Off last Monday to Saffron Walden’s wonderful new cinema, the Saffron Screen (yes, that’s a plug) to see Mohammed Rasoulof’s fine new film, Manuscripts Don’t Burn. The film is a claustrophobically circular journey at several levels, a snake biting its own tail, a topologically incestuous Klein bottle with no inside and no outside.  It begins … More ‘Oh Land, we are murdered for your preservation’

The news today has been full of events at Bassingbourn barracks, where the British army has been training Libyan soldiers. Of the 300 Libyans in England, three have been charged with sexual assault (and two of them have pleaded guilty); two more are in custody charged with raping a man in a Cambridge park; and another … More Confined to Barracks

Ten days ago most newspapers carried a photograph of Daesh – Isis – fighters, in silhouette against the sky, raising their black flag on the hill of Tel Shair opposite Kobani. It portended the fall of the city, and in those parts of the city that Daesh has so far managed to enter, the violence … More ‘Intending so to terrify the world’

The two-month silence on this blog is the result of our moving house – after four years in Morocco, I am now back in England with my family, settling into a new home, new weather, new circumstances. I shall continue to write about Morocco and the Middle East, and hope that you will stay with … More Black Banners and Wizardly Bowlers

It’s bac time again, with thousands of young Moroccans chewing their pens and writing exams. The price of hoopoes’ blood, that sovereign booster of exam performance, is no doubt sky-high. The newspapers are full of ingenious stories of cheating. They also pay much attention to what comes next, and there was an interesting survey in … More Entitlement and hoopoes’ blood

There’s a story told by Edward Westermarck, about a judge – a cadi – who committed a variety of sins, culminating in his smearing soap across the threshold of his chambers and finding it hugely funny when visitors slipped and fell. He went on doing this, with growing hilarity, “until an angel of God said … More The Cockerel Tree

I have the clearest memory of standing, ten or twelve years ago, under the great barrel-vault of the Menin Gate, looking at the names of the 55,000 dead in the battles for Ypres, whose bodies had never been recovered. It is a melancholy place, site of an extraordinary daily theatre of the emotions when the … More Moroccans at Monte Cassino

In my garden in Rabat there are half a dozen tortoises which emerge on sunny mornings, loll in the sun, couple from time to time with a sound like wrestling wardrobes, and spend the winter under the woodpile. At least two of them were already there when we arrived in 2010. Another – Mr T … More Arbitraging the tortoise market

I have on my desk a press cutting about an organization called ‘Les Enfants de l’Ovale-Maroc’ – EDOM – and it’s such a wonderful story that I shall do little more than repeat it here. Moroccan rugger has not really impinged on my consciousness these last four years, though there’s a field of waist-high buttercups … More Follow that oval ball

At the beginning of the last century, the Bouregreg valley was a lush confusion of interlaced channels, thick with reed-beds and sedge, where European residents went sniping from flat-bottomed boats in the heat of a Rabat summer, avoiding pot-shots from Zaer tribesmen. Rbatis with any sense stayed well away, safe within the walls. This fragile and … More A dearly bought hyphen