Egypt
‘Too bohemian for Bournemouth’: the young Lawrence Durrell
Begged by his mother to go somewhere his behaviour wouldn’t ‘show so much’, the future novelist, aged 19, embarked on a lifetime of travel and rarely visited Britain again
Conrad Black adheres firmly to the ‘great man’ view of history
The movers and shakers of Volume I of his projected history of the world are Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Hannibal rather than any socio-economic forces
Movers and shakers
Anthony Sattin begins with a quotation from Bruce Chatwin, who famously tried all his life to produce a book about…
Sound made visible
What particularly excites Silvia Ferrara, the author of The Greatest Invention, is not language per se but writing – that…
A daughter’s duty
There comes a time after the death of parents when grief subsides, the sense of loss eases, and you, the…
The enquiring minds of Egypt
The government has plans to fund a new research agency to back ‘cutting-edge science’. Ptolemaios (Ptolemy) I (367-282 bc), the…
A world apart
Holed up in her sixth-floor London flat, Laura Freeman finds solace in the art of the hermit
Arabian nights
Recall the media coverage at the height of the Jimmy Savile scandal, times it by about a thousand, and you…
Death metal
We in the West may snigger at heavy metal, but in some parts of the world its practitioners face the death penalty. Karen Yossman reports
A country in crisis
Jack Shenker is a throwback to an older, more romantic age when foreign correspondents were angry, partisan and half-crazed with…
Best in show
Martin Gayford recommends the exhibitions to see — and to avoid — over the coming year
The caliphate strikes back
Isis could be on the brink of creating a terrifying new world order
Of gods and men
Tom Holland on Egypt, where the deities were born and history itself began
Gore blimey
Gore Vidal has form as a crime writer. In the early 1950s, when his sympathetic literary treatment of homosexuality had…
Egypt
Egypt’s revolution of 2011 didn’t just get rid of President Mubarak: it did a pretty good job of clearing out…
Portrait of the week
Home MPs voted by 382 to 128 to make Britain the only country to allow genetic modification of embryos to…
Arab spring
Last weekend BBC Arabic celebrated 77 years since John Reith (as he then was) launched the first foreign-language service of…
Let there be light
It’s time to reclaim Islam from the Islamists
The hype jihad
Isis slaughters kidnap victims because it guarantees headlines. It's better at slaughtering innocents than it is at winning wars
… and in Gaza
Gaza The main entrance to Al-Shifa Hospital was crowded with what seemed to be journalists. This wasn’t unusual. They…
How the Westminster hawk became an endangered species
There is a slight whiff of the summer of 1914 to Westminster at the moment. The garden party season is…
Portrait of the week
Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, responded to the triumph of the UK Independence Party in the European elections (which…
General paralysis
America has let Egypt’s old military oligarchs take hold again. Must it carry on paying for them, too?
Portrait of the week
Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that inheritance tax ‘shouldn’t be paid by people who’ve worked hard and saved…
