ADRIAN J BOAS

My son has just given me a collection of essays by Umberto Eco, On the Shoulders of Giants, that was recently translated into English.* T...

When I was thirteen, I was given a set of phylacteries with silver cases. They were decorated on each side with images of four Holy Land ...

I recall seeing very colourful snails on a wall in Oxford a few years ago, and in my mind at the time I was thinking, how much more pleas...

One of the most potent modern images of failure, almost as powerful as that of the Air America helicopter evacuating American citizens on...

The ousel cock so black of hue/With orange-tawny bill/The throstle with his note so true... Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 3, Scene 1 Th...

At a certain point it became apparent to me that at the age of sixteen my bridges were burnt. I had initially regarded immigrating to Isr...

In his 1976 essay “How New the New World Was”, Italo Calvino describes an exhibition held at the Grand Palais in Paris - "America Seen by...

I am just coming to the end of The Mirror and the Light, the final volume of the trilogy by novelist Hilary Mantel about the English stat...

The building that made the greatest impression on me as a child was the war memorial known as the Shrine of Remembrance, colloquially ref...

As someone with what is perhaps a healthy sense of fear (certainly a modicum of common sense), and who has retained long into adult life ...

August. I usually miss the garden, this being the month that in more regular times we are out in the field. I return in September to find...

It is a lazy morning, the first in some time when I do not have enough urgent to-dos to make the obligation to get up overcome the compul...

I recall three aged aunts, or more accurately cousins several times removed, sisters, spinsters, so ancient that they had shrivelled away...

Viewing a city from above is very different from observing it at ground level. I once had the opportunity of seeing the city of Tyre both...

It is hardly surprising that we, the lookers-on, the ordinary people, those of us who are not in the public eye, the "average joes" to us...

Qal'at al-Subeibe or Qal'at Namrud occupies a spur descending south-west from Mount Hermon. It is among the most marvellous of all mediev...

The traffic on the northern section of Route 6 was heavy and I turned off and took the road that continues via Megiddo. I had not passed ...

Fortresses fulfilled a variety of roles. Some were intended to actively defend, some primarily to fulfil a regional administrative role, ...

While travelling across Europe in the summer of 1975, a friend and I met up with some other young backpackers in Athens and rented a car ...

Lawrence Durrell, a writer particularly charmed by islands, opens his travel book on Rhodes, Reflections on a Marine Venus, with the disc...