Selected articles
Reading Between the Lines, an article on Osman Hamdi Bey - Parisian painter and Ottoman archaeologist
In Young Woman Reading, the book that lies open, respectfully wrapped in a linen cloth embroidered in silk, is written in Persian in Arabic script.
Troy Story 1: Lost and Found
The museum interior is a four-storey tower of enchantment.
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
Through a glass darkly – North Africa as seen through English travel-writing
It is not enough for a traveller in North Africa, to sit in the shaded Cafe de Paris, be it in Tunis, Tangier, Algiers or Marrakech and just sip a coffee beside the street theatre of a Maghrebi dusk. You should, in the pecking order of these things, have both an open packet of local cigarettes and a battered travel book at your elbow.