Wild life
Wild life
Kenya Hassan was our skipper. He’d take us in his dhow out on the Indian Ocean for trips along the…
Wild life
Laikipia Some are saved by Jesus and they are sober. For others, drunkenness is as natural as love-making, roasted meat…
Wild life
The Farm, Laikipia Outside the nightjars were calling and a zebra brayed in the valley. The constellations were still bright…
Wild life
Laikipia The principal of the local polytechnic was waiting for me in the kitchen. Frequently in the kitchen there is…
Wild life
The Farm, Laikipia I realised the worst drought of this generation was at last over this morning when two Samburu…
Wild life
On the lengthy train ride to Kyiv I read my Plokhy as we trundled through seas of mud, passing villages…
Wild life
When Wilfred Thesiger arrived in the port of Al Mukalla after his foot crossing of the Empty Quarter desert with…
The man who makes money where no one else dares to go
Rwanda The mineshaft is dark, the air humid and starved of oxygen. I follow Marcus Edwards-Jones out of the muddy…
Wild life
Kenya Tonj is a war-battered settlement on a river that eventually feeds into the White Nile, in South Sudan. When…
Wild life
Kenya Greetings from Africa, my beleaguered cousins. I’ve written before about how in 1973, Uganda’s Idi Amin telegrammed Queen Elizabeth,…
Wild life
Laikipia, Kenya No portrait of Boris Johnson hangs in the hall of Balliol, his old Oxford College. Hardly a surprise,…
Wild life
Laikipia Plateau, Kenya Until only a few years ago, the constellations blazed across the sky above the farm at night…
Wild life
Kenya After two years of no rain, all colour has drained from the landscape on the farm so that by…
Wild life
Laikipia You know things are bad when the zebras are thin. Even during most droughts, zebras are like matrons at…
Wild life
Kenya As late as the 1920s, it was believed that Africa’s tropical sun would boil a European’s brains. ‘The direct…
Wild life
On the BOAC VC10 flights to Nairobi, the pilots would invite children like me up to sit in the cockpit…
Wild life
Yet again, millions of civilians across the Horn of Africa are starving. The world blames the crisis on drought and…
Wild life
Delayed, on Southern Rail Home From the Hill is a 1987 documentary by Molly Dineen about Hilary Hook, an elderly…
Wild life
Kenya During Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 I got a close look at Moscow’s troops and their kit. These…






























