Like most, I came to writing by accident.   Divorce was the first real spur. My sojourn in that particular wilderness gave me a great deal to get off my chest. And sitting in the frigid interior of the yacht to which life had banished me, hammering away at the keys of …

Aristotle  The army has a habit of leaving soldiers in places where the stories make themselves. I started keeping notes. At the time it was for no particular reason. Now I am grateful, the notes jog my memory, fuel my writing.  One late …

There is another thing I have learnt from David Baboulene. It is a learning I immediately grasped. And have been unable to ignore ever since. Nowadays – post Bab, as I like to term it – I can hardly watch …

A story has to have a structure. A beginning, a middle, and an end. The cleverness – the joy of writing – is in the construction. Granting a reader his first awareness of a situation, teasing a realisation that all …

I met him in a room in Saddam’s Ba’ath Party Headquarters. Baghdadis called the building Qasr-al-nihayah – the castle of the end. It squatted like an angry potentate, scowling out over the oily filth of the Tigris. On its roof …

The aircraft was almost unbearably loud. A Chinook with the ramp half open and a loadmaster in a helmet with a mirrored visor staring wistfully into the desert. Engines that made any sort of conversation impossible. Ten of us on …