Recently I wrote about the British Court of Appeal’s decision to allow the return of Shamima Begum to fight the Government’s ruling to remove her British citizenship. Begum lives in a squalid Syrian refugee camp. Before that, she spent more than t...
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When the helicopter landed on the roof of the Mirror Group Newspapers building on Holborn Circus, the noise was deafening, and you knew that Robert Maxwell, the proprietor of the vast media empire, had arrived at his London office. When they repor...
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There’s no getting around the fact that 2020 has been a crap year for just about everyone. At the end of February, I went to Toronto to celebrate my father’s birthday, which is on March 2nd. A remarkable man. He died at the end of that month, at t...
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Jessa Bombalera (above) spent her adult life in a tangled web of deceit and what felt, for some, like betrayal. She is also known as Jessica Krug, the white American professor of African American history who pretended to be black. She recently rev...
Continue readingThe twentieth and twenty-first centuries have brutal histories of genocide. The Holocaust, Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia should never happen again. Those words seem to get lost in a miasma of amnesia. It should never happen again, and yet it always doe...
Continue readingWhen I arrived in Kabul in 2007, I met Sippi Azarbaijani-Moghaddam. Her reputation preceded her. She was the expert’s expert, someone who had a deep understanding of Afghanistan. Sippi has always had an unerring grasp of the complexities of govern...
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I wish I could ask my father what he makes of the prominence of mental health in the media these days. It’s certainly a far cry from what it was like when he graduated from medical school and started practising psychiatry. Back then, it was consid...
Continue readingWith Shamima Begum’s July High Court victory, which allows the Isis bride to return to the UK to challenge the government’s decision to strip her of citizenship, it seems an apt time to remember the real victims of Isis, or “Daesh”. Sahima Begum ...
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For months Heidi had put off the inevitable, an interview about her book, Dispatches from the Kabul Cafe. The Polish Hearth Club in London had suggested a slot in November, luckily Heidi was meant to celebrate American Thanksgiving in New Jersey. ...
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Mental health has preoccupied a lot of our thinking and broadcast time during the pandemic. Governments have taken trouble to sensitise us to the toll that isolation takes. After disasters, ironically, people recover, despite the absolute devastat...
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Dispatches from the Kabul Café 
Genocide – Personal Stories, Big Questions 