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

Best thing about writing a travel memoir: the dreams, after rereading notebooks. Last night I dreamt I woke again in my Antarctic tent. I used to leave the flap open.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 months

🥳🎉Paperback publication day: a memoir of life on the road. Epigraph by Martha Gellhorn: 'I do not wish to be good. I wish to be hell on wheels, or dead'. Still here! 🎇

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

1 year

Anyone read my book 'Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica' (1996)? This is Seismic Man and me in Scotland today. Where did the years go, and so quickly?

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 years

Sixty today.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

1 year

This just fell out of a book. Me at the South Pole 3 decades ago. Note noonday shadow! Shackleton wrote, 'We all have our own White South' - all well and good, but where did the years go?

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

Think it's cold? I took this at minus 40, in August, when the sun rises in the polar south. 'You wait', wrote Thomas Pynchon. 'Everyone has an Antarctic.'

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

7 years

I recently encountered this helpful sign when hiking and wild camping in the #Caucasus .

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

1 year

When Jan Morris congratulated Harold Evans on becoming Times editor in 1981, HE scrawled a note back, 'Dear Jan, What fun! Feel like climbing Everest again? Love, Harry'. I have just found this note folded into a book of Morris'!

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

6 years

Mud and Stars! Out in July! Here's the jacket! (subtitle - Travels in Russia with Pushkin and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age) Yikes!

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

1 year

Just found this picture from years ago of Emperor penguins next to my tent after I put a Pingu toy on the ice. Wild excitement! See the ones on the left calling the others over?

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

4 years

Like you, woke to the exciting news that scientists have discovered there are 22 species of penguin, not 18 as previously thought. Here I am interviewing some emperors on the topic a few years ago (this is not photoshopped, btw!) PS I tired of this encounter before they did

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 years

Lateen dhow. The most handsome vessel in the world? I think so.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

4 years

Twenty years ago. With my writing hero, Norman Lewis. In his Essex garden. Still learning from him.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

Boarding long-distance South American buses at dawn like I did 40 years ago. As Ian McEwan wrote, nobody changes much after the age of 2

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 years

A hundred years ago today Captain Scott and four companions reached the South Pole. He wrote in his diary that they had shown what Englishmen can achieve. Imagine what Scott would have made of the moral invertebrates in charge on this centenary.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

9 months

As former Dr Who Tom Baker is trending I wish to repeat a story Baker told me when we were in a limo on a Waterstones signing tour in December 1997. He said, 'The last time I sat signing books a woman in the queue mistook me for Shirley Williams'.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

A shelfie keeping you up to date with my Jan Morris volumes for the authorised biography-in-progress, each stickered by date. Up to 46 volumes and they have had to turn the shelf corner.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 months

Trieste to Ljubljana by train. I could have walked quicker, but everything about it is heavenly.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 years

This just fell out of a Muriel Spark. It's me on Scott's bunk in 1995. Seeking meaning in this event.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

Up to 38 in my Jan Morris collection for the forthcoming biog. Stickered with dates.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

'And then we turned homewards, counting the weeks, and days, and then the hours.' Cherry-Garrard, Worst Journey centenary quotation 18/20, #antarctica

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 years

Justin Hayward tucked his lateral flow test into the neck of his guitar to display its cantilever before singing Nights in White Satin just now. Nothing does it for me like an old rocker @TheLondonLib ⁩

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

Matt and I, 1966 and this week. Happy Siblings Day. #NationalSiblingsDay2022 @Sibs_uk 'It's alright for you'. It wasn't, but I love him more not less.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 months

But how could I have married him: he was just celebrating his sixteenth wedding anniversary and his wife was waiting for pineapple a la mode, she was not locked in the attic

Ivan Pope

@ivan007

3 months

@saradwheeler Reader, I married him.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

10 months

Thrilling to see this homage to Dervla Murphy published last night. Superb editorial selection @ethelcrowley2 . @ElandPublishing Keep pedalling girls.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

This might cheer you up. A pair of Wilfreds. Thesiger (91) and Wheeler (1)

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

Morning! From my hut during the brief August light cycle in the Antarctic when the long polar night ends. Mt Erebus, and my gathered neighbours waiting for me to wake up.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

1 year

Celebrating #NationalSiblingsDay2023 , for siblings with a disabled brother or sister. Check out the wonderful charity Sibs if you need support, or know someone who does. Matt and me in 1963. You love them more, not less. @Sibs_uk

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 years

Paradise regained. Thanks to staff @LDNFieldsLido

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

4 years

One of my heroines, Freya Stark (1893-1993), once wrote to her editor in London, John Murray, asking him to send a tin bath out to her in the interior of Yemen: more than a girl can expect of her publisher today, I think.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

1 year

So J comes down every morning of our trip looking like she's been delivered by a florist. I look - without fail - like I've slept in a skip. Grinds a girl down.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

Thinking today of Martha Gellhorn, writing the fighting for six decades. Although each conflict was different, her message remained the same: ‘There is neither victory nor defeat; there is only catastrophe.’

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

Revisiting all my top Dervla stories. In Cameroon with Egbert, she encounters a curious observer. ‘Are you a man or a woman?’, he asks. In response, she lifts her jumper to show her tits.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 years

Morning!

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 months

Ruby cheering for her wonderful MP ⁦ @TulipSiddiq ⁩. #dogsatpollingstations Woof

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

9 months

Now a Financial Times Book of the Year. 'Despite the dangers and misogyny endured on journeys from Antarctica to Zanzibar, she admits her main fear is the John Lewis curtain department.'

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

Lavatory of the day. This was mine once, in the Antarctic close to the Mackay glacier. Plumbed in to the Southern Ocean. Very fine. But once a seal came up - hot fishy breath!

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 years

'They talk of chattering teeth: but when your body chatters you may call yourself cold.' Cherry-Garrard, Worst Journey centenary quotation 1/20

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

9 months

I spent six months in Chile in the early 90s and met many people of my age whose fathers had been pushed out of choppers over the Pacific in and after 1973. Thinking of them today.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 years

Watched the game in 1966 with my dad and little brother; mum was working. I had just learned to tell the time so at the 90-min whistle I stood blocking the set as dad had promised to take us to the swings.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

Showed these visiting emperors a soft penguin toy I had in the tent. Sensation. As you see, some called to others to come and look. They are still talking about it 25 years on.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 months

‘My spirit is in Trieste’, Joyce wrote to Nora in 1909. And here he is in Trieste today, on the Ponterosso. Very fine

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

1 year

Well dang. I went to see A Little Life and ran into the author of the novel of the play. Hanya Yanagihara superstar

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 years

'Titus Oates was the most cheerful and loveable old pessimist you could imagine.' Cherry-Garrard, Worst Journey centenary quotation 16/20, #antarctica

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

4 years

Paradise today at London Fields Lido - 3 degrees C, 38 F. Worked out I only have 6738 miles of front crawl to go to offset the mince pies.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

Impressed with my new travel hammock (£7.99). But, lying in it just now in West Papua, I read in Pax Britannica that in 1897 Hemmings in Bristol offered in its catalogue for travellers to India a whole flatpack hotel inc veranda and chapel for £1000.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 months

Happy #Bloomsday from Joyce in Trieste, and from me 1/3

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

7 years

i am not normally in this debate but am moved with horror by @Scyberboy to speak up, and say, I am against you. I support #DavidBaddiel . Horrified.

David Baddiel

@Baddiel

7 years

Well @Scyberboy I would normally, as a counter-Nazi, tell you to fuck off. But as a counter-little men using Nazi vocabulary to feel significant and make their tiny cocks hard, I can’t be bothered.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

4 years

Reckless plans: 3 decades ago I decided to write the first travel book about the Antarctic. In the years it took to get there, I sought proxies. This heavenly pub in Annascaul, County Kerry, was founded by Scott and Shackleton's man Tom Crean, all time greatest polarman.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

The only thing I want in the universe is someone to install my printer. Is it too much to ask? I am 61 and have always paid my taxes

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 years

'Frayed and bitter’ - my heroine Martha Gellhorn on how she often felt on the road. Considering this as a title for my new book, a travel memoir.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 years

Pleasing reaction to my new trousers from stranger. 'My nan had wallpaper like that in 1975.' Massive, of course, compliment.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 years

95 years ago today Shackleton rowed ashore on Elephant Island to rescue the crew he had left behind after ice crushed 'Endurance'. 'Are you all well?' Greatest story ever told? Perhaps.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 years

I bought this in Siberia and ate it. Felt a bit aggressive after, but otherwise ok.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

Second day recording audiobook of my travel memoir. I like a studio with a reliable supply of Tunnocks. Thanks ⁦ @IDAudio ⁩

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

It’s what she would have wanted

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 years

Confided to my friend that I was anxious about an upcoming speech.'Don’t try to be clever or funny', she said. 'Just be yourself.'

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

1 year

Heroines of Glowing Still 14/14. Rachel Carson, fugleman for the apocalypse to come, published Silent Spring in 1962. She revealed that pesticides including bioaccumulative endocrine disrupter dieldrin were killing the planet.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

Latest shelfie recording Jan Morris volumes for the authorised biography-in-progress, stickered by date. Up to 53. Morning!

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 months

THRILLED to see @ElandPublishing reissuing this imo classic today - a hugely illuminating glimpse into the Middle East before well you know. 1950s.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 years

If sitting at my desk in Zanzibar has taught me one thing, it’s that deep down, I’m shallow

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

1 year

Loved the Evelyn Hofer show at @TPGallery . This one appears in Jan Morris' 1964 book 'Spain' - all later editions tragically did not include Hofer's wonderful images.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 years

Top social distancing signage at Iona abbey

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

4 years

On Bruce Chatwin, a writer I admire. One lover, Miranda Rothschild, said, ‘He’s out to seduce everybody, it doesn’t matter if you are male, female, an ocelot or a tea cosy.’ I thought about it. But I think not.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 years

Hugely enjoying @DrMatthewSweet 's #modernism @BBCRadio4 . Cherry-Garrard wrote 'The Worst Journey in the World' in the magical 1922 - a modernist seeking in the Antarctic Sweet's 'cleaner, brighter zone'.

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

1 year

The best travel books by women to inspire a journey of your own

Sara Wheeler shares the 5 best books on travel by women to inspire a journey of your own. Have you read The View from the Ground?

shepherd.com

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 years

Actual me at actual South Pole many years ago

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

'The black-and-red notebooks, I was beginning to learn as I excavated my travelling past, were reliable witnesses to the woman I was then. But a cross-examining barrister might ask, "Do you still trust her?"’

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 years

#NationalSiblingsDay2021 Well done Matt - still battling on at 58. #heaintheavy

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

Thrilling first day in the heavenly National Library of Wales. Virtually nobody here

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

2 years

'If you march your winter journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg.' Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Worst Journey, centenary quotation 20/20

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

9 months

winter light @LDNFieldsLido . Got me through to the next shift at my desk

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Sara Wheeler

@saradwheeler

3 years

#Antarctica @cheapsellotape

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