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Robert Irwin for many years co-hosted a gathering of creative writers in the upstairs room of the Blue Post pub in Fitzrovia, so that we could steal each other’s plots and swap gossip about publishers and agents.
It is a place that has been home to all the proudest ethnic elements of the Middle East: Turks, Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians and Arabs, subdivided by all their kaleidoscopic divisions of dialect, dynasty, clan, confederation and faith. You are sitting on one of the fissure lines of mythology and history.
… this chronicle of male, military orthodoxy is charmingly juxtaposed by the story of the first Almoravid Queen of Marrakech, Zaynab an-Nafzawiyyah.
Our last morning in Mashad was enlivened by a game of social chess. Bruce was determined not to be shown the documentary that is otherwise screened to all western visitors to the Imam’s shrine. So instead of quietly submitting to forty minutes of propaganda, we had a much longer series of interviews with clerics.
I have just read Tolstoy’s Confessions, which is a fascinating but melancholic ramble through faith, philosophy and religion. I think the pilgrimage would need to engage with this book, plus his Criticism of Dogmatic Theology, The Four Gospels Harmonised and What I Believe.
In our three journeys across south-west Turkey we searched out monuments from the high-noon of the Roman Empire - the time of the five good Emperors: Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninius Pius and Marcus Aurelius.
Jaipur is the best literary festival in the world, not because it is the biggest (it is not), nor because it is well-funded (it is not), but because it is free. Or almost free.
I still cherish my memories when the thrill of the story was in fantastic contrast to the close, protective warmth of the person reading to you
The carvings of gods and heroes that King Antiochus had commissioned to adorn this mountain have now been weathered by two thousand years of winter snow and the fierce heat of summer.
it was like winning the prize in a travel competition, the chance to work alongside Britain’s most celebrated war-journalist and photographer, who had himself travelled with many of my literary heroes – such as Norman Lewis and Bruce Chatwin.
So what was Gobekli-tepe? The stones have already been linked with aliens, refugees from the drowned island of Atlantis, Noah's flood, the lost paradise of Eden and more plausibly as places of astronomical observation.
Though enchanted by the sea, he was not a natural cog within any system. When they shared a cabin together, Andrew Waugh remembers how my father used to ‘lose’ a portion of his paperwork by posting them into a crack he had opened into the metal bulkhead.
For a skilled submariner could piggy-back his way through any surveillance, by waiting patiently and then tagging its way along by following (a bit like a limpet) underneath a noisy ship.
... on one memorable occasion we arrived home to find her racing around the garden in her car, apparently trying to run down my father
We love stumbling across wisdom in all the different ages of humankind, and try to avoid falling into the trap that our contemporary culture is any significant way, wiser than that of our ancestors.
Bruce had enthusiasm, he had stamina, he had knowledge, he had an ear and a delight for music, language and poetry. What he did not have was any money or any interest in making it, let alone submitting to the slavery of a salary.
We look for books that have been written with inner conviction and truth about the world. We want them to observant of others, capable of summing up a spirit of place and catching the moment on the wing.
The public call to prayer that echoes out from the minarets of all the great mosques of Islam is like a circular beacon that wraps up our world in ribbons of faith.
One door of the station bar opens onto the platform – where the blue sleeper carriages silently await their passengers – while from a lower door you can look directly out over the waters of the Bosphorus.
Bahira took Abu Talib aside and told him to keep a special watch over Muhammad, “for if others see and get to know about him what I know, they will do him evil for a great future lies before this nephew of yours.”
The miraculous is seldom far from the surface in Ethiopia.
Muhammad told us not to be concerned if we were kidnapped, for he had been held for 18 days (in the company of a delightful-sounding English geologist) and had found the food to be plentiful, with a fresh goat slaughtered every morning.
One clan were being asked to hand over ten Kalashnikov's and a thousand rounds in exchange for a new well and a small herd of camels to replace the losses of the war years
Instead of providing a direct answer Omer told me to keep a look out for camels. They are much more dangerous than hijackers, he said, for they mistake the reflection of the moon on the road for water. I peered alertly out of the window, keeping an eye out for both camels and hijackers.
A defiant and hauntingly long guttural wail of emotional rapture - an Arabic hymn to God’s love - held the crowd as spell bound as her sisters had.
The Sallee Rovers did not just restrict their operations to the capture of shipping but took the war into the lands of the enemy; landing raiding parties that returned with captives.
Until a few months ago, the Houthi were an obscure footnote to the complex history of the Arabian peninsular, but now due to their habit of firing rockets at ships using the Red Sea … they are very much at the centre of everyone’s attention.