Justin Marozzi

Mecca is the greatest paradox of the Islamic world. Home to the Kaaba, a pagan-era cube of black granite said to have been built by Abraham and his son Ishmael, it is the lodestar to which 1.6 billion Muslims direct their five daily prayers. Mecca is the single point on the planet around which Muslims revolve — quite literally for those able to perform the once gruelling, now simply expensive, pilgrimage or haj. Yet the prodigious, world-illuminating gifts of Islamic civilisation in the arts and sciences, from architecture to astronomy, physics to philosophy, came not from Mecca but from cities such as Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo and Istanbul.

Writing to a god seems a presumptuous thing. Who are we, feeble mortal creatures whose lives pass in the blink of an eye, to address the great immortal deities? The Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, now entering his ninth decade and never knowingly lacking in chutzpah, is not one to be deterred by such considerations. Nooteboom is an immensely civilised and civilising writer, rich in curiosity and armed with a dazzling literary style. Those who already know his writing will not be surprised to discover that on the page, if not in the briny, he is more than a match for the trident-bearing earth-shaker, god of the sea.

Recent years have seen the slim but splendid Patrick Leigh Fermor oeuvre swell considerably. In 2008 came In Tearing Haste, an entertaining collection of letters to and from Deborah Devonshire, followed last year by The Broken Road, the posthumously sparkling and long-awaited completion of the ‘Great Trudge’ trilogy, which finally delivered the 18-year-old Paddy from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. Now comes another volume, setting out in full for the first time one of the great moments in a life heavily laced with glamour and incident. It takes some chutzpah to kidnap a German general — and serious presence of mind to get away with it.

Genghis Khan, unlike most Mongols in history, is a household name, regularly misappropriated as a right-wing totem. If we recall the genocidal killing sprees of, say, Stalin and Mao, perhaps it would be more historically accurate to say ‘to the left of Genghis Khan’. In the popular imagination he is the despot’s despot, a one-man killing machine who led his army of mounted archers to triumph after triumph, terrorising and slaughtering by the million to carve out an empire that stretched from the Caspian to the Pacific. His martial conquests place him in the top trio of world conquerors, alongside Alexander the Great and Tamerlane.

How many writers would give their eye teeth to have a book reissued 2,500 years after their death? It certainly beats being pulped after a year or two. And who better to receive the Penguin Hardback Classic treatment than Herodotus, the fifth-century BC ‘Father of History’, he to whom historians today owe so much, whether they know it or not? This is a new translation. of a book that remains more relevant than ever. by the popular historian Tom Holland, with an introduction by the Cambridge professor Paul Cartledge, doyen of classicists, citizen of Sparta and a Herodotean to the core.

Sound the trumpets. Let rip the Byzantine chorus of clattering bells and gongs, the thunder of cannons, drums and flashing Greek fire. Raid cellars and let champagne corks fly. Eighty years after Patrick Leigh Fermor’s epic trudge across Europe, 20 years after the death of his long-suffering publisher Jock Murray, ten years after the passing of his wife Joan, and two years after his own death, the elusive third volume that so tormented him is published at last. The travel trilogy is complete. It is, as John Murray reminds us, the literary event of the year. But for those who admire Paddy’s densely beautiful prose, can this awkward, unformed orphan live up to its billing?

Pity the modern dictator. Time was he could bump off a recalcitrant opposition figure, take out a dissident stronghold, massacre the entire population of a town and the world would be none the wiser. There might be a pesky reporter trying to get to the truth, but that could be taken care of, as President Assad’s security forces demonstrated earlier this year. Yet the digital world has made it much harder to brush war crimes and atrocities under the kilim. Thanks to Youtube, Facebook and Twitter, surveillance states now find themselves under constant surveillance in turn. The spies are spied upon, lifting the lid — albeit only partially — on what is happening inside places like Syria.