Coca-Cola Portraits

Coca-Cola Portraits

Portraits for Coca-Cola Touching Base With My Artistic Roots More than a century ago, my great-great-uncle, Hamilton King, a prominent American magazine and advertising illustrator who was known for his paintings of pretty girls, was commissioned by Coca-Cola to...
The 100 Bike Rides of A Lifetime

The 100 Bike Rides of A Lifetime

The 100 Bike Rides of A Lifetime I’m delighted to announce the publication of my new book The 100 Bike Rides of A Lifetime (November 2023), by National Geographic Books. It’s a project I have been working on for some time this past year and has truly been...
The Diamond Shipwreck

The Diamond Shipwreck

Five centuries ago a Portuguese carrick loaded with gold and ivory and bound for the fabled spice port of Goa vanished in a wild storm off the southern tip of Africa. Days later it foundered on a mysterious fogbound coast whose sands were strewn with millions of carats of diamonds. This whole improbable yarn would have been lost forever had it not been for a chance find on a lonely Namibian beach in what’s known as The Forbidden Zone

The Ghost Ship of Filey Bay

The Ghost Ship of Filey Bay

The Bonhomme Richard is said to be one of the last of the great historic shipwrecks that has yet to be found. Left burning and adrift after its epic battle with HMS Serapis off the Yorkshire coast in 1779 – during which John Paul Jones scorned surrender and uttered his immortal line “I have not yet begun to fight! – the ship is assumed to have been carried far out to sea by the local currents. Sophisticated computer modelling says that must have been the case. Yet an old Yorkshire fisherman swears it went down in Filey Bay, not five miles from the battle. And he’s producing some tantalising evidence.

Before Stonehenge: The Ness of Brodgar

Before Stonehenge: The Ness of Brodgar

One long ago summer, around the year 3200BC the Neolithic farmers and herdsmen on Scotland’s remote Orkney islands got together and decided to build something big. Using thousands of tonnes of fine-grained sandstone they set to work constructing a vast temple complex whose scale and magnificence was unlike anything the Neolithic world had ever seen. Now it has been found.