For Christmas my wife gave me a book called The Rainborowes, by Adrian Tinniswood. It’s a collective biography of a remarkable family of Puritan mariners and soldiers, turned politicians and revolutionaries, who straddled the Atlantic world of the mid-seventeenth century, with one foot in Wapping and the other in Massachusetts. But what particularly interested me … More Tertius Gaudens

I spent a day recently at an interesting Fulbright Alumni Conference about language. This time it was about the future of the English language in Morocco. I sometimes secretly think of English as an alarmingly successful invasive species, like the Cane Toad or the Nile Perch, but that definitely wasn’t the tone of the day’s … More Cane Toads and Boiled Eggs

Last week I was in London. The occasion was a huge and very splendid party being given at the British Library by HH Lalla Joumala, the Moroccan Ambassador, to celebrate the 800th anniversary of Anglo-Moroccan relations. King John evidently sent a couple of dips to the Sultan’s court in 1213 to ask for help vis-à-vis … More King John and the Sultan

The third and last film I saw at British Film Week was a documentary made by the British film-maker Deborah Perkin, called Bastards. It follows the stories of a number of women supported by the remarkable Casablanca women’s charity Solidarité Féminine, in their quests to establish through the courts the legitimacy – or if not … More Bastards