Alaa al-Aswany is the biggest literary star of the Arab world. In a region where few people read for pleasure, the Egyptian dentist-and-writer's 2002 novel, Imaret Yaqubian, became a Dan Brown-sized bestseller. Unlike the highbrow novels of the tiny literary elite, al-Aswany's slice through Cairo society dealt frankly with poverty, Islamism, endemic corruption, domestic violence and homosexuality (predictably, only the last provoked an outraged debate in the Egyptian parliament). Good-natured, [...]

Daniel Barenboim is waiting for an urgent message. "We have a problem," he says, glancing at the mobile phone lying beside him on an apple-green chaise longue in his office at La Scala opera house in Milan. "Next week we play our first concert of the year, and it's difficult to get some of the musicians there."

The conductor's problem goes beyond the logistical difficulties presented by any orchestral tour. [...]

Yeheskel Kojaman's Baghdad is a city of dust roads, alley markets, minarets and palm trees. Muslim, Jewish, Armenian and a few European coffee drinkers lounge in cafes where you can pay - in Indian rupees - to pick and eat fresh salad or have a fish pulled from the Tigris and grilled in front of you. The streets, nightclubs and houses are full of music. "The singer Hdhairy Abou Aziz [...]

A snake writhes over the desert sands that half submerge the Sphinx. A crafty merchant examines a coin presented by two anxious, veiled customers. Heavily laden camels kneel at an encampment. Bored, gorgeously clad concubines lounge in the secret depths of a harem. The British orientalist paintings of Tate Britain's forthcoming exhibition "The Lure of the East" are colourful, exotic, often technically brilliant. But they are also controversial, variously perceived [...]

As the sun sinks over the steep jungle hills of the Thailand-Burma border, a saffron-robed monk walks towards his temple's golden shrine. Across a shallow gully, four grey- uniformed Burmese soldiers watch him through binoculars, their rifles poised. Below them is a huddle of abandoned, burnt-out houses.

"Six years ago, they destroyed the temple and ran the new border straight through the middle," says the monk. "On the Thai side [...]

All spring, Abu Dhabi's airport, shopping malls and heavily chandeliered luxury hotels have been plastered with golden banners announcing the "second-largest book award in the world": the Sheikh Zayed Book Awards. Like Martin Newland's new English-language newspaper, the National, the £950,000, nine-category prize, now in its third year, represents a fraction of the £100bn pledged by the emirate's government to generate a "cultural revival" in the Arab world. The aim [...]

"This incorporate World of Grand Cairo is the most admirable and greatest City seene upon the earth!" exclaimed the traveller William Lithgow as he struggled out of the Suez Desert in 1612. Ever since, as explorers, Egyptologists, Arabic scholars, painters, administrators, occupiers, spies, diplomats, businessmen or holidaymakers, the British have had a pretty good time in the city known to its inhabitants as Umm el-Dunya, the Mother of the World. [...]

A fast-talking street girl in Sana'a. A belly-dance student in Cairo. A village girl lost in the endless plains of rural Turkey. Disillusioned middle-aged émigrées from Damascus. A schoolgirl seized by Iran's religious police. An Algerian housewife trapped in a gloomy French apartment. The female protagonists of the 36 features, short films and documentaries in the Institut Français's festival of films by and about women in the Middle East, "Women's [...]

As 2007 draws to a close, publishers', and writers', thoughts are turning to Last Things - the military, political, economic and climatic chaos that will surely engulf us in 2008.

In Rivals (Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, April) and When China Rules the World (Allen Lane, June) Bill Emmott and Martin Jacques predict the uncomfortable effects of Asia's growing economic dominance, while in The Ballad of Abu Ghraib (Picador, March) [...]

Pharaonic Egypt has been blessed, or cursed, with a popular appeal that no other ancient civ ilisation can match. Its jackal-headed gods and glinting treasures have gripped our imagination since 1801, when Napoleon's army returned from Cairo laden with statues, papyri and pilfered grave-goods. From those light-fingered colonialists to B-movie directors and modern tour operators, kitsch, commerce and downright greed have been an inseparable part of Egyptology's history.

So, the [...]