Selected articles
ROBERT IRWIN (August 1946 - June 2024)
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.
Winter Solstice letter. Nine swims over MMXXV
Swam out from Narin beach in wild weather, just making landfall at Inishkeen monastery island before the tide made things too difficult.
Mardin & Tur Abdin
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.
Zaynab: Queen of Marrakech
… this chronicle of male, military orthodoxy is charmingly juxtaposed by the story of the first Almoravid Queen of Marrakech, Zaynab an-Nafzawiyyah.
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.