Posts by Pamela
The Storied City
In 2013, Charlie English, then international news editor of The Guardian, became obsessed with the news coming out of Timbuktu. Jihadists were destroying the city’s religious monuments because they were not properly Islamic and librarians were smuggling medieval books out of the city in order to preserve them from the jihadists. He was not the…
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Warriors, Bishops and Long-Haired Kings
These days I’m not reading many Big Fat History Books that I’m prepared to recommend to the Marginalia. It’s not that I’m not reading. At the moment I have five different library cards on active rotation in my wallet and carefully segregated piles of books from three different libraries on my study floor. When I…
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From the Archives: Road Trip Through History-Driving the Ypres Salient
Normally I’d hesitate to describe something as a road trip that begins with a transatlantic flight. The driving tour of the Ypres Salient* is an exception. The Belgian town of Ieper (Ypres in French, “Wipers” in British Tommy) was the center of a series of bloody battles in World War I. The kind of battles…
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