… the uncovering of Motya has been fraught with controversy right from Schliemann's first raid-like dig.

..beneath the surface of this seemingly conventional travelogue, there is a questing spiritual inquiry.

Her personal insights into the political manoeuvres of the 50s and 60's alone make this book a valuable and fascinating testimony.

Michael Jacobs is an explorer of books and bars, ruins and restaurants - a scholar who can clearly lunch the best of us under the table.

… we are kept quite on tenterhooks as we follow our hero, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, on his erudite tour through the Arabic and Turkish speaking lands of Morocco, Egypt, Syria, Oman, Turkey and Crimea.

Munthe was also possessed by an abiding fascination for tramps and street musicians.

Her subject is not public architecture, the five M's of a Muslim city - mosques, mausolea, markets, medrasa and military-monuments - but the closely guarded domestic space.

The persistent edge of fear, the innate political caution of a people brought up under Saddam's dictatorship followed by the numbing experience of living through the allied aerial bombardments and the creeping tide of street violence, assassination, bombing and kidnappings after the invasion.

Time and time again I felt in the company of a young Dostoevsky, albeit in a jean jacket wandering through the dark streets of Edinburgh rather than in a greatcoat on the avenues of St Petersburg.

Bolter's Grand-daughter reveals a life packed full of movement, people, energy, flowers, scents and landscapes

Her coins are indeed beautiful objects, for she is cast as both human and an august empress ...

From these tenuous trails of historical memory, a whole rigid belief system would however be created by literate, male scholars to gradually strangle the freedom of a living, inspirational religion with the chains of clerical authority and a scarcely credible mythology

… he acquires a tangibly different mentality - that of a man supporting cultural diversity wherever he finds it, rather than seeking the imposition of a new order by an outside power.

This is a man with three best-selling books about Spain under his belt, who can speak and play guitar like a native, survive cocaine binges and police chases and has a flamenco-dancer from Valencia as his live-in lover.

My final test drive of this exemplary guidebook was to check up on half a dozen specific items that I have long puzzled over. I began with the gorgeous marble statue in the main entrance hall of Tripoli’s museum

There was much patriotic talk of exporting English broad-clothe to the Levant, but in reality the trade was also underwritten by breaking the arms embargo of Christendom with the Turks

Editing the glories of Anatolia down to just 83 entries is itself a labour of Hercules, but Russell quickly earns your respect by his eye for the telling detail, his love of nature, for taking the hard path ...

… the heart of the matter is that Melchior Lorck deserves the five-volume treatment because he is the first famous Danish artist.

Whether Mehmet is to be assessed as a battlefield commander, a strategist, a diplomat or a monumental builder of cities, there are very few men who can equal his achievement.