For all the effort invested, in the end the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban was inevitable. Everything the Taliban assured negotiators they wouldn’t do, they did. As Fred Smith, who worked for DFAT in Uruzgan province and elsewhere, writes in The Sparrows of Kabul, 'the problems that brew in failed states become our problems'

Critic Sheridan Morley watched an old movie and saw a winking endorsement of child sex abuse. Well, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and a film no more than innocent entertainment. Alas that modernity's eye for the sordid subtext so often distorts a blameless past

“If the pages are brown, then out it goes,” said […]

The Dust of Uruzgan by Fred Smith Allen & Unwin, […]