Hugh Pope
Author, Reporter, Editor
Year: 2010
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I didn’t realize that I was perceived as having a ‘swashbuckling style’, but reviews don’t get much more flattering than this Adam Chamy take on my April presentation of Dining with al-Qaeda at the New America Foundation. It was published in the Music and Arts section of the July edition of the Washington Report on…
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Description of Dining with al-Qaeda book talks in Oxford, Cambridge and London – and an encounter with British adventurer Rory Stewart
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A lovely review from Crisis Group media director Andrew Stroehlein, posted on Reuters AlertNet (original here). As for Stroehlein’s concern in the last paragraph, let me state that I had never thought that anyone would be uncomfortable at my occasional mentions of girlfriends in the Middle East! I reckoned that eyebrows would more likely be…
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Oxford University’s student newspaper Cherwell published this interview (here) ahead of my 20 May talk in Wadham College. My dinner with interviewer and Oxford Oriental Studies scholar Jessica Kelly and two of her fellow Oxonians was fun and memorable. While we discussed Hollywood’s portrayal of Iraq and America’s mission in the Middle East, it became…
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Working in America is completely different from trying to get anything done in the Middle East. In five hyperactive days, only once did something go wrong. Spring rains flooded the rail tracks on Rhode Island, and when I arrived at New York’s Penn Station, my train to Washington DC was running at least 90 minutes…
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This interview about Dining with al-Qaeda with Hülya Polat of VOA’s Turkish service features a photograph in 2002, taken as I sacrificed my hair to win insights from a whip-saw handed barber in central Baghdad. He claimed to have trimmed the locks of the pre-1958 King of Iraq, to have had the young Saddam Hussein…
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An interview about Dining with al-Qaeda with Christopher Isham of CBS news for the network’s ‘Washington Unplugged’ webcast (here) shows how the Internet allows a traditional broadcaster can now spend quality time showcasing a non-mainstream point of view (14 minutes in this case). Isham – Washington bureau chief for CBS and the man who organized…
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The May 2010 edition of Britain’s leading intellectual magazine Prospect has run a three-page excerpt that its editorial staff cleverly adapted from a chapter in Dining with al-Qaeda. In it I tell of my encounter in Saudi Arabia with a missionary from al-Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan. Editor David Goodhart sent me a copy of the…
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An interview with Nicola Mirenzi of Il Riformista, one of the few Italian newspapers with a correspondent in Istanbul. Along the way Mirenzi taught me another lesson in points of view: for me, his great countryman and 19th century forerunner, Edmondo de Amicis, is a favorite travel writer (Constantinople, Holland); for Italians, he is apparently…
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Having persuaded myself that America under President Obama is becoming more sophisticated in its approach to the Middle East — opening its eyes to the complications of Afghanistan and Iraq, questioning its blanket support for Israel, renouncing the legacy of the neocons — watching the film ‘The Hurt Locker’ was an unexpected reality check of…
Hugh Pope 