Eight Months on Ghazzah St
14 November 2014 | Media
Hilary Mantel wrote a number of books before her big breakthrough with Wolf Hall. Followed up by her second Booker Prize winner Bring Up the Bodies. I saw the two books, as plays, in London earlier this year. On the same day, matinee and evening performance so it was ...
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Goodbye Mecca
3 October 2014 | Living
True or False?
• The house of the Prophet Mohammed’s first wife Khadijah in Mecca has been demolished and replaced by a block of toilets
• The Victoria’s Secret lingerie shop in Riyadh was burnt to the ground by angry matawwa, the Saudi Arabian religious police
•...
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Islamabad
27 October 2012 | Places
Before my recent trip up the Karakoram Highway through northern Pakistan to Kashgar in China I spent a day on a side trip to the Murree hill station and looking around Islamabad. On my last visit to Pakistan in early 2006 I went to the ancient Buddhist site at Taxila,...
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Dictator Style – Gaddafi & Others
26 August 2011 | Culture
◄ When I rewrote the intro to Bad Lands for a recent reprint I noted that nothing much had changed, Fidel in Cuba, Kim Jong-il in North Korea, a mess in Iraq, no driving licences for women in Saudi Arabia, the generals in Burma, everywhere you looked it was no change....
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Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad
1 May 2011 | Places
◄ The Faisaliah Tower in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The tower was designed by UK architect Sir Norman Foster and built by the bin Laden family’s construction company.
After all the talk about Osama bin Laden hiding out in a cave in the unpoliced badlands along the Pakis...
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