Verity and Agatha hate being left behind by their father when he goes off on his travels as a British diplomat. So after he tells his daughters he’s being sent to visit a mountain kingdom in southern Africa, they wangle their way into joining him. When the King’s grand-daughter tells the young sisters of a…

In 1969, my family left South Africa. My father explains why: a clash between university ideals and state power.

Manca Juvan is a Slovenian photographer who, among many other projects, is coordinating a new collection of writing to go with her photography in Istanbul to which I hope to contribute. More on that soon, I hope. But Manca also shared a lovely photo of the new cover of my book on making sense of…

Francis Ghilès, a veteran Algeria and North Africa watcher and ex-Financial Times reporter, kindly gave a warm welcome to the new edition of my book Dining with al-Qaeda: Making Sense of the Middle East, saying it represented “ground-level reporting, bursting with insights“. What made me even happier while talking to Francis was that he said…

When I began to work as a reporter in Turkey in 1987, David Barchard was the correspondent of the Financial Times and the outsider that everyone turned for an independent interpretation of Turkish affairs. He died on Christmas Day after an accidental fall in his native Yorkshire, aged 73. His old friend İlhan Nebioğlu broke…