My final test drive of this exemplary guidebook was to check up on half a dozen specific items that I have long puzzled over. I began with the gorgeous marble statue in the main entrance hall of Tripoli’s museum

There was much patriotic talk of exporting English broad-clothe to the Levant, but in reality the trade was also underwritten by breaking the arms embargo of Christendom with the Turks

Editing the glories of Anatolia down to just 83 entries is itself a labour of Hercules, but Russell quickly earns your respect by his eye for the telling detail, his love of nature, for taking the hard path ...

… the heart of the matter is that Melchior Lorck deserves the five-volume treatment because he is the first famous Danish artist.

Whether Mehmet is to be assessed as a battlefield commander, a strategist, a diplomat or a monumental builder of cities, there are very few men who can equal his achievement.

It reveals the subtle transformation of Thesiger from a youthful explorer-traveller to a world-class photographer who has left a priceless archive of some 38,000 negatives.

it was not until 1950 that he established a base in the Moroccan port of Tangier, complete with an open-top jaguar and a uniformed Moroccan chauffeur.

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.

Redmond has developed an entertaining but effective screen formed from a hoard of hilarious anecdotes and runaway stories

This book is stuffed with a lifetime of reading, selective drug-taking, chanting, eastern travel and dancing, all undertaken in the search for God.

... the process of conquest (savage and violent though it was) was often milder than the period of settlement, dominated by slave raiding, rape, the sacking of villages and burning of crops, leading to famine and wholescale depopulation.

Joseph Braude has crafted an ingenious, moving, clever, respectful and ultimately honest book about Morocco and the Moroccan people.

the two authors keep throwing open the windows to offer us fresh insights, new horizons of inquiry, as well as skipping out through a back door to give us a witheringly close examination of the fabric.

Abulafia rises above narrow nationalism to exhibit an Olympian detachment over his vast and varied historical landscape.

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.

… although the reader is utterly caught up in the devilish intricacies of the multi-layered plot, you are left with a complex picture of Istanbul and its deeply grained history.

...there is also enough bawdy laughter and midsummer humanism to enchant a wider audience and perhaps also get them drumming.

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