Esfahan nasf-e jahan est (‘Isfahan is half the world’) ‘… and rank Isfahan among those rarer places, like Athens and Rome, which are the common refreshment of humanity.’ Robert Byron The Road to Oxiana Isfahan, so the Persian phrase goes, is ‘half the world’. This, the third largest city in Iran, has quite a reputation …
I am currently involved in an art exhibition at St Margaret’s Gallery, St Benedicts St, Norwich. The exhibition is mixed media, with paintings by Poppy Mathews (@poppymathewsart) and photographs and text by me. It is all very flint-themed and, for my part at least, relates closely to my recent book. Some of the text is …
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LATEST NEWS I’m delighted to announce that Flint Country has won the the General Non-Fiction category for the 2025 East Anglian Book Awards. It was up against some very worthy opposition and I am thrilled that it has been chosen by the prize committee. The 2025 category winners are:
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I’m delighted to announce that Flint Country has been shortlisted in the General Non-fiction category for the East Anglia Book Awards 2025. The winners of each of the seven categories will be announced early next year. It’s gratifying to see it here, midstratum in this literary Jenga Tower, its spine a silvery – dare-I-say, flinty …
Kashgar, Xinjiang, China 2001 I have made a few updates to East of Elveden recently so you might wish to take a look. The site is now thankfully ad-free, so the only thing I am promoting or trying to sell here here is my own work. There are now separate pages featuring my various Books …
We were driving home from North Wales, and it is a long way to East Anglia from there. So we were looking for a break in the journey somewhere: a place to rest overnight before A14-ing onwards to Norwich? While it might not be everybody’s destination of choice, Dudley, de facto capital of England’s Black …
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My latest book Flint Country was published a couple of weeks ago. I would just like to share this generous blog post about it by Klausbernd Vollmar and Hanne Siebers. It also includes some of Hanne’s lovely images of Cley next the Sea on the North Norfolk coast.
My new book Flint Country: a stone journey will be published on July 10th. Here’s a link to the blog post I wrote about it for the publisher, Saraband.
The road to Dirē Dawa is a long one: an eight-hour drive from Addis Ababa, or so we are told. We left Addis Ababa at dawn, our bus rattling through empty streets shadowed by new-build office blocks. As with almost everywhere currently in Ethiopia, the pavements were piled with concrete rubble, the result of Prime …
The very mention of the village of Happisburgh in Norfolk brings to mind all manner of prehistoric associations and connections with long-extinct ancestors. The early years of this current century have revealed exciting local evidence of the presence of earliest hominins in northwest Europe: Homo antecessor (‘Pioneer Man’) – near million-year-old clues in the form …
