Selected articles
Nineteen Islamic Numbers
It is an act of piety to collect together the forty most personally relevant hadith from the thousands that have been assembled.
Cultural Connections: The Middle East in London
One should not insult the memory of Thersites and Cleon by allowing Trump and Farage to be rated as fellow Demagogues.
My Demagogue Hero
One should not insult the memory of Thersites and Cleon by allowing Trump and Farage to be rated as fellow Demagogues.
Relatively speaking: Sicily with my father
The essence of our travel gamesmanship is to sound as relaxed and carefree as possible while actually controlling every single movement. Picnic sites are especially fiercely fought over.
Be a Traveller in an Antique Land - Cyprus
On this varied landscape is reflected an extraordinarily rich architectural heritage of Gothic cathedrals, Venetian fortresses, Roman Mosaics, Ottoman minarets, Crusader castles, Ptolemaic tombs, Bronze Age sanctuaries and British postboxes which all stand in surprising harmony.
A Place Apart
This population, only to be numbered in its tens of thousands, is yet drawn from many of the world's most far-flung trading nations.
Garrison Library at Gibraltar
It was at the shelves of the Garrison Library that I first learned about the last crusade led by the doomed boy-king of Portugal, about the loss of 'English Tangier' to Sultan Moulay Ismail and about the heroic defence of the Rock itself against the combined forces of France and Spain in the dark years of the American War of Independence.
Pedicab
I yearned for some silk banners, painted gargoyles and bells but once on the road my distaste for washable, pressed plastic disappeared in the elation of the journey.
A London Evening at St Barnabas House, Soho
I am Everyman, she is Knowledge and we meet in the 18th century hall of the House St Barnabas In Soho.
Major Munthe's Garden at Southside House, Wimbledon Common
Apart from the odd weakness for wolfhounds, the Munthes have forsworn pedigree strains and generation after generation have sought new friends from those in the condemned cells at Battersea Dogs Home.
Close to home: Suffolk coast
The coast is everywhere, for the five estuary fingers of Suffolk extend deep inland to grip the county like a tenacious claw.
From St Swithun’s tomb to The Old Man of Wilmington: Barnaby Rogerson & author Mary Miers on the South Downs Way
The ‘whole-wayers’ were often alone, male, and possibly over-equipped with maps, carbon-fibre sticks and backpacks.
Muslim Dogs
This is glory for animal-lovers to exalt in, a basic understanding that all creatures are spiritual partners on this earth.
Exhibition review: “Celts: Art and Identity at the National Museum of Scotland”
The Celts have no ethnic or linguistic identity. It is just our collective term for the shared material culture of the Iron Age Europeans living north of the Mediterranean, from the Atlantic to the Danube.
Like Lambs to the Slaughter - Old Roads and New Ways
A drove road was not just for driving rural meat to the urban marketplace, but for thousands of years was part of the seasonal rhythm of the British Isles, as the black cattle moved to the summer pastures in the Highlands and moved back down to the lowlands in the winter.
Dog Days in the capital: My Week
We stumbled upon our most unexpected discovery at the end of a long march through Grovelly Woods on a gloomy, rain-sodden track that the map had enticingly labelled a Roman road.
A Modern Pilgrimage
We stumbled upon our most unexpected discovery at the end of a long march through Grovelly Woods on a gloomy, rain-sodden track that the map had enticingly labelled a Roman road.
Walking the New River
A barbed wire fence stopped me crossing the railway line, the other side of which was the banks of the Lee. We had reached the end.
Rough Journeys: George Bean and Terence Mitford
George Bean was a gentle giant, a somewhat unworldly figure whose towering 6 foot 6 inch frame only seemed to come alive on the golf course and tennis court.
A Goddess Clothed
'By Hercules' he exclaims, 'What slender hips! How delicately moulded the buttocks! How sweetly they smile!'