"The Pale Abyssinian" leaves the moral character of James Bruce in tatters. He has however brought the ruddy, oversexed, 6 foot 4 inch Scotsman, vibrantly to life.

She is also sincere, disarmingly honest, decent, interested in a continuous process of revealing self-examination and focusing her observations on the small community with which she has become intimate.

Doughty's curious archaic English will always succeed in repelling the casual reader from his book of Arabian travels.

Most emigrants from Britain have no wish to come back but those that do are often compelled by the bleakness of the British winter to write down their memories.

a busy enclave of house-bound CIA agents who have unwittingly re-occupied Mullah Omar¹s headquarters and filled it with gym equipment rather than venture outside

… they must also embrace other aspects from the lifetime of the Prophet: the freedom of women to speak out, to pray, study and learn

... though he has sunk his own share of shard-hunting trenches through the alluvial mud of Afghanistan and Mesopotamia, he has studied Syria with the broad-ranging lens of an art historian.

... with the very first line the reader is hooked into this epic roller-coaster of a historical narrative

... it was the five camels of the expedition who emerge as the dominant characters with a good walk-on part for Tuna, an oasis dog that adopts the party.

... he investigates the Tuareg defeat of the Flatters expedition and the bizarre truth of this French misadventure with its madness, mass poisoning and cannibalism.

Fortunately C.R.Pennell, having taught students in Turkey, Australia and Libya as well as lecturing to disparate groups of cultural tourists, has become educated in the attention span of "the interested general reader"

... although it is seemingly set in 17th-century Istanbul, it actually portrays a never-land of the collective imagination

… 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.

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.