This is a gem of a book, pleasing to behold and delicious to browse. It’s strewn with visual and verbal nuggets as distinctive as the famous lapis lazuli and as diverse as the humanity which have surely been the two main causes of Afghanistan’s pain over the three millennia of its history. That publishing a guidebook for Western tourists to the land of the Taliban could be thought a profitable venture by hard-headed capitalists should by itself come as a pleasant surprise. George W will be pleased; and President Hamid Karzai has contributed a foreword.

Aug 2005

A Talent For Shrouds

Priests And Mullahs

Was It Every Right?

Wise Words

Anatomy of a Terrorist

In The Steppes of Curzon

The BBC Tribe at War

No Two Sides to Genocide

Conquest In Double Time

A Historian Read by Both Sides

Revolution And Reform

Making Music

Dangerous Dynasties

Mummies In The Closet

Backgammon Vs the Sword

A Tale of Two Peoples

The Decline and Fall of the Peacock Throne

The Caliphate Strikes Back

Over A Barrel

Khayyamania

From the House of the Believers

From Muhammad to Bin Laden

What the Persians Did For Us

Islamic Schism

He’s no Uday, but…

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