In the 1st century BC, present-day Uzbekistan stood on the important overland trade route that linked China with the Mediterranean.  Alexander the Great conquered it; Islam was introduced by Arab invaders who were followed by the Persians, Turkic hordes, the warlord…

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Himalayan Paradise –  Kashmir and Ladakh “Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar, Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell?…”     Dubbed the Kashmiri love ode, when set to music, this became the most popular song  …

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      Nudging the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman, this country — stub your toe and you’ll strike oil— juxtaposing old and new, with its varied landscape of ravine, desert, mountain, ocean and wadi, advanced in just…

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  When I mentioned a holiday in Romania, I faced incredulity and dark mutterings of  “has she lost it?” A friend and I toured during the second half of July, our choice influenced by its hot and sunny location. We…

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Eastbury Manor Hous This   beguiling red -brick   building stands on land that belonged to Barking Abbey from the seventh century to the dissolution of the monasteries by King Henry V111. It’s located in east London in the Borough of Barking…

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TOUR OF LORD’S Lord’s is to cricket as Santa Claus is to Christmas and in 2014 Lord’s celebrates its 200th anniversary. One of the most illustrious sports venues in the world, it was founded by Thomas Lord (23 November 1755…

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Hever Castle This is the childhood home of Anne Boleyn, the second wife of King Henry V111, lecher and shrewd monarch who changed the course of England’s history and religion. When Spanish Princess Catharine of Aragon lost her husband Arthur…

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LONDON You’ve probably often heard the expression Freudian slip. No one knows who coined the phrase but it wasn’t Sigismund Freud the founding father of psychoanalysis who, in his book, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, published in 1901, concluded that…

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A holiday in Burma       I’m in Katha where George Orwell set Burmese Days. It’s a bustling town, backed by distant mountains, on a bluff above the murky Irrawaddy where, days earlier, I’d glimpsed the rolling antics of a grey…

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Hello everybody! ” I do not know you, nor have I ever seen the face of him who gave me my ‘Hope,’ but I am thankful for the chance of that day when it came to me in my sore…

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