Sedbergh Festival of Books & Drama 2009

Barnaby Rogerson

The Last Crusaders

Dodging the Taliban

Anthony Fitzherbert from Old Hutton is an expert in Rural Development and has worked all over the Middle East. He speaks Persian and Turkish and continues to spend a good deal of his time in Afghanistan, finding keeping a low profile is te best way to dodge the Taliban.

Mark Ellingham & John Hatt In Conversation

Founder Publisher Mark Ellingham is the travel guide guru, who’s still roughing it twenty–six years and 30 million copies after his first Rough Guide, in conversation with John Hatt, traveller to more than 90 countries, ex Travel Editor of Harpers and Queen, publisher (Eland specialising in travel literature) and internet entrepreneur.

Barnaby Rogerson speaks about his new book “The Last Crusaders” with Tony Reed Screen

“The Last Crusaders” is narrative history at its richest and most compelling. It is about the carnage of Lepanto, the conquests of Don Juan, the pyramid of Spanish skulls that Dragut built in Jerba, about how the Spanish stabled their horses on a litter of Korans, the life of galley slaves, gunpowder, the casting of cannon and gold.

This book is about the last great conflict between the East and the West. It is about the titanic struggle between Hapsburg–led Christendom and the Ottoman empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Though it focuses on the great naval campaigns and the ferocious struggle to dominate the North African shore it was also, in its way, the first world war. The conflict spread out along trade routes into the Atlantic, Red Sea, Persian Gulf and across the Sahara. There was even a plan hatched for taking the war into the Caribbean. It consumed nations and cultures, destroyed dynasties, flattened cities and depopulated provinces. Yet the borders they fought for stand to this day as defining frontiers – the dividing lines between languages, nations and religions.

Barnaby Rogerson has written half a dozen guidebooks, “A Traveller’s History of North Africa” (Windrush, 1998), “The Prophet Muhammad: A Biography” (Little, Brown, 2003) and an account of the early Caliphate, “Heirs of the Prophet” (Little, Brown, 2006).  He has also put together a collection of Moroccan travel literature, “Marrakech, the Red City” (Sickle Moon, 2003) a pocket collection of English Orientalist verse, “Desert Air”, a pocket collection of the verse of London and a collection of contemporary travel writing; “Meetings with Remarkable Muslims”, Eland 2005.

Audience Questions – please be ready with your questions after each talk

Should we mind our own business by staying ‘at home’ or is travel essential to form character and opinions? Our experts answer audience questions on today’s topics – chairman Tony Reed Screen.