In a backstreet of the old workers’ quarter of Port Said, where the Suez Canal meets the Mediterranean, 20 musicians have drawn up a ragged semi-circle of wooden chairs. Strings of coloured lights swing overhead, and the tarmac is covered with flowered carpets. The entire neighbourhood has emptied out on to the street: old ladies in long robes packed tightly together with girls in acid-green and pink headscarves, young men [...]

Historical novels set in 16th-century England – especially accounts of the marital woes of Henry VIII – usually follow a Hollywood-friendly template of heaving bodices, well-filled hose and pointy-bearded intriguers.

In the hands of Hilary Mantel, Tudor kitsch becomes something darker and less digestible. Wolf Hall takes a forensic slice through a nation caught between feudalism and capitalism, the Middle Ages and modernity, Catholicism and the revolutionary doctrines emerging [...]

“Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with a man you loathe,” wrote the Iranian critic Azar Nafisi in her bestselling account of teaching western literature under the ayatollahs. Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) described how her English-language library – in particular, the novels of Jane Austen, F Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and Nabokov – helped her survive an enforced intimacy with a regime that sought to control [...]

Broughton in Oxfordshire is a 14th-century moated manor house that has been described as “about the most beautiful castle in all England”. But, for William Fiennes, whose parents inherited it shortly before he was born, it was simply “the house”. “I didn’t question the world as I found it,” he writes; “ . . . our wide moat and gatehouse tower . . . were just facts I grew up [...]

In April 1982, the British artist Linda Kitson boarded the QE2, which had been requisitioned as a troop carrier, and set out for the Falkland Islands, and for war. She was the first female artist – at least, the first with an official commission – to accompany British troops into action. In the three months she spent with the soldiers on board ship, in harbour and in the sheep pens [...]

The Senegalese singer and guitarist Baaba Maal is no ordinary pop star. When he returns from touring in Europe, North America or the Far East, he travels to the old French garrison town of Podor, situated on the banks of the river that separates Senegal from its desert neighbour, Mauritania. He exchanges his jeans for bright West African robes, greets his family, and sits down to listen to his fans.

Along with more sinister institutions nearby, the towering, crenellated Red October chocolate factory was one of the most celebrated landmarks of Soviet-era Moscow. Throughout the 20th century, its candies, cocoa and biscuits marked out the fortunes of the state - and, more bizarrely, those of its artists. When the factory was seized by the Bolsheviks in 1917 - and named first State Confectionery Factory No 1, then the more evocative Krasny [...]

The mayoralty of Tehran was the springboard to the Iranian presidency for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - and it could work the same way for his successor. Ahmadinejad ran Iran's chaotic capital for two years, curtailing many of the freedoms introduced by the reformist administration that preceded him, before he was elected president in June 2005. Now, Mohammad-Baqer Qalibaf - the current mayor, a defeated candidate in the 2005 elections, and one [...]

A dark-eyed woman wrapped in a black chador steps from the roof of her house and drifts, as slowly as a leaf, to the street below. She lies by the side of a dead man, her 1950s-style skirt spread neatly around her. She is buffeted by a white-shirted mob of protesters shouting, "Down with Britain!" and sees them brutally forced back by motorcades of royalist troops. She rises [...]

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, [...]