In The Aspern Papers, Henry James wrote rather gloomily “When Americans went abroad in 1820, there was something romantic, almost heroic, in it, as compared with the perpetual ferryings of the present hour when photography and other conveniences have annihilated surprise,” and this is far, far truer today with the universal availability of countless indifferent … More ‘A fading time’ – Iraq in black-and-white
“The Moroccan saddle was constructed of wood, shaped like a peaked roof with two exaggerated weathercocks at each end. On the ridge are some curious lumps, which come exactly where lumps are least welcome to any person of Christian build.” Sir John Drummond Hay was writing of saddles for horses, but the same might be … More Balthasar in a Flying Armchair
I was recently told a delightful, but far-too-good-to-be-true, story about the Muslims of Trinidad. It went more or less like this, and has remained in my mind as a fine image of jollity and carnival subverted by puritanism. The mosque in Port of Spain was originally built by Indian Sunnis, but in a warmly oecumenical … More Rum, Orthodoxy and the Lash
Last weekend I was in Oporto, where I visited the quite extraordinarily opulent church of St Francis. It is a rococo creation of such self-indulgent extravagance – 500 kilograms of gold are said to have been used in the gilding, and the whole interior is a vast, wriggling omelette of gold leaf – that on … More The Five Martyrs of Morocco and the bloody Miramamolin
In most cities of the Middle East and North Africa, you’ll see displayed on stalls and in shop windows, artful texts, usually from the Qu’ran, of words distilled into pictures – of horses, or ships or praying men, their shapes picked out in the fine shading of word used as image. They can be … More A Theory of Everything
In the late 1970s, when I first lived in Cairo, I had lunch most Fridays at the Turf Club. Not of course the original Turf Club, burnt down in the riots of 1952 (a club which “would not have looked out of place in St James’s”), but its nominal successor, which was in a … More ‘A lecherous old Wog on the outside’
A very touching and beautifully-observed piece in the TLS this week, by Louise Callaghan of the Sunday Times, about the liability that books can become in a fast-changing political climate. “If you want to know a city’s secrets,” she begins, “ask the bin-man.” Talking in Istanbul to Ahmet the Kurdish bin-man, she discovers that people … More The wind leafed through them: ask the bin-man
I recently found myself wondering about the name Boko Haram, and did a bit of rummaging on the internet. Like many people, I had rather assumed that it was a crude translation of ‘Books are haram,’ which was then loosely paraphrased as ‘Western education is forbidden,’ the battle-cry of the book-burning, student-killing obscurantists of north-eastern … More Bokonism and the Colonial Past
Writing condolence letters is difficult – how can you get across in words the feelings of loss and sympathy which often seem a little too big for the sheet of writing-paper? The Emperor Susenyos of Abyssinia didn’t do badly, writing of the death of the Jesuit Father Pedro Paez: ‘Were this paper to be the … More Gathering Up Spilt Waters
Mr Kim Jong-Un, hero of The Interview, last year announced that North Korea’s clocks would shift back by half an hour. This is a fascinatingly Borgesian gesture, apparently based on the notion that controlling one’s own clocks is a serious measure of autonomy and national moral muscle. “Wicked Japanese imperialists” had, according to the curious … More South of Black Tickle and north of the DMZ
Martin Rose 