She is also sincere, disarmingly honest, decent, interested in a continuous process of revealing self-examination and focusing her observations on the small community with which she has become intimate.

Doughty's curious archaic English will always succeed in repelling the casual reader from his book of Arabian travels.

Most emigrants from Britain have no wish to come back but those that do are often compelled by the bleakness of the British winter to write down their memories.

… they must also embrace other aspects from the lifetime of the Prophet: the freedom of women to speak out, to pray, study and learn

... with the very first line the reader is hooked into this epic roller-coaster of a historical narrative

The persistent edge of fear, the innate political caution of a people brought up under Saddam's dictatorship followed by the numbing experience of living through the allied aerial bombardments and the creeping tide of street violence, assassination, bombing and kidnappings after the invasion.

Her coins are indeed beautiful objects, for she is cast as both human and an august empress ...

… he acquires a tangibly different mentality - that of a man supporting cultural diversity wherever he finds it, rather than seeking the imposition of a new order by an outside power.

Mackintosh-Smith is on a quest 'to pick up the vibrations of his age, to echo sound the centuries'.

... a Holy City amongst broken arid hills on the edge of a desert, where for three thousand years pilgrims have come to repent, to pray, to celebrate, to wait for the second coming, to attempt to question God and to die.

Rory Stewart reminds us that in a recent recruitment drive, 92 out of 100 Afghan police recruits could not write their names or record numbers.

...running like a stream of molten lava beneath the narrative of Holland’s history is an even more intriguing story.

Selina O’Grady is also a first rate story-teller with a finely tuned ear for character and an impressive eye for atmosphere and the telling detail

the invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the USA and its dependent allies is not only a crime, but one that was spectacularly ill-advised.

In the background to this enduring triangular relationship a shifting chain of alliances bound the city of Aleppo to tribes of Bedouin (horse-breeding) Arabs to the east, Kurdish clans in the hills to the north and Alawi highlanders to the west.

... for the small readership who can engage in the poetics of two cultures situated in two different ages, it is a work of extraordinary richness.

... he started out as a convinced imperialist but was so disgusted by British rule in India (and French rule in North Africa) that he eventually realized that mere administrative efficiency should never be exchanged for freedom.