Last week I received a publicity shot from a company selling top-of-the-range reading lamps. Printed on the back of the envelope were the words: The person who does not read books has no advantage over the one who cannot read them – Mark Twain. A little naff for reading lamps perhaps, but an important truth … More Of Reading-lamps and Literacy

It has been raining in Morocco, as most of us have noticed. Our cleaning lady said with tears in her eyes to my wife last week, “Now we shall be able to eat.” The drought appears to be over. But what made it happen? I was impressed by the way the rain followed on the … More Interfaith Rain

I was in Kalila wa Dimna a few days ago, buying a French novel that my wife wanted, and I caught sight of a table of tiny books in the window, published by Khbar Bladna of Tangier. (Actually I caught sight of one or two other interesting things too, but that’s the danger of going … More The Monster That Refuses to Die

I’ve happened on a nice blog in the last few days, called Arabic Literature (in English), which is well worth a look. My eye was caught by a splendid, very short, piece about a man – Elliott Colla – who started life as  an American Republican Christian Zionist, learned Arabic for his work and found … More Deprovincialisation

“It’s rather like being shown round the Pitt Rivers Museum by General Pitt Rivers,” said my daughter, as we left the Belghazi Museum at Bouknabel, on the Old Kenitra Road from Rabat. We had just had an extraordinary hour-and-a-half being shown round the Belghazi collection by M Mohammed Abdelillah Belghazi, its patron and presiding genius, … More Prospero’s Cell

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

The last couple of weeks have been an elongated British Film Week, with full programmes in Marrakech and Rabat and a couple of very interesting events in Casablanca. As Director of the British Council , I have the problem of wanting – but not being able – to see all the films. I do, though … More Instances of the Seventh Art