For many children of the sixties a ‘journey to the East’ was a necessary rite of passage. In an extraordinary memoir Robert Irwin contrasts the contexts of England – the new culture and the hippy trail – with those of Algeria – bombs and guns and mysticism.
It’s 1987, and Maged is working nights as a cabbie in London, befriended by his fellow cabbie, ‘The Professor’, who offers local prostitutes gynaelogical advice. By day he’s a news junkie, hooked on broadcasts from his native war-torn Iraq, and desperate for news of his family. To deal with his terrible homesickness he recalls his […]
This first part of the autobiography of Dr Sultan bin Muhammad al-Qasimi spans the years until his selection as ruler of Sharjah as a young man of thirty-three. It reveals the emergence of the man and the state, documenting with insight the dramatic palace coups in his own country and the neighbouring emirate of Ras […]
A lyrical, haunting, multi-generational memoir of one family’s tempestuous century in Iraq from 1900 to the present. The Chalabis are one of the oldest and most prominent families in Iraq. For centuries they have occupied positions of honour and responsibility, loyally serving first the Ottoman Empire and, later, the national government. In ‘Late for Tea […]