[escenic_image id="55165703"]Certain cities seem to conjure up a wealth of images at the mere mentioning of their names. Damascus, just like Paris and Venice, is such a place. Hardly any other place…

[escenic_image id="55163788"] Blood and Gifts World premiere at the National Theatre, London September 2010 to 14 November Blood and Gifts by American writer JT Rogers is an epic political…

[escenic_image id="55160856"]KABUL: The Pashtun warlord’s son arranged our audience in the plush living room of a villa thronged by petitioners and guarded by men dressed in army uniforms, armed with…

[escenic_image id="55160846"] Ethnicities and Global Multiculture: Pants for an octopus Jan Nederveen Pieterse Rowman and Littlefield Publshers, Inc. 2007 £16.10 Pieterse’s work is academic,…

[escenic_image id="55156060"]In markets like Khan El-Khalili in the old city of Cairo, or indeed in any other Arab souk, the shops, courtyards and the very clothing of the traders and their customers…

[escenic_image id="55144538"] Faith and Power: Religion and Politics in the Middle East Bernard Lewis Oxford University Press 2010 £10.49 Bernard Lewis, Professor of Near Eastern Studies at…

[escenic_image id="55145238"]Consider the map: an object created to represent some aspect of the physical world, purporting to be objective but naturally reflecting the perspective of the mapmaker…

[escenic_image id="55132106"] An Iraq of Its Regions: Cornerstones of a Federal Democracy?  Reidar Visser and Gareth Stansfield C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd 2007 Stansfield and Visser’s…

[escenic_image id="55129184"] Despite its reputation as a world-class destination for culture, Beirut’s art scene has been hindered by sociopolitical factors since the mid 1970s—as the onset of the…

[escenic_image id="55112119"] Far Horizons Frank Gardner £18.99 Hard Cover Reading Gardner’s book on a summer’s afternoon in London transported me to exotic destinations far from the capital’s…