Selected articles
Travelling Circus, Tunisia
I was longing for them to fall in love with the ancient gilt-embroidered velvet suits but instead they picked out a selection of hair grips and a pink plastic telephone.
Carthage: gateway to Tunisia
I have listened to Tunisians passionately arguing that these infant bones are not evidence of human sacrifice but belonged to still-borne babies and infant mortalities
The trials and tribulations of sailing up the Nile
The cooks always exhibited the most charming manners: "Madame, I have met you twice already, here at breakfast but also in my dreams…’
A trip to Cairo
In Cairo a blind man can smell what month it is through the scent of the squeezed fruit juices. We hit the end of the mango season but were plumb in the middle of guava and tamarind and at the beginning of bitter orange.
Sailing Down the Nile
Following in the wake of Anthony and Cleopatra as they sailed down the Nile can set up dangerously high expectations.
Western Desert of Egypt
I had to pinch myself time and time again to check that I was not in a dream as I swam in the spring-fed pool of Cleopatra
Busra and Bostra, Syria
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 Lure of the Silk Road
I knelt by the emperor’s grave-slab and touched it. Beneath, wrapped in linen embalmed in camphor and musk, his shrunken body had been laid in an ebony coffin. I could not imagine it. The living man was too vivid in my mind.
Colin Thubron’s The Lost Heart of Asia
Medieval Damascus
In the cosmopolitan court of Ommayad Damascus, scholar officials drawn from the old ruling classes of Byzantium and Sassanid Persia, from Yemen and Egypt mingled with singing girls, desert bards and nomad huntsmen drawn from out of the old tribal courts of Arabia.
Ruins of the shrine to Saint Simeon
… the intensity of his discipline alarmed the community – which was constantly on its guard lest madness, exhibitionism or self-serving masochism undermined a hermit in his spiritual search.
Baalbek, The Twin Temples of the Lord of Springs
Baalbek, in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, is the most magnificent temple in the entire Middle East, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
Travelling with Don McCullin in Lebanon
I am a plump, balding publisher of travel books with an immense capacity for wine, parties and picnics. We make an odd pair of travellers.
The Izzards – a family biography
If you have ever wondered what James Bond, having settled down with Miss Moneypenny, might have been like as a father, then you need look no further.
Birds began it all - journal notes on Islam in Ethiopia
Apart from the odd wrecked tank, or half-truck with a tree growing through the windscreen, the wars and tribulations of Ethiopia now seem a whole generation away.
The blameless Ethiopians
The miraculous is seldom far from the surface in Ethiopia.
Abyssinian Adventurer - James Bruce in Ethiopia
James Bruce was a big, lusty snob who filled notebook after notebook with accounts of his travels in North Africa and Abyssinia. The trousers fitted me perfectly.
Ethiopia – no one smokes in public
The faith in Ethiopia still retains something of the purity and passion of those apostolic saints, in a way that the British Isles has not seen since St Columba dwelt on Iona.
Aksum - Queen of Sheba
In between these great complexes, fixed like so many stars in the sky, there were bare meadows which in season filled up with the emphemeral tents and hut cities of the tribes drawn to the city by the great markets and festivals.
Sage of Sanaa
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.
Prester John
I have inherited from my Anglo-Irish mother a strong eye. When we look hard we find things - lost notes and four-leaf clovers, invisible to less attentive eyes.