I have lived abroad for most of the last 30 years, in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Italy, Belgium, Canada and Morocco. I now live in England.
Several readers of this blog have been in touch to ask about my progress on Richard Wright and the question of silver manufactured in Manchester for export to Morocco. Well, I can report at last that I have sent an article called ‘Silvery singing voices:’ Moroccan Manchester and the Puzzle of Richard Wright which sums … More Richard Wright and other silvery matters
Unable to leave well alone, I found myself compiling a second alphabet this winter. It is much as before, and entirely inconsequential. Anyway, for those who do not entertain Twitter, here is the whole caboodle. Happy Christmas. A is for Amicable numbers, pairs of numbers magically related, each the sum of the other’s divisors. The … More More alphabetical excursions
I was interviewed recently by a colleague for a thesis she is writing on religion and Cultural Relations. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but the conversation came back to me in fragments last week in Périgord, sitting by a log fire, eating walnuts and reading Shusako Endo’s extraordinary novel, Silence. Endo’s story … More Wholly Overlapping Magisteria
Earlier in the summer, I celebrated the relative idleness of retirement with an alphabet, sent out most days on Twitter. It consisted of favourite words culled from my commonplace book, and I reproduce it here, lightly edited, in case it pleases any of my prudently Twitter-free readers. A is for Aftermath, a word much abused … More A is for Alphabet
Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, Louis Mercier, the French Vice-Consul, describes the agreeable walk down the coast from Rabat’s Bab el-Alou to the walls of the Sultan’s seaside palace, al-Qubaybat (the Little Domes). Opposite the qoubba of Sidi El-Khattib there is a forking of the ways: the metalled road which comes up … More Penelope in a Pickelhaube: The Rottembourg Bastion at Rabat
A few weeks ago I was gently and kindly reproved at a round-table meeting for using the phrase “more bang for your buck,” and told that it is a Trumpery vulgarism with its origins in the brothel. Job done: I could no longer say it unselfconsciously, even if I wanted to, and it is no … More More bang for your salvation
It’s good to be back in Rabat after three years away. My old shoe-cleaner has just descended on me where I’m sitting outside the Cafe Fine Brioche, and not just polished my shoes to a luminous perfection, but with much tutt-tutting injected superglue between the toes and the soles where he deemed them to be … More Let them eat Danone!
I haven’t been to the Ultimate Picture Palace in Oxford for years, not since it was called the Penultimate Picture Palace. Its re-naming conjures up a shuffling line of picture palaces, like heirs to the throne, which all shimmy up a place in the queue when one ahead of them closes. I wonder if there’s … More Remember Baghdad
“Where are you from?” “Jamaica … My father is Egyptian.” “And what nationality does that make you?” “Parasitologist.” “I say chaps! This man says his nationality is parasitologist!” If you’re born with three mother-countries, as Yasseen was, you look for the Highest Common Factor that unites them, and since both his parents were doctors – … More ‘Buy a couple of pistols – one for Egypt and one for Britain – and shoot myself through each ear in the Bull Ring?’
One day in early 1977 I went to the cinema in Cairo, to see the one and only screening of Costas Gavras’s magnificent film, “Z”. It had been summarily banned by the President, Anwar Sadat, who must have seen uncomfortable parallels between the story of a Greek politician set up and murdered by hired thugs, … More Noireddin, the Bent Copper and Partial Redemption
Martin Rose 