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The people who make the things, the places and the arguments worth reading about.
In Beirut our writer met a man eight months into walking from England to Jerusalem, pausing after the length of Turkey and Lebanon. No fair-weather traveller, he had worn the journey remarkably well.
Since the revolution, Egyptian artists have claimed the streets as well as the studios. Nowhere is this clearer than Mohammed Mahmoud street near Tahrir Square, where once-bare walls are now scarcely left unpainted.
Decamping to the mountains, our writer relished finding the International Herald Tribune at the Librairie Michel in Bikfaya, its yellow weekend strip promising hours of mind-twisting joy. Then, one week later, a grey cloud descended.
It’s hard to imagine that Bottega Veneta was on the brink of bankruptcy when Tomas Maier took over as creative director but during his thirteen years in charge, he hasn’t just created riches, he’s brought much needed respect back to the luxury goods label. Bottega Veneta might mean ‘sma…
Banksy's Flower Girl, in which a child eyes an emerging security camera, heads to auction. We trace urban art's rise to the saleroom, a trend Bonhams helped ignite with its dedicated sale in 2008.
Confronted by a milk-fed baby goat of barely a few months, our cook marvels at its beautiful pink flesh, and questions the old butcher's prejudice that female animals yield meat too smelly to eat.
Architect Raafat Majzoub relishes asking new clients how they like to shower, provoking everything from awkward excuse-mes to terrified expressions. The reaction, he argues, reveals just how much intimacy we have lost from bathing.
Bernard Khoury may hold a bleak view of our region, but he has not given up on this part of the world. Instead he fights on against the corporate machine he blames for our architectural inadequacies.
Author and journalist Rose George explains how a coffee-table book on excreta at COLORS magazine sparked a deeper fascination with sewage, toilets and waste, and the simple question she set out to answer.
Rachida Dati is immediately imposing: self-confident, strikingly handsome and risen from an Arab workman's daughter to one of France's most senior politicians. We meet the former justice minister at her Left Bank office.
The Egyptian feminist writer, activist, physician and psychiatrist, Nawal El Saadawi, has braved prison, exile and death threats in her fight against female oppression. It’s a fight she wants to see through to the end. The first thing Nawal El Saadawi does when we speak for the first ti…
Over cardamom coffee, Salma tells her grandchildren a story they know all too well, of land once made of sand-fields and stardust, now given over to glass-fields and car-dust beyond the window.