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“I didn’t think you were the type.” Zu Henry, our neighbour in Bath, was looking through the passenger window of our car and addressing me.

A few weeks ago, I found myself repeatedly humming a tune of a well-known Arabic song lamenting the loss of Andalusia and its splendour.

The other day I was pulled up short by a headline from the USA that a school district in the state of Utah had banned the Bible, King James’

An envied British institution. No, not the National Health Service. Something much more enviable. This year is the 70th anniversary of The

No, despite the title, I am not reviewing the second book in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy on Henry VIII's chief minister, Thomas Cromwell.

I first came across Fraxinus uhdei in Colombia in 1998. It’s a species of ash tree from Mexico, known in Colombia as urapán...

I was drinking a Mützig beer near Bukavu on the Congo border a week ago with a Rwandan when the BBC World Service headlines described a...

For the last six months or so, I have been engaged in a mammoth reading project which is the biggest one I have ever undertaken...

"Odesa. The doctor I went to in London. Remember? I read this morning: her clinic in Odesa was less than a kilometre from where those...

‘The Death of Grass’ is a post-apocalyptic novel written in 1956 by English novelist Samuel Youd under the pen name John Christopher...