Somalia
Wild life
Kenya During Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 I got a close look at Moscow’s troops and their kit. These…
Wild life
Kenya Each time I sit in St Bride’s on Fleet Street during the memorial of another friend, I look around…
Wild life
Malindi, Kenya Beneath the Indian Ocean’s surface, I wondered if the pandemic had turned out to be a good thing…
Nordics and Nazis
Social historians of the future may look back at the reading habits of this era and conclude that we were…
My time in Somalia with Michael Meacher, Tony Benn’s ‘vicar on earth’
East Africa The late Michael Meacher represented almost everything I loathe in a politician. Before his death in 2015,…
Will Labour convict me of thought crime?
I got an email this week, from a chap called Harry, which began as follows: ‘I am writing to inform you…
Just Williams
It’s tempting to believe that somewhere in the bowels of Broadcasting House in London the voice of Kenneth Williams is…
Hope against hope
At the eye of apartheid South Africa’s storm of insanities was a mania for categorisation. Everything belonged in its place,…
Diary
Lunch with the man who hanged Saddam. My irrepressible old Baghdad friend Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Ealing neurologist turned Iraqi national security…
Portrait of the week
Home Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the former Conservative foreign secretary, resigned as chairman of Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee and promised…
Wild life
Hell’s Kitchen My ambition to open a fish and chip shop in Mogadishu has not happened yet, though I remain…
Murder in the mall
So you’ve just popped down to the supermarket for the weekly shop, toddlers in tow, when the grenades start to…
The final crossing
Italy’s decriminalising of illegal immigration has acted as a green light to boat people, and the journey is a deadly one
Wild life
From a way off, as he entered the café, he looked young and handsome but when he sat down there…
Wild life
Wizards inland from the little Somali port of Barawe bewitched a person to come to them by banging a nail…
An African Khmer Rouge
If Al-Shabaab was behind the terrorist attack in Nairobi, then the group has come a long way since its foundation…
