It reveals the subtle transformation of Thesiger from a youthful explorer-traveller to a world-class photographer who has left a priceless archive of some 38,000 negatives.

it was not until 1950 that he established a base in the Moroccan port of Tangier, complete with an open-top jaguar and a uniformed Moroccan chauffeur.

Mackintosh-Smith is on a quest 'to pick up the vibrations of his age, to echo sound the centuries'.

... a Holy City amongst broken arid hills on the edge of a desert, where for three thousand years pilgrims have come to repent, to pray, to celebrate, to wait for the second coming, to attempt to question God and to die.

Redmond has developed an entertaining but effective screen formed from a hoard of hilarious anecdotes and runaway stories

This book is stuffed with a lifetime of reading, selective drug-taking, chanting, eastern travel and dancing, all undertaken in the search for God.

... the process of conquest (savage and violent though it was) was often milder than the period of settlement, dominated by slave raiding, rape, the sacking of villages and burning of crops, leading to famine and wholescale depopulation.

Joseph Braude has crafted an ingenious, moving, clever, respectful and ultimately honest book about Morocco and the Moroccan people.

the two authors keep throwing open the windows to offer us fresh insights, new horizons of inquiry, as well as skipping out through a back door to give us a witheringly close examination of the fabric.

Abulafia rises above narrow nationalism to exhibit an Olympian detachment over his vast and varied historical landscape.

Rory Stewart reminds us that in a recent recruitment drive, 92 out of 100 Afghan police recruits could not write their names or record numbers.

… although the reader is utterly caught up in the devilish intricacies of the multi-layered plot, you are left with a complex picture of Istanbul and its deeply grained history.

...there is also enough bawdy laughter and midsummer humanism to enchant a wider audience and perhaps also get them drumming.

...running like a stream of molten lava beneath the narrative of Holland’s history is an even more intriguing story.

And since my reading of Artemis Cooper’s page-turning biography, Leigh Fermor has acquired yet another fan.

He shows us that although the British occupation of Afghanistan was a doomed long-term strategy, there was nothing inevitable about a military defeat.

Selina O’Grady is also a first rate story-teller with a finely tuned ear for character and an impressive eye for atmosphere and the telling detail

So when we hear how the Huguenots of France, or the Jews and Moors of Andalucia are to be protected and tolerated by a generous peace settlement, we need to set the alarm clock for the inevitable persecution that is to come. 

The resulting mosaic of opinions draws out a fascinating composite picture of a nation that through the three cultural markers of language, music and food is triumphantly self-defined and ceaselessly inventive.