Hello. My name’s Alex and I’m a topophile.
That’s to say, I’m a lover of place, and my writing is an attempt to capture what places are like and to explore the reasons why they are the way they are.
Put differently, I’m interested in our relationship with the planet on which we live and how we build on geography and circumstance to create society and culture. While I love the natural world, I’m particularly interested in cities, where this mysterious socio-cultural process occurs most intensely.
Maybe this is why I chose travel writing as the genre for my hybrid form of non-fiction. But I’m a bad traveller, anxious about journeys and eager to settle. I want to get under its skin of the place I’m in, and in writing to witness to the different way of living it brings into being.
I’m fascinated by what the philosopher Charles Taylor called ‘forms of life’: the diversity of human communities and the different ways in which people create meaning, whether under the banner of ‘values’ or spirituality, and the different ways societies are organised - aka politics. As someone constitutionally unable to accept that there’s only one way of living and seeing, you could call me a pluralist. Hence the title ‘Ways of Seeing’.
Since 2020, I’ve become concerned about a kind of forgetting that seems to have overtaken much of Western society, one that threatens our freedoms, democratic values and our very humanity. It seems that we have arrived at a crossroads and that the choices made at this time will have far-reaching consequences.
As a result, my writing has taken a new direction, shifting from leisurely explorations of place, culture and spirituality to analysis of current developments powered by a sense of urgency. The title ‘Ways of Seeing’ has taken on a new aspect, and now also refers to the need to look beneath the surface. My pieces tend to be long and research-intensive - essays with elements of reporting that draw on my background in academic philosophy and former career as a public policy journalist. I publish one roughly once a month.
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A note about Substack in 2026: Unfortunately, Substack is now asking some people to verify their ages in order to access features such as direct messages. I will not be doing this and so may not see messages sent via this platform. Readers who want to contact me directly can do so via email: alex klaushofer AT protonmail.com
About me
It – the stuff that makes me write - started with literature and place – my head in a book, my hands in the village stream, my eyes on the city on the horizon. At different times of the day, obviously!
In time, the reading led to an English degree. Later, a PhD in philosophy trained me to think in terms of questions, while a subsequent career in journalism gave me the licence to bother actual people with them.
As a journalist specialising in public policy and social affairs, I got to explore the workings of many of the areas that make up modern society: health and housing, education and regeneration. It was an age of expansion in public services and I interviewed the decision-makers at the top, the professionals running the services and the people using them.
Along the way, time in the Palestinian Territories revealed a love of the Arab world. My first book, Paradise Divided, was an attempt to get behind the headlines about the conflict-ridden Middle East and tell the human stories of modern-day Lebanon, with its rainbow of religious and political communities. My second book, The Secret Life of God, brought some of these concerns home in a kind of spiritual investigation into communities and individuals across three religious traditions attempting to find new ways of believing and belonging in contemporary Britain.
The writing of my third book about Europe seen through the lens of its lesser-known cities, was interrupted by Covid. I fled the ongoing lockdowns in Britain and accidentally moved to Lisbon. The book I originally envisaged lives somewhere in the back of my mind, part of it emerging as a ‘travella’ about Albania called Spyless in Tirana. I very much like the ‘midform’ publication - longer than an essay but shorter than a full-length book - and have published a few of them.
The material you will find here dates from September 2021. You can find my past blogs and links to work published by a variety of newspapers, magazines and websites over the past twenty five years at my website: www.alexklaushofer.com.
