one of the advantages of cycling is that it automatically prevents a journey from becoming an Expedition.

On my tenth birthday a bicycle and an atlas coincided as presents and a few days later I decided to cycle to India.

Buying a bicycle is a momentous event, akin to marriage: you are acquiring a partner.

Undoubtedly the Afghans must be, by our standards, the best-looking people in the world. They have everything; height, proportions, carriage, features and complexion.

the sudden violent dispossession accompanying a refugee flight is much more than the loss of a permanent home and a traditional occupation, or than the parting from close friends and familiar places. It is also the death of the person one has become in a particular context, and every refugee must be his or her own midwife at the painful process of rebirth.

Sunnis consider Shias a pack of unwholesome fanatics and Shias consider Sunnis a gang of lukewarm no-goods - there's nothing like religion for spreading brotherly love!

With our mad lust for Uniformity and a Higher Standard of Living and Expanding Markets, we go to a country like Afghanistan and cruelly try to jerk her forward two thousand years in two decades, giving no thought to the profound shock this must be to her national psychology.