The greatest challenge in writing The House Divided was to maintain balance, not just between Sunni and Shia, but also between the three great identities within the Middle East; Arabia, Iran and Turkey. The book took several years to write (earlier drafts were three times longer), and was based upon many decades of research and travel. But finally, it was edited and complete, in September 2023. As I set off for a break in Rome, the war between Russia and the Ukraine dominated the news and, for once, the Middle East seemed quiet. I spent the day of October 7 exploring the ruins of the antique port of Ostia, where the Tiber meets the sea and where I heard news of the Hamas massacre of 1200 Israelis outside Gaza. By the time I returned to London, the Israelis had launched a revenge attack on Gaza and the Middle East was set off into a new whirlwind of violence.
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Read MoreRead Barnaby Rogerson on Ralph and Molly Izzard’s trek across the Lebanese mountains in 1957 with 4 children, 2 donkeys and Elias.
‘Ralph himself was one of three role models from which Ian Fleming created the fictional James Bond. If you have ever wondered what James Bond, having settled down with Miss Moneypenny, might have been like as a father, then you need look no further.’
Jan Morris described Ralph Izzard as ‘the beau ideal of the old-school foreign correspondent … not only brave and resourceful, but also gentlemanly, widely read, kind, a bit raffish, excellent to drink with, fun to travel with, handsome but louche, honourable but thoroughly disrespectful. He was old Fleet Street personified. Not only did everyone in the business know him, but they had also known his father, Percy Izzard, the Mail’s highly respected gardening correspondent who was the inspiration behind William Boot in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop.’
Such was the unusual stamp of the man who took his four young children off to walk the spine of the Lebanese mountains in 1957. Although his name is on the cover of Smelling the Breezes, it is mostly written by his wife. Smelling the Breezes was Molly’s first book and was published in 1959.
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Read Moreby Barnaby Rogerson
I have been lucky enough to travel with Don McCullin in both the Libyan and Algerian deserts looking for Roman ruins. Last year we decided to expand our horizons and drive through the Troad in north-west Turkey, and then hop over to have another look at the temple of Baalbeq in eastern Lebanon. We have had some wonderful successes in the past – like finding the Saharan frontier fort of Bou Njem at dawn – but there have also been some failures. On this latest trip, walking around the excavations of the Late Bronze Age city of Troy, talking excitedly to the director of the excavations about Hector and Achilles in the gathering dusk was a totally thrilling experience for me, but I noticed it did not have quite the same fascination for my travelling companion. His camera bag remained buckled up (always a bad sign) apart from one photograph of Hector, the excavation guard dog.
The next morning, I knocked lightly on the door of Don’s room to check he was up. It was dark, and we were hoping to catch the Roman statues in the site museum in the first light of dawn. The door immediately swung open, and Don appeared, bags packed, camera case to the fore. The shadow of a grin crept across his face as he met my glance. ‘Up at last I see,’ he said. ‘Only you could have slept through your mate making such a din.’ The mate he was referring to was the muezzin, calling the dawn prayer.
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Read MoreEothen is such an easygoing book, so funny, so crisp and vivid in its handling of people and places, that the reader may well not notice that it is also a very slippery book indeed. It seems so lightly and spontaneously done, this quizzical self-portrait of an Old Etonian swanning idly around the Middle East in the 1830s. Its determinedly inconsequential surface masks a degree of artistic guile for which Kinglake has never received full credit.
‘My excuse for the book is its truth,’ he announces in his Preface. One may let one’s eyebrow lift a fraction at that statement, since the preface itself is an elaborate, and highly purposeful, lie. Kinglake passes off Eothen as a hastily written letter (a ‘scrawl’) to a travelling friend. It was no such thing. The book took Kinglake a decade to write. It was revised and re-revised; its style of bright talk was the product of a long process of literary refinement. In the Preface, Kinglake rejoices in the book’s ‘studiously unpromising’ title and makes the assurance that it is ‘quite superficial in its character’. For an ironist, the worst of all fates is to be taken literally – and Kinglake, adored though he was by generations of Victorian and Edwardian readers, has usually been taken, or mistaken, at his word.
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