One male Roman citizen wrote a touching letter to a foreign beau asking him to overlook what made the two of them different. There were many pairs of things that struck simple folks as incompatible, he said: the soul with the body, the nightingale with the spring, and the swallow with an indoor home. Elephants terrified many Romans. Rumors of the phoenix, the bird that rose from its own ashes, entranced the people of India, and a kingfisher rarely perched on a cliff. An uneducated mind was often taught to view these odd pairings as exotic and strange. But two men who felt a deep love for each other should embrace their strangeness, he reasoned:

Don’t be shocked if I, as a foreigner, reveal my love for you. It’s not a crime to look. Beauty, like fire, kindles the eyes, and what is beautiful should shine. It should light up the eyes, right away. Don’t worry about trying to distinguish a foreigner’s eyes from a citizen’s, or a foreigner’s ears from a citizen’s. The eyes and the ears are messengers of the soul.

Attributed to Philostratus the Elder, Letter 8, lines 1–5, in Alciphron, Aelian, and Philostratus: The Letters

Foreign lovers were especially beautiful, he went on. “If you want someone who will stay faithful to you, write my name down in your list of citizens. Be my Zeus and my Apollo, my protector of citizens, my guardian of native cities. And if they ask what tribe I belong to, go tell everyone my tribe is the tribe of Love.” Many immigrants to the Roman Empire were shocked to find war and bigotry and fanaticism in their adopted home. But with luck, some also found the spark that led to poetry.

Douglas Boin, Alaric the Goth: An Outsider’s History of the Fall of Rome

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There is an interesting account of a visit to the prince’s court from an unusual source: the diary kept by a Persian ambassador, Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, which was written during his nine months’ stay in London in 1809–10 while a friendship treaty between the two countries was finalized. Abul Hassan encountered the prince several times at balls and dinners and was very impressed by his friendliness. The diary references are extremely fulsome, but the prince seems to have been genuinely interested in the exotic ambassador and sought him out, inviting him to visit the palace gardens whenever he felt melancholy or homesick and to ride one of the horses from the royal stables. On 3 February 1810 he attended a dinner the prince arranged in his honour:

We proceeded through rows of handsome footmen, richly attired and saw a myriad beautifully coiffed ladies standing beneath the gold and silver and crystal chandeliers. Thousands of wax candles lighted the rooms and alcoves… The prince graciously placed me on his right hand and showed me great condescension. [He said:] ‘Every place has its particular attractions. God the Creator has given us the flowers of spring and the fruits of summer – as well as pomegranate-breasted beauties! Since he has brought you to this land, banish sorrow from your heart and enjoy it!’ Then the conversation turned to affairs of the heart. The Prince asked: ‘Thin women or fat – which do you prefer?’

For himself, the prince (like Hassan) preferred plump women.

Stephen Bates, 1815: Regency Britain in the Year of Waterloo

Summarizing Sir Francis Sykes’ (of the Sykes-Picot fame) travelogue of the Middle East, of a trip undertaken with his 60+ year old Dad, 30-something Mom and her lover:

In Damascus he was assailed by ‘packs of filthy dogs . . . ragged soldiers, yelling muleteers, greedy antika sellers’, and dismayed by the ‘ill-appointed hotels, tough mutton and rank butter’. He saved his deepest opprobrium for Mosul, a ‘foul nest of corruption, vice, disorder and disease’, in which ‘the new houses are as ramshackle, as insanitary, as stinking as the old; the old as ugly, as uninteresting, and as repulsive as the new’. The souks there were ‘ankle deep in decaying guts and offal; the kennels run with congealing blood and stinking dye in sluggish and iridescent streams, nauseous to behold and abominable in odour’.

James Barr, A line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle for the Master of the Middle East

After dinner one evening late in April 1963, the telephone rang at Jim Johnson’s Chelsea home. Johnson was now an insurance underwriter at Lloyds. Brian Franks, the man on the other end of the line, was a friend from a former life. Until the previous December Johnson had commanded 1st SAS – the territorial regiment. Franks, a near-legendary figure who had led the second of the two SAS regiments in the war, was now the corps’ colonel commandant. ‘May I come round and have a glass of brandy?’ Franks asked. ‘Of course,’ Johnson replied, intrigued.

When Franks turned up a little later he explained that he had come directly from a meeting at his club with the foreign secretary Lord Home, Julian Amery, Billy McLean and the SAS’s founder David Stirling. McLean and Stirling were both just back from separate missions to southern Arabia, where, on the surface, the news seemed bleak.

Franks urged Johnson not to believe anything he might have read in the papers. ‘Don’t believe the Americans about the Yemen. They don’t understand the Middle East,’ the maverick MP said. ‘The resistance under the Imam is terrific.’

McLean had reported that while King Hussein had largely abandoned the royalists following intense American pressure, the Saudi Crown Prince Faisal had no plan to follow suit, though he was frustrated by British inactivity so far. Inside Yemen itself the royalists’ situation was much the same. But, under daily attack from Egyptian and Russian bombers and desperately short of arms and ammunition, they feared that they would have to withdraw from the Khawlan, the massif immediately east of Sanaa, from which they controlled the road to Marib, which the Egyptians were having to resupply by air. If the royalists abandoned the high ground, the Egyptians would be able to take over the road. Not only would they then be able to supply Marib far more easily, they would also consolidate their grip over the east of the country, disrupting the royalists’ supply lines which for the time being were still open. McLean had been into the Khawlan by camel, passing within 5 miles of Marib. He had seen the situation for himself.

If the Khawlan was key to victory, the key to the Khawlan appeared to be the airstrip from which the Egyptian and Russian air attacks were being launched. It was this Franks had come to see Johnson about. ‘Would you like to go in and burn all these aeroplanes?’ he asked.

‘Well, yes,’ replied Johnson. ‘I’ve got nothing particular to do in the next few days. I might have a go.’

James Barr, Lords of the Desert

Part natural fastness, part lost world, the Jebel was protected on all sides by 45-degree flanks, pierced in a few places by sheer-sided wadis that ran off a 6,000 ft-high plateau, which was in turn surrounded by higher peaks. The temperate climate and running water all year round created, by Omani standards, a veritable Elysium on the plateau: fruit and cereal crops grew abundantly there. Last conquered by the Persians in the thirteenth century, the Jebel retained a mysterious reputation. ‘An Arab from the mountain’, Thesiger recounted, ‘once told me that in the winter the rain sometimes turns into a soft white powder like salt.’

James Barr, Lords of the Desert: Britain’s Struggle with America to dominate the Middle East

In one of the world’s least hospitable places, The Sultanate of Oman, hot and dry and lifeless, there rises, in the middle of murderous desert, a mountain of water and life. The Jebel Akhdar or Al Jabal Al Akhdar, is part of Al Hajar Mountains range in Ad Dakhiliyah Governorate. It rises to a height of 2,980 m and encompasses the Saiq Plateau at 2,000 m above sea level. Jebel Akhdar is famous for its labyrinth of wadis and terraced orchards, where pomegranates, apricots and roses grow in abundance due to its mild Mediterranean climate.

Now consider: when a French person travels for a holiday to a sea-side resort, s/he expects to have an affair, the affair of the summer. Isn’t this wonderful? Here is the hero, at dinner table, discussing with the (sexy) wife of a friend, his own love interest:

Her friendly concern enchanted me. So was I mistaken? In this hostility I detected something more than the usual rivalry between women. Impossible to see Irène, this magnificent brunette, without immediately being aware that she’s above all the woman, with all the appetites, the needs, the blinkered vision of her sex. Not even the most banal, hackneyed gallantries could fail to spring automatically from the lips of someone faced with a woman who’s been more mercilessly depersonalized by her sex than anyone I’ve ever seen. I don’t wish to be improper—yet it’s perfectly obvious that that mouth, that backside, those breasts rebel against the thought of appealing to anything except the brief caress of a palm, lips, words of sexual arousal. And what makes most women proud, Irène experiences as humiliation. Tucked up so snugly in her prison of flesh, she’s got something against Christel for being able to play the angel, stir the imagination, dreams, more directly than the senses. It’s a sign of a far and away rarer jealousy, because prejudices scoff at it, which I think I found in that word “Sphinx” which she used with such scorn.

Julien Gracq, A Dark Stranger

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I was a kind of Malinowski — an Austrian subject in British domains; and my lover was a kind of Joanna — all fashion, panache, confidence, show. We were sent on a mission of exploration in a cold, very high mountain country: the Indian Northwest, perhaps, or a mountain range in the Russian Far East? We were geographers but also spies. The mountains were incredibly steep and very green, vegetation climbing near vertical walls. Donkeys and porters slipped off the mountain sides and plunged into the abyss.

Cut.

Then came the war and I was interred by the British as an enemy subject. In a city besieged by Austrians. I escaped dressed as a woman only to fall into the hands of the besiegers who naturally, hearing my accent, expected me to volunteer. I escaped again in a red woman’s jacket, but was followed in a long chase across the occupied Europe, on speeding trains and through cities bound in fierce winter cold, in Warsaw, Paris and Rome. In all those city chases I was able to stay ahead of my pursuers only because of my intimate knowledge of the cities’ layouts. I dashed around familiar monuments and through familiar dark passages, intimately familiar to my dream self, yet ones completely dreamt up and imaginary.

Cut.

All this was described in an old, yellowed book, written by Joanna to commemorate my exploits. As I lived through the chase, I stopped every now and then to consult the book, while lying on a sumptuous carpet in a house of friends to whom I was relating the story.

A kind of dream in which so much happens that one wakes tired and dazed from all that action.

Socially distancing as I am by nature, it cannot be that I miss my trips to Nancy. Yet, perhaps in the wake of a beautiful French love story, filmed with an eye trained on Dutch Master’s interior scenes — Vermeer, Dou; and my reflections on the Old Goat Goethe; I spent the morning cleaning my office while my mind wandered round Nancy: Place Stanislas, Place Carnot, and the area around the Musee d’Ecole de Nancy and Grand Nancy Thermal. There is, in that narrow street, a tiny antique shop stuffed full of art nouveau glass; it is just two steps from Lycee Frederic Chopin and a place where an older, refined gentleman might accidentally make acquaintance of an artistically minded bacalaurette. Or not. What bacalaurette takes interest in old glass? A lovely morning, though, remembering, imagining.