James Meek

In 1995, in Sudan, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri put two teenage boys on trial for treason, sodomy and attempted murder, in a Sharia court of his own devising. Of the two boys, one, Ahmed, was only 13. Zawahiri, the partner in terror of Osama bin Laden, had them stripped naked; he showed that they had reached puberty, and therefore counted as adults. The court found the boys guilty. Zawahiri had them shot, filmed their confessions and executions, and put video copies out to warn other potential traitors.

When Moazzam Begg was kidnapped by the American government and its Pakistani foederati on 31 January 2002 – ‘kidnapped’ appears to be the appropriate legal term to use of Guantánamo Bay prisoners, none of whom has ever been charged, tried or formally designated a POW – he experienced a curious moment of melodrama. Seized from the house where he was staying in...

Like a single-column photograph in a newspaper, the portrait of Tsar Ivan IV on the dust jacket of Isabel de Madariaga’s book has been cropped down to the essential features: the mournful brown eyes, the long, slightly beaked nose, the plump little mouth nestling in the silver-black whorls of a beard which bleeds out to the edge of the paper. On the inside of the back flap is the...

“I boarded a Metropolitan train to Amersham, wondering whether the person who designs the upholstery for the seats is the same person who designs the carpeting at Heathrow and the blouses for British Airways’ female cabin staff and why, if so, he has escaped punishment for so long. The train started at King’s Cross. There’s a 700-yard tunnel under Mount Pleasant but the rest of the line, like the other early Underground lines – the District, the Hammersmith & City and the Circle – was built using a method known as ‘cut and cover’, where navvies dug down from the surface, then roofed the tunnel over. Officially 307 people were displaced in the Farringdon area when the line was built, but unofficially, 12,000 people were moved, most of them poor, and the landlord of the Pickled Egg in Clerkenwell got £100 compensation for having his foundations shaken.”

Not long after​ the First World War, the movie baron Samuel Goldwyn set up a stable of Eminent Authors in an attempt to give silent screenplays more literary weight. One of the recruits was the Nobel Prize-winning Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck. Initially, neither party seems to have been troubled that Maeterlinck spoke no English, and the great Belgian set to work on a screen version...