Anthony Sattin

I have been reviewing for decades and this is by far the most difficult book I have taken on: difficult to read because it relates to what Israel has done in Gaza over the last year, and difficult to write about because the subject is so divisive. But whether you think Palestinians deserve what is

In 1587, the Mughal Emperor Akbar, himself illiterate but with grand vision and even greater ambition, commanded his courtier Abu’l-Fazl to write an official history of his reign and dynasty. An order went around Akbar’s court that anyone who was ‘gifted with the talent for writing history’ should put pen to paper and record the

It’s boom time for nomad history. It started some eight years ago, when Bloomsbury published a study of central Asia from an Oxford academic. This might have been a fringe book, but the author’s breadth of knowledge and analysis was exceptional, the narrative was gripping, the cover was beautiful and the publisher had high hopes,

For the 19th-century English adventurer, author, ethnographer, pornographer and all-round maverick Richard Burton, one of life’s happiest moments was ‘the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands’. There would of course be difficulties; but happiness derives from the prospect of overcoming great challenges and in the process achieving fame and perhaps even fortune. By

This is the best of times to be writing history, since so much of what has been taken for granted, especially in the West, is being revised. Assumptions about the past that we accepted as fact, and events we once looked upon with pride, are now being questioned. A dark cloud hovers over the Benin

When the British formed the basis of their empire in the 1600s by acquiring territories in India and North America, they already had many centuries’ experience of foreign involvement. One of the most remarkable aspects of the force that reshaped Eurasia 1,000 years earlier is that there was no prelude: the Arab conquests, and the

There comes a time after the death of parents when grief subsides, the sense of loss eases, and you, the child, are left wondering who those people were. What were they like? Not as you knew them as parents, but as people? For most of us, as the cliché goes, time is a healer, and

History is full of ‘ifs’ and the Spartan story fuller than most. If the 300 had not made their famous stand against a vast Persian army at Thermopylae in 480 BC, or if Helen of Troy, originally from Sparta, had not been abducted, we might not remember them today. If their young men had not

Travel writing is ‘the red light district of literature’, as Colin Thubron aptly put it, a space where anything goes. Like punters to the other red light districts, we tend to stick to what we know we like, to our own kind. We travel vicariously with voices that are familiar, or at least intelligible, whose

In his first book, published in 1977, Tim Mackintosh-Smith described mentioning the idea of travelling to Yemen while studying Arabic at Oxford because he had heard that Yemenis spoke the purest form of Arabic. ‘They all say that, you stupid boy,’ his tutor replied, suggesting he go ‘somewhere respectable’ instead. The student went to Yemen

A thought kept recurring as I read Toby Green’s fascinating and occasionally frustrating book on the development of West Africa from the 15th to 19th centuries: that the money in my pocket was just a piece of polypropylene. And what is that worth in the greater scheme of things? The thought occured because money and

With summer on its way, thoughts turn south to olive groves and manicured vineyards, to the warm water and hot beaches of the Mediterranean. But this sea that is a place of rest and beauty for some of us is the scene of drama and often despair for many others, among them people trying to

The marvellous tales of the title are not just confined to the contents of this book, for the travels and travails of the lone manuscript in which they were inscribed are also something of a wonder, and deserve to be told. The original collection appears to have been composed in the 10th century, and it

If you have read Iain Sinclair’s books you will know that he is a stylist with a love of language. You will also know that he has opinions to express and projects to promote or destroy: London’s Olympic park was one of his targets. He has lived in Hackney for much of the past 40