This collection On Travel is clever, funny, provoking and confrontational by turn. In a pyrotechnic display of cracking one- liners, cynical word play and comic observation, it mines three thousand years of wit and wisdom: from Martha Gellhorn to Confucius and from Pliny to Paul Theroux.

A pocket-sized collection of all the favourite verses that have inspired desert travellers. This collection of poems delights in constructing a sensual Orient of the imagination, from the seven golden odes of Pre-Islamic Arabia to the fevered visions of Coleridge. It is a place where sand dunes bear the impress of a lover, a land ruled by honour and hospitality, where poets and warriors are esteemed, where the sons of noble sheikhs labour in dignity as shepherds, but Kings are imprisoned within the cruelties of their palaces.

For 40 years, Barnaby Rogerson has travelled across North Africa, making sense of the region's complex and fascinating history as both a writer and a guide. Throughout that time, there have always been a handful of stories he could not pin into neat, tidy narratives; stories that were not distinctly good or bad, tragic or pathetic, selfish or heroic, malicious or noble. This book, neither a work of history nor travel writing, is a journey into the ruins of a landscape to make sense of these stories through the lives of five men and one woman. A sacrificial refugee (Queen Dido), a prisoner-of-war who became a compliant tool of the Roman Empire (King Juba), an unpromising provincial who, as Emperor, brought the Empire to its dazzling apogee (Septimius Severus), an intellectual careerist who became a bishop and a saint (St Augustine), the greatest General the world has ever known (Hannibal), and the Berber Cavalry General who eventually defeated him (Masinissa). Though all six lives have been clouded with as much myth as fact, the destinies of these North African figures remain highly relevant today. Their descendants are faced with the same choices: Do you stay pure to your own culture and fight against the power of the West, or do you study and assimilate this other culture, and utilise its skills? Will it greet you as an ally only to own you as a slave? The chosen heroes of this book represent classical North Africa, and not the familiar drum roll of Julius Caesar, Augustus, Trajan, Hadrian, Constantine and Justinian. In between these life stories, we explore ruins which tell their own tales and see the multiple interconnections that bind the culture of this region with the wider world, particularly the spiritual traditions of the ancient Near East. With photographs by Don McCullin.

This is the first book in a new series of pocket-sized poetry books for travelers and poetry lovers who seek inspiration while on a bus, subway train, or taxi, or while waiting for a museum to open. Here is the poetry of London, from the up-beat rap-poetry of Benjamin Zephaniah to Wordsworth's dawn sigh. From the catchpenny verses of Oranges and Lemons and London Bridge is Falling Down, to the ecstatic visions of Keats, Milton, and Blake. From the first lines of Anglo-Saxon verse to lines retrieved from a bar last year. It's a collection full of irony, delight, and personal grief. Some other poets included are Shakespeare. T.S. Eliot, Alan Jenkins, John Betjeman, Bacon, Wilde, and Blake.

Rogerson's timely book begins with the contemporary Middle East and the proxy wars between Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies and Shiite Iran. To understand these, he suggests, we must understand the origins of the Sunni-Shia divide, which go back to the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632, the accidental coup that set aside the claims of his son Ali, and the slaughter of Ali's own son Husayn at Kerbala. These events, known to every Muslim, have created a slender fault line in the Middle East. This is a vivid tale full of doomed heroes and secret conspiracies as Rogerson shows how the rivalry between Arab, Turk and Persian has shaped the modern chessboard of nation states, oil wells, mountains and minorities, and at the seismic shift from the Iranian Revolution of 1979. It is vital, Rogerson contends, to both understand and empathise with the Islamic world's struggles with a conflict that matters not only in the Middle East, but to the world at large

Marrakech is the heart and lifeblood of Morocco's ancient storytelling tradition. For nearly a thousand years, storytellers have gathered in the Jemaa el Fna, the legendary square of the city, to recount ancient folktales and fables to rapt audiences. But this unique chain of oral tradition that has passed seamlessly from generation to generation is teetering on the brink of extinction. The competing distractions of television, movies and the internet have drawn the crowds away from the storytellers and few have the desire to learn the stories and continue their legacy. Richard Hamilton has witnessed at first hand the death throes of this rich and captivating tradition and, in the labyrinth of the Marrakech medina, has tracked down the last few remaining storytellers, recording stories that are replete with the mysteries and beauty of the Maghreb.

Meetings with Remarkable Muslims is a collection of travel writing celebrating friendship and the chance encounters that unexpectedly enrich our lives, which shows the diversity of the modern Islamic world and the way in which it continues to inspire, bemuse and enrich the western imagination. What shines through these many stories is our common humanity - the need, indeed the urge, to earn, to love, to protect, to enjoy and to make a sense of life.

The Prophet Muhammad is a hero for all mankind. In his lifetime he established a new religion, Islam; a new state, the first united Arabia; and a new literary language, the classical Arabic of the Qur'an, for the Qur'an is believed to be the word of God revealed to Muhammad by the angel Gabriel. A generation after his death he would be acknowledged as the founder of a world empire and a new civilisation. Any one of these achievements would have been more than enough to permanently establish his genius. To our early twenty-first century minds, what is all the more astonishing is that he also managed to stay true to himself and retained to his last days the humility, courtesy and humanity that he had learned as an orphan shepherd boy in central Arabia. If one looks for a parallel example from Christendom, you would have to combine the Emperor Constantine with St Francis and St Paul, an awesome prospect. Barnaby Rogerson's elegant biography not only looks directly at the life of the Prophet Muhammad, but beautifully evokes for western readers the Arabian world into which he was born in 570 AD.

The Last Crusaders is about the titanic contest between Hadsburg-led Christendom and the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the last great conflict between East and West - the battles that were fought and the men who led the armies that fought them. It was, in its way, the first world war.

The Prophet Muhammad taught the word of God to the Arabs. Within a generation of his death, his followers - as vivid a cast of heroic individuals as history has known - had exploded out of Arabia to confront the two great superpowers of the seventh-century and establish Islam and a new civilization. That the protagonists originated from the small oasis communities of central Arabia gives their adventures, their rivalries, their loves and their achievements an additional vivacity and intimacy. So that on one hand, THE HEIRS OF THE PROPHET MUHAMMAD is a swaggering saga of ambition, immense achievement, self-sacrificing nobility and blood rivalry, while on the other it allows us to understand some of the complexities of our modern world. For within this fifty-year span of conquest and empire-building, Barnaby Rogerson also identifies the seeds of discord that destroyed the unity of Islam, and traces the roots of the schism between Sunni and Shia Muslims to the rivalry of the two individuals who best knew and loved the Prophet: his cousin and son-in-law Ali and his wife Aisha.

Ignorance about Islam runs deep in the West - ignorance of its rites, its beliefs, and above all its prophet. Who was Muhammad, the founder of Islam, and the man Muslims believe was God's last prophet on earth? In this concise and colourful account, the acclaimed writer and broadcaster Barnaby Rogerson tells the story of the illiterate orphan who was raised in the desert and trained as a merchant on the camel trade routes that criss-crossed Arabia, before defying his tribe to found a new religion, establish a world language, and create an almost unstoppable force that only 100 years after his death has conquered an empire stretching from the Pyrenees to the Hindu Kush. It was when he was 40 that Muhammad experienced his first revelation on a mountainside outside Mecca, hearing the divine order: "Recite!" From then until his flight from Mecca his tale is one of rejection and persecution, but it is also one of puzzling contradictions: why did he order the murder of a Jewish tribe? And why did he marry 10 times himself while restricting Muslims to four wives? Barnaby Rogerson examines his puzzling life, and how it has laid the foundation for a "clash of civilisations" between the Muslim and Christian worlds.

'Photography for me is not looking, it's feeling. If you can't feel what you're looking at, then you're never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures' - Don McCullin Sir Donald McCullin's Journeys Across Roman Asia Minor is driven by an eye for beauty and an ear for history. On his 5,000-mile travels in western Turkey he works his ineffable magic, moving from a sanctuary known to Homer to the broken face of an exhausted Roman emperor, before turning his eye on the sensuous torso of a goddess. While most of us were sheltering from Covid, Don explored the mountains, valleys and coast of western Turkey, hunting out the most poignant and powerful ruins of the Roman Empire. He has created a meditation on landscape, the effects of light on ancient stone, the way clouds animate the past, but this book is also inescapably about conquest, imperium and power. Journeys Across Roman Asia Minor reveals a world full of wonder. We see pavements once trodden by Aristotle and Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, St Paul and the Emperor Hadrian. Through his lens we discover ancient theatres cascading down the slopes of mountains, 2,000-year-old bridges used by hill farmers to this day, and spring water flowing into fountains still dominated by statues of the gods. Journeys Across Roman Asia Minor is consciously focused on just one specific period within Turkey's dazzlingly rich parade of historical cultures (that stretch back over 12,000 years), but by choosing the 500 years of the Roman Empire, we can also celebrate a time that we can all share in. Journeys Across Roman Asia Minor is a companion to an earlier volume, Southern Frontiers, where Don had observed the landscapes of the Roman Empire in North Africa and Syria.Journeys Across Roman Asia Minor was created through a series of journeys across western Turkey commissioned by Cornucopia Magazine. His companion during all these journeys was the writer Barnaby Rogerson, who was not only able to watch the master at work but was able to listen to the astonishing tales from Don's adventurous life, as they travelled along Roman roads. So we get the context and the historical story behind every chosen photograph. Don McCullin has won himself the reputation of being one of the greatest living photographers of conflict, but this has always co-existed with his other role as a great traveller. He also takes pride in the craft, so he delights in developing all his own film. The far frontiers of the Roman Empire are a lifelong obsession that had been accidentally been kick-started by an incident in his early career when he worked alongside Bruce Chatwin.