Selected articles
Nineteen Islamic Numbers
It is an act of piety to collect together the forty most personally relevant hadith from the thousands that have been assembled.
Cultural Connections: The Middle East in London
One should not insult the memory of Thersites and Cleon by allowing Trump and Farage to be rated as fellow Demagogues.
Review of “Medina in Birmingham, Najaf in Brent: Inside British Islam” by Innes Bowen
So when one is looking for Cultural Connections does one have to cut out all the real success stories? Are we always looking at a bridge, or a journey half delivered, someone caught halfway between assimilation and the indigenous homeland?
Book review: “Al-Britannia, My Country” by James Fergusson
Three children of Pakistani bus drivers are now working at the very peak of Britain's meritocratic society; Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, Baroness Warsi and cabinet minister Sajid Javid.
Book review - “Victorian Muslim: Abdullah Quilliam and Islam in the West”, edited by Jamie Gilham and Ron Geaves
Queen Victoria not only read Quilliam’s book on Islam but bought copies for all her children.
My Demagogue Hero
One should not insult the memory of Thersites and Cleon by allowing Trump and Farage to be rated as fellow Demagogues.
Book review of “In the Name of God: A History of Christian & Muslim Intolerance”, by Selina O’Grady
Selina O’Grady is a first-rate story-teller with a finely tuned ear for character and an impressive eye for atmosphere and the telling detail.
Book review of “Islamic Empires: Fifteen cities that define a Civilization”, by Justin Marozzi
His chapter on the city of Samarkand, informed by an earlier biography of Tamburlane, is so knowledgeable and intimate that one is in danger of briefly warming to this murderous but garden-loving tyrant, worthy of being listed alongside Stalin, Mao and Hitler.
Relatively speaking: Sicily with my father
The essence of our travel gamesmanship is to sound as relaxed and carefree as possible while actually controlling every single movement. Picnic sites are especially fiercely fought over.
Be a Traveller in an Antique Land - Cyprus
On this varied landscape is reflected an extraordinarily rich architectural heritage of Gothic cathedrals, Venetian fortresses, Roman Mosaics, Ottoman minarets, Crusader castles, Ptolemaic tombs, Bronze Age sanctuaries and British postboxes which all stand in surprising harmony.
A Place Apart
This population, only to be numbered in its tens of thousands, is yet drawn from many of the world's most far-flung trading nations.
Garrison Library at Gibraltar
It was at the shelves of the Garrison Library that I first learned about the last crusade led by the doomed boy-king of Portugal, about the loss of 'English Tangier' to Sultan Moulay Ismail and about the heroic defence of the Rock itself against the combined forces of France and Spain in the dark years of the American War of Independence.
Pedicab
I yearned for some silk banners, painted gargoyles and bells but once on the road my distaste for washable, pressed plastic disappeared in the elation of the journey.
A London Evening at St Barnabas House, Soho
I am Everyman, she is Knowledge and we meet in the 18th century hall of the House St Barnabas In Soho.
Major Munthe's Garden at Southside House, Wimbledon Common
Apart from the odd weakness for wolfhounds, the Munthes have forsworn pedigree strains and generation after generation have sought new friends from those in the condemned cells at Battersea Dogs Home.
Close to home: Suffolk coast
The coast is everywhere, for the five estuary fingers of Suffolk extend deep inland to grip the county like a tenacious claw.
From St Swithun’s tomb to The Old Man of Wilmington: Barnaby Rogerson & author Mary Miers on the South Downs Way
The ‘whole-wayers’ were often alone, male, and possibly over-equipped with maps, carbon-fibre sticks and backpacks.
Muslim Dogs
This is glory for animal-lovers to exalt in, a basic understanding that all creatures are spiritual partners on this earth.
Exhibition review: “Celts: Art and Identity at the National Museum of Scotland”
The Celts have no ethnic or linguistic identity. It is just our collective term for the shared material culture of the Iron Age Europeans living north of the Mediterranean, from the Atlantic to the Danube.
Like Lambs to the Slaughter - Old Roads and New Ways
A drove road was not just for driving rural meat to the urban marketplace, but for thousands of years was part of the seasonal rhythm of the British Isles, as the black cattle moved to the summer pastures in the Highlands and moved back down to the lowlands in the winter.