Drinkers with Writing Problems

It's a city that doesn't flinch - or forgive. Las Vegas found its halcyon days at the end of skimming rackets and growing criminal ambition, but the writers who tried to make sense of its story faced a wavering desert mirage of America's secrets. That reflection remains strong in the city's cocktail bars and craft distilleries, while its smokier rooms are haunted by memories of creative outcasts on a collision course with their own demons.

Have a drink with the only troop of wild monkeys in Europe. The Royal Crown colony of Gibraltar remains one of the Old World's enigmas – a cauldron of cultures and empires simmering together under the low-lit flame of History itself. Gibraltar is also a port where weary sailors, restless soldiers and drifters engaged in espionage have found themselves stranded over time. Episode 9 explores how the contours of this colony intersected with the lives of three drink-loving writers, as well as how the legacy of cider, sherry, spying and warfare connects with their stories that were penned about a high rock over the sea.

Come along on a hike and pub crawl through the most spell-binding landscape in Britain's northwest: Writers have been gravitating to the Lake District for generations, their imaginations enthralled by its serene and stunning views, their senses on guard for the blustery, foreboding power of its skies. The district's dynamism fostered one of Literature's greatest partnerships; but the restless, drink-loving half of that duo eventually started veering through darker doorways of the human mind.

Season 2 opens with a return to the California Gold Rush and Nevada Silver Strike, exploring how these discoveries in the 19th century lured every kind of drifter and dreamer to America's lawless edge of the world. Through the dusty violence and ominous mineshaft darkness, three writers emerged to capture a brazen, boom-and-bust spirit of the age. Their own drink-soaked stories – some inspiring, some funny, some tragic – have now seeped into the bones of bars, saloons and hotels that remain from northern California to western Nevada; and into a force we call the Literature of the West.

Season 1 ends with a sojourn to the southern corners of Iberia, chasing the elusive memory of one of the greatest Spanish writers to ever take up the pen. He was a literary folk hero in the wine-splashed tapas bars from Seville to Granada; and when forces within the Spanish Civil War caused him to disappear, it set the stage for a national haunting as dark as any of his poetry. Travel to the barrios and hill towns that he called home – and to the place where some are still searching for his body to this very day.