The Honorary Ottoman
Faith and Power: Religion and Politics in the Middle East by Bernard Lewis
Politics, Ideas and the Arts
A Dangerous Artist to Know
Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane by Andrew Graham-Dixon
The Answer Lies in the Soil
The Making of the British Landscape by Francis Pryor
Jottings of a Journeyman
The Lost Books of The Odyssey by Zachary Mason
A Tale of Two Presidents
'In the Old World, a leader is criticised — and quits — for being too emotional. In the New World, a leader is criticised for not being emotional enough'
Let My Pieces Sing
'Perhaps it was Philidor's prodigious musical intuition that somehow gave him a special insight into how the chess pieces should be harmonised'
Life, Synthia, But Not as we Know It
The latest work on synthetic cell creation by Craig Venter raises serious questions about bioethics
High-Stake Fakes
If you think that painting hanging in a dark corner of your house is worthless, think again
Tajikistan: In Search of the Yeti
'The Tajiks are unnervingly friendly. They take the Islamic injunction of hospitality with grave seriousness. The hungry often sacrifice their only cow for a backpacker with a camera, and the regime has
Bahrain: Women Drivers Welcome Here
'Hadija laughs as she describes how Saudi women, once over the bridge connecting Saudi Arabia to Bahrain, elbow their husbands out of the driving seat to take command of the wheel.'
Nabokov in Berlin
'Perhaps tying works of art to their originating topography is vulgar and needs to be kept discreet. But history needs Nabokov. During the artistically formative years, he lived here in the 1920s
No Brits in Basra
British businesses are nowhere to be seen in Iraq, unlike the companies of those countries that opposed the war