Sport, travel, food, art, humour. Award winning author of 13 non-fiction books. Based in North East England. Contributing editor to Conde Nast Traveller UK. Wrote 800+ columns for the Guardian.
Ferret racing and giant marrows: how UK country shows keep rural traditions alive
Britain's Agricultural Shows
The Bumblebee's Knees
A look at the Bumblebee: it's behaviour, characteristics, history and place in British culture.
Full steam ahead — how artists embraced the age of the train
The locomotive roared through European art for more than a century, inspiring English Romantics, French Impressionists, Italian Futurists and Belgian Surrealists. Harry Pearson tracks its epic journey
In the autumn of 1825, a wheezing, panting, cast-iron contraption designed by George and Robert Stephenson chugged out of the County Durham town of Shildon in the north of England. Named Locomotion No 1, the steam engine was hauling 20 coal wagons and an experimental passenger coach containing c...
Piero Manzoni in Denmark
Controverisal Italian artists Piero Manzoni made many of his best known works in a shirt factory in rural Denmark.
The Velvet Coated Gentlemen
The mole: It's habits, history and place in British culture.
History of Oman
Oman is a country of great variety. In fact, historically, it's a variety of countries. It was called 'Muscat and Oman' until the accession of Sultan Qaboos bin Said in 1970, and even that double barrel was a wishful attempt to impose homogeneity on a collection of mutually hostile indigenous tribes and a multitude of incomers: merchants from Persia and the Indian subcontinent; descendants of slaves from Somalia (when James Morris visited Oman in 1955 the Sultan, Qaboos's father, still kept a...
To Best Experience Alaska’s Burgeoning Local Food Movement, Go in Winter
Travelling through Alaska in March.
Félix Fénéon: anarchist and aesthetic visionary
As a new exhibition opens in Paris on the enigmatic figure who discovered Seurat, championed Pissarro, and was accused of murdering the French president, Harry Pearson examines the influence of the greatest tastemaker of his generation
Félix Fénéon, the most quietly influential figure on the art scene of fin-de-siècle Paris, cut an oddly comical figure. The discoverer of Georges Seurat, supporter of Maximilien Luce, and champion of Camille Pissarro aspired to an elegant dandyism that his unga...
The allure of the foreign sports paper, where language skills are not required
In a newsagents on Gran Canaria last year, I did what any sensible person would do when faced with a choice between a two-day-old copy of the Daily Mail and yesterday’s Daily Mail – I bought Marca.
I speak no Spanish, but I recalled the Madrid sports daily fondly from the years when a friend of mine was working in Andalusia and we went to the Estadio Ramón Sánchez Pizjuán to see Ted McMinn scuttling around for Jock Wallace’s Sevilla – an admittedly bizarre fusion of ingredients that calls to ...
A great walk to a great pub: The Wallace Arms, Rowfoot, North Pennines
A walk through an area once populated by murderous clans leading to a cosy pub in rural Northumberland
An English railway journey back in time
The Esk Valley line transports pilgrims to a Yorkshire town made famous by its crop of giant gooseberries