Justin Marozzi

Justin Marozzi is the author of Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World, published by Allen Lane on 9 July.

Saturday

Justin Marozzi

Smack in your face

Kabul The minister had been stood up. Here we were in Bamiyan, in the heart of Afghanistan with Her Majesty’s drugs-busting minister Bill Rammell, and there was no sign of the Afghan farmer who had reportedly given up growing poppies in favour of dried apricots. He seemed an unlikely enough character in any case. Perhaps he never existed. Protected by a phalanx of armed Special Branch officers, we had flown into Bamiyan in a C-130 Hercules to catch up on the British-led counter-narcotics effort in Afghanistan, a country that supplies 95 per cent of the heroin on our streets. The UK is providing £70m over three years to help the country turn its back on poppy cultivation.

Saturday

Justin Marozzi

Beholding sundry places

Here’s a Christmas present for anyone with a serious interest in travel. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an armchair aficionado or grizzled explorer. There’s something for everyone, as they say. Eric Newby, the octogenarian doyen of the travel-writing genre, has put together a wonderful literary journey through the centuries and across the seven continents. Where to begin? How about Herodotus, Father of History, affable Greek aristocrat and probably the world’s first travel writer to boot? Here we find him musing on the unfathomable geography of Europe, ending his erudite aside with the splendidly modern conclusion, ‘But that is quite enough on this subject.

Saturday

Justin Marozzi

Another good man in Africa

INSIDE SAHARAby Basil PaoWeidenfeld, £25, pp. 200, ISBN 0297843044 Michael Palin is a decent chap, I thought, after bumping into him for a nanosecond at the Hatchards Authors of the Year party a few months ago. It was just long enough for the briefest exchange of desert tales before he was mobbed by growing numbers of the Palin Fan Club, at which point he faded from view and I was left wishing I had cornered him for longer. That was back in May, and this being October, it is time for the latest Palin tome to land in bookstores the length and breadth of Britain, for what could be a nicer Christmas present than this sleek volume from the man who brought us Around the World in Eighty Days, Pole to Pole, Full Circle and Hemingway Adventure?

Saturday

Justin Marozzi

Our man in the thick of it

There he is on the cover, our handsome 57-year-old Boys' Own adventurer, probably doing a piece to camera, cheered on by the locals who have come along to revel in the BBC's long-awaited liberation of Kabul last November. Why couldn't he have arrived a few years earlier, they're probably wondering. It could all have been so much easier. No beastly Taliban. No need even for America's B52s and the Northern Alliance. There was always a far better and infinitely more elegant solution to the interminable Afghan conundrum. Send for Simpson. Of the BBC's big guns, they don't come any bigger than Simpson. Revolution in Serbia? Put Simpson on a plane. Trouble in Tiananmen Square? Simpson's got it covered.