ADRIAN J BOAS

I was born at Windermere, a name that conjures up broad windswept vistas, farmlands, holiday villages and a majestic lake. But my Windermere was somewhat dif...

I once knew a fellow; all of us know someone like him; who, whenever he was asked anything inevitably knew the answer, or believed he did, and always had som...

In the Gulf War between the coalition led by the United States and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, when Israel was in the firing line, people here were required to ca...

As a former pencil-chewer, it is a great relief to know that the lead poisoning I got as a child came, not from the "lead" of the pencils, actually graphite,...

Map of Acre and detail by Pietro Vesconte [Public Domain, British Library, Add. MS 27376, ff.189v-190]; Akko harbour Emmanuel G. Rey (from B. Dichter, Maps o...

A number of years ago, in one of those many periods of tension in this region that are sometimes identified as "wars", at other times merely as "actions", bu...

The isolation forced upon us by the pandemic has emboldened a pair of sunbirds (Cinnyris osea) and enabled me a delightful opportunity to observe up close th...

As a child, gazing out across Port Phillip Bay, I remember feeling that I was looking off the edge of the world. There was more land out there of course, som...

Having given expression to my love of cats, I have to make it clear to those demented few who find this an aberration, that I grew up with dogs as well and h...

I am a cat lover. I admit it without hesitation. There is something delightful about cats, about their independence and playfulness, and those who malign the...

With anticipation, as the weddings of my two still unmarried sons approach this spring, it occurs to me that of the many great and small events of my life, o...

With the current outbreak of the corona virus - COVID-19, it is interesting to note how attitudes range between fear bordering on hysteria and total apathy. ...

Last week, I took a group of students on a field trip to some rural sites in the Judaean hills. When we encountered an arched doorway in an overgrown vaulted...

If streets and lanes are the veins and arteries of cities, city squares are their beating hearts. Trafalgar Square, Place de la Concorde, Piazza Navona; thes...

The Dead Sea is dying. It has been for some time. Since I first saw it a half century ago the shallow south of the lake has all but vanished, the hard-won ac...

When I was sixteen, I pestered my mother into agreeing to buy me a pair of pale blue, chequered, bell-bottom trousers. Today I would not be seen dead in the ...

Last week I observed an interview on Israeli television of the writer whose recent book opposed certain views that were expressed in the 1992 bestseller by J...

My mother, thin and frail in her old age, though never frail of mind, passed away at the age of 89, after a brief but painful battle with intestinal cancer. ...

We are not always certain about how to look after fragile things. Sometimes our efforts to care for them only endanger them the more. It is not always easy t...

The two most dramatic approaches to a city that I know are those of Venice and Jerusalem. Venice is approached across a flat expanse of blue. There is a sens...