This plea for help from a man in Zimbabwe arrived today. I don’t know what I can do to help, but rather than do nothing am posting it. What can you do? I reckon that these are the last days of TKM and ZPF. The darkest hour is always before dawn. We are …

So I missed ‘Freedom’ because we were keen to leave the concert before everyone else in case of a two-hour traffic jam. Actually I forgot to mention that Alicia Keys played before George, she was truly incredible, I liked her almost more. Especially wh …

A couple of nights ago I sat next to a young man at a drinks party who had escaped from Iran aged 14 in the back of a van. This was in 1987. So while I was going to dinner parties at university and making vital decisions like what to wear, he was riski …

This morning a woman was shot on her way to work in Kabul by a fundamentalist who sped past her on a motorbike. Her crime? It could have been as mundane as being female and having a job. As it turned out she was a western aid worker whom they accused o …

When a certain Martin Rynja founder and owner of Gibson Square publishing first wrote to me suggesting I write a book about my life in France I assumed he was a vanity publisher. I had spent most of my adult life trying to get a book published without …

I have just finished a book called Burned Alive by a woman called Souad. She was a teenager when her brother-in-law poured petrol over her head and set fire to her. Her crime was serious in “honour” killing terms among Palestinians; she was pregnant. B …

Alexander Solzhenitzyn, the Russian Nobel laureate and former prisoner of Stalin’s gulags, has died in Moscow aged 89. I can’t pretend to have read any of his books, but I have at least heard of them and I am aware of what a huge impact he made exposin …

There are few things that make me as angry as the situation in Zimbabwe. I read this morning that 60 or so women and children have been removed from the opposition party headquarters for “hygiene reasons”. They were hiding there for fear of beatings, a …

What the hell is Robert Mugabe doing at the World Food Summit in Rome? This man belongs in jail, not at some international convention. Added to which the irony could hardly be more poignant. He has sytematically starved his people for years. So while h …

Regular blog readers may remember that ever since I was a little girl I have lived with the idea that a large suitcase of cash would one day magically appear on my doorstep. Well, it has. The night before last we had a friend over for dinner. He is a c …