A bitter March wind is whistling off the Clyde, hurrying the last few commuters onto their trains at Glasgow Central Station, but a floor above, in the golden ballroom of the Grand Central Hotel, the man who would tear the United Kingdom apart is bathing in a warm glow of love. “Alex,” says a middle-aged …
On a December morning in 2014, a four-car convoy of black SUVs swept out of the polished limestone arches of the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem and drove south. Skirting the walls of the old city, it passed Mount Zion and its small, ancient church where King David lies buried and where Jesus was …
ONCE UPON A TIME, NOT SO LONG AGO, in a land not far away, a British man who would become an icon to a generation of European Islamists fighting and dying in Syria and Iraq, sat down before a webcam in his parents’ modest home on England’s south coast and filmed a 90-minute tutorial on how to tie a turban. The …
CHAPTER 1: EVERYTHING CONNECTS IT BEGINS WITH A BOAT. Small, white, with two large outboards – a speedboat. The pilot has feathered his throttle and is crawling upriver. The scenery suggests an estuary. The water is a muddy aquamarine. Aside from the grassy bank where the soldiers have parked their pick-ups, the river has no …
CHAPTER 1: A bar on the Nile Mid-morning and the staff were still wiping down the bar and clearing away the empties when George Clooney ambled over to my table. George had a couple of hours before he headed north to the fighting and we’d agreed to meet by the Nile, at the aid worker hotel …
CHAPTER I It’s 50 days since the Islamist militants of Boko Haram kidnapped an entire girls’ school in northeastern Nigeria and the general wants me to see what he’s up against. He invites me to his office in the capital, Abuja, and opens his laptop. The general clicks on one folder entitled “Abubakar …
Nelson Mandela was born on July 18, 1918, into the royal house of Thembu of the Madiba clan, in the village of Mvezo, which sits on a bare, rocky hill above a bend in the Mbashe River, a day’s walk from the town of Umtata in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province. Though he didn’t believe …
The Olympian and his girlfriend seemed to have the perfect romance – until he killed her Four days before Oscar Pistorius shot her in the elbow, hip and head through the bathroom door at his home in Pretoria, Reeva Steenkamp tweeted a message about violence against women in South Africa. “I woke up in a …
To meet the man with one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, I must pass 10 separate security checkpoints. Five groups of Somali soldiers, three of Ugandan soldiers, one of Somali presidential bodyguards and finally a Ugandan close-protection officer all ask for my pistol. (To general bewilderment, I don’t have one.) They then …
All day a lookout sat in the waiting room outside Sbu Sibiya’s office at the African National Congress (ANC) city headquarters in downtown Durban. Across town, next to the 40-year-old ANC regional secretary’s suburban home, a hit man waited behind a hedge. When Sibiya left work for the day at 8:30 p.m., the lookout in …