Charles Glass

After all, who didn’t go through the most improbable adventure during the civil war?

Mikhail Bulgakov, Black Snow

When a Lebanese wants your attention, he lowers his voice. You draw closer, and he asks: ‘Do you want to hear a story?’ If you say yes, and everyone does, you’re hooked. You listen. In the most Lebanese of his novels, Little Mountain, Elias Khoury tells a...

Mosul, said by some to be modern Iraq’s second and by others its third most populous city, was originally awarded to France as part of Syria under the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement. François Georges-Picot, the French delegate at the secret negotiations that divided the Ottoman Empire into British, French and Russian satrapies, laid out France’s dubious claim to Mosul and...

Kabul, since 1776 the nominal if forever ignored capital of Afghanistan, hides itself within thousands of forbidding walls. Mounds of ancient brick race up hillsides, remnants of the fifth-century ramparts that failed to preserve decadent Hindu rule from Mughal conquest. Every private house and most public buildings are set inside mud and brick enclosures that give the city an unwelcoming...

Albert Aghazarian is a Palestinian, neither Arab nor Israeli, who lives in the eastern portion of Jerusalem annexed by Israel in 1967. His house stands within two sets of walls, those of the ancient Armenian convent of St James and, beyond them, the Turkish walls of Jerusalem’s old city. The convent is a haven, in the same sense Israel calls itself a haven, in which descendants of...

Ninety-five per cent of the world’s cargo travels by sea. Without the merchant marine, the free market would collapse and take Wall Street’s dream of a global economy with it. Yet no one, apart from ship owners, their crews and insurers, appears to notice that pirates are assaulting ships at a rate unprecedented since the glorious days when pirates were ‘privateers’ protected by their national governments.