I’m sorry to learn that Jeremy Bassetti, who has done so much to promote writing about travel and place through Travel Writing World, is ending his podcast. The arrival last year of his son, he says in his latest newsletter, has made him realise that he is juggling too many things on top of a day job (he is professor of humanities at a college in Orlando, Florida) and that he needs to concentrate on his own projects. I’m sure regular visitors to Travel Writing World will join me in wishing him all the best. Interviews and articles will remain archived on the website; if you haven’t already seen it, there’s a rich back catalogue.

Sophy Roberts, author of the acclaimed The Lost Pianos of Siberia, opens a second series this week of her podcast, Gone to Timbuktu. Her guest is Paul Theroux, who talks about his own journeys, “his fascination with George Orwell, his misgivings about Ernest Hemingway, and Bruce Chatwin’s curious dislike of travelling alone”. The episode will be available from Thursday. Roberts’s “luminous” new book, A Training School for Elephants, was reviewed in Saturday’s Guardian by Ruth Padel. Roberts, she says, “is such a vivid travel writer that you forget what a brilliant historian she is. She has the water-diviner’s gift for stories in unlikely places.”

And the writer and broadcaster Phoebe Smith opens season three of her magazine-style podcast, Wander Woman, with a visit to Belize, “to see how, when diversity is celebrated rather than feared, wonderful things can happen”.

The Observer had brief recommendations yesterday of Between Britain, a journey back in time along the England/Scotland border by Alistair Moffat (Canongate, £10.99, paperback), and Golden State, a revelatory history of California by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Michael Hiltzik (Amberley, £25).

Finally, an email from Daunt Books (whose Marylebone shop is one of my favourite interiors in London) alerts me to a title I hadn’t come across before: The Stories Old Towns Tell by Marek Kohn (Yale University Press, London, £11.99, paperback). It is, the publisher says, “A journey through Europe’s old towns, exploring why we treasure them—but also what they hide about a continent’s fraught history.” And on the Yale site, I learn that the company will shortly be publishing Walking Europe’s Last Wilderness: A Journey through the Carpathian Mountains by Nick Thorpe (£20, February 11), the BBC correspondent and film-maker.

Correction: on February 10 I realised that the author of Walking Europe’s Last Wilderness was Nick Thorpe, the BBC journalist and film-maker, and not Nick Thorpe, the writer and coach whose books include Eight Men and a Duck. I’ve amended the text above accordingly.