Selected articles
Pilgrims to the Mountain
The carvings of gods and heroes that King Antiochus had commissioned to adorn this mountain have now been weathered by two thousand years of winter snow and the fierce heat of summer.
Possessed by Peake
I was familiar with the thick lips of the heroine Fuchsia and the cadaverous, high-brow of the anti-hero Steerpike years before I read so much as a line.
Gobekli-Tepe: The Oldest Temple on Earth?
So what was Gobekli-tepe? The stones have already been linked with aliens, refugees from the drowned island of Atlantis, Noah's flood, the lost paradise of Eden and more plausibly as places of astronomical observation.
Funeral address for Keith Rogerson
Though enchanted by the sea, he was not a natural cog within any system. When they shared a cabin together, Andrew Waugh remembers how my father used to ‘lose’ a portion of his paperwork by posting them into a crack he had opened into the metal bulkhead.
My Mother / Kathy's Youth
... on one memorable occasion we arrived home to find her racing around the garden in her car, apparently trying to run down my father
Bosphorus Review interviews Barnaby Rogerson
We love stumbling across wisdom in all the different ages of humankind, and try to avoid falling into the trap that our contemporary culture is any significant way, wiser than that of our ancestors.
Bruce Wannell (1952-2020)
Bruce had enthusiasm, he had stamina, he had knowledge, he had an ear and a delight for music, language and poetry. What he did not have was any money or any interest in making it, let alone submitting to the slavery of a salary.
Bookblast interviews Barnaby Rogerson & Rose Baring, worker-directors of Eland Publishing
We look for books that have been written with inner conviction and truth about the world. We want them to observant of others, capable of summing up a spirit of place and catching the moment on the wing.
Osama’s T-shirt and the Prophet’s Mantle
In 1998 Osama spun completely out of control. He went ‘global’, calling for a pan-Islamic International Front and arranged for forty Taliban ‘scholars’ to back a fatwa sanctioning the killing of Americans and Jews.
Night Train from Stamboul
One door of the station bar opens onto the platform – where the blue sleeper carriages silently await their passengers – while from a lower door you can look directly out over the waters of the Bosphorus.
The blameless Ethiopians
The miraculous is seldom far from the surface in Ethiopia.
Sage of Sanaa
Muhammad told us not to be concerned if we were kidnapped, for he had been held for 18 days (in the company of a delightful-sounding English geologist) and had found the food to be plentiful, with a fresh goat slaughtered every morning.
Make Music not War - Tuareg music festival
One clan were being asked to hand over ten Kalashnikov's and a thousand rounds in exchange for a new well and a small herd of camels to replace the losses of the war years