Selected articles
“Sahara Man: Travelling with the Tuareg” by Jeremy Keenan
... he investigates the Tuareg defeat of the Flatters expedition and the bizarre truth of this French misadventure with its madness, mass poisoning and cannibalism.
“Memoirs of a Dervish: Sufis, Mystics and the Sixties”, by Robert Irwin
This book is stuffed with a lifetime of reading, selective drug-taking, chanting, eastern travel and dancing, all undertaken in the search for God.
Review of "The Barbary Figs" by Rashid Doudjedra
“Rashid Boudjedra has his finger on the pulse of his country's heart and soul, does more than offer us a great novel about Algeria - he gives us a fascinating reflection on the ambiguities of history" - Le Monde
Review of The Sword and the Cross by Fergus Fleming
The Sword and the Cross is a tale of two extraordinary men who lived in an extraordinary place during an extraordinary time. It is the story of General Laperinne and Father Foucauld: the two greatest figures from the turn-of-the-century French colonial conquest of Sahara
The Four Faces of Algeria
Algiers will always be married to its past. For her streets and her harbour walls have witnessed some of the most decisive engagements of recent world history.
A Grand Tour of the classical monuments of Algeria
Algiers has become another Rome to me. Like the eternal city, every street and hill of its complex topography echoes with some dramatic scene from history.
Algiers and Tlemcen
Algiers has become another Rome to me. Like the eternal city, every street and hill of its complex topography echoes with some dramatic scene from history.
In Algeria with Don McCullin
Don, a genuine home-brewed product of London’s East End, was launching into an imitation of the precocious, slightly camp, auction-house accent of Bruce Chatwin. It was Chatwin who had first brought Don to Algeria, on the trail of a story that traced the Algerian war of independence right back to the massacre of Setif
Taking Pleasure in Ruins
Tipasa is just one of the many Roman port-cities that studded the coast of North Africa, but if you look deep into their stratigraphy they all started life as harbours of the Phoenician traders about three thousand years ago.
The Other Armadas: The Three Spanish invasions of Algiers: 1516, 1519 and 1541
As the galley pulled alongside, rather than risk any of his men unnecessarily, the commander of Our Lady of the Conception ordered that the merchantman should be raked with gunfire. For you never knew in these waters, who was armed with what.
The Algerian Flag in Exmouth Market
I was horrified to discover that it was the British under Lord Exmouth who had destroyed the eight-hundred-year old Almoravid mosque that had been the heart, soul and university of the city.
A Narrative History of Ancient Algeria
These kingdoms were rich in corn, olive oil and leather but not in the metals that were so highly prized in the ancient world, indeed the whole region seems to have stood outside the charmed circle of bronze age culture, passing from tools of stone, leather and wood straight into the Iron age.
Tales of the Unexpected
I’d gone through 90% of the bureaucratic hoops of a land-crossing from eastern Morocco, only to watch my passport being literally frisbeed out of the window of the last kiosk. After which the shutter was slammed down in a very decisive manner.