Selected articles
Dorchester Literary Festival
October 20, 2025
Dorset Museum, Dorchester
In conversation with Allan Mallinson, Barnaby Rogerson will be talking about his latest book - The House Divided
Persian Picnics
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.
To Tolstoy’s grave
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.
Ancient Asia Minor
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 Literary Festival
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.
Oxford Literary Festival
March 31, 2025
Oxford Martin School: Lecture Theatre
Travel writer and historian Barnaby Rogerson looks back at the reasons for the 1,400-year divide between Sunni and Shia and how it has shaped and continues to shape the Middle East.
Jaipur Literature Festival 2025
January 31 and February 1, 2025
Cheriton Talks
February 22, 2025
St Michael’s Church, Cheriton in Hampshire
The Sherborne Travel Writing Festival 2025
April 12, 2025
The Houthi are Highlanders
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.
Reading Out Loud
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
Pilgrims to the Mountain
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.
Into the West: an island off an island off an island
The sea water moans as if some vast submarine monster lies chained to the sea floor and has been struggling for a thousand years to break free.
Dervla Murphy (1931-2022)
Whatever the theologians might say about heaven being in a state of union with God, I knew that it consisted of an infinite library; and eternity was simply what enabled one to read uninterruptedly for ever
With Don McCullin to the Frontier
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.
Gobekli-Tepe: The Oldest Temple on Earth?
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.
Memorial address for Alida Harvie
For the beautiful young Alida was warmly embraced by Lloyd George, beamed at by Mr Baldwin, Ramsay Macdonald bestowed a wintry smile, the be-monocled Austern Chamberlain offered a more formal salute and even Mr Winston Churchill gave her a puckish smile.
A brave bitch by Keith Rogerson
A cold shudder struck us both and we raced to the cliff edge walking along it, staring down at the shingle beach about 80 feet down a steeply sloping ridged drop.
Funeral address for Keith Rogerson
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.
China Tea in Gibraltar
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.