Lyse Doucet’s The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan (Hutchinson Heinemann, £25) is Book of the Week on Radio 4 from 11.45am today. The author — chief international correspondent of the BBC — was one of the contributors to Start the Week on the same station earlier this morning, with Ashleigh Percival-Borley, a British Army medic turned military historian, and the writer Michela Wrong, whose biography of the Congo/ Zaire dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz, was published 25 years ago.

In the FT at the weekend, Charles Clover said The Finest Hotel in Kabul was “full of warmth, wit and a lovely eye for the human stories that make the hotel not just a monument to tragedy but also love and resilience”. In The Sunday Times, Justin Marozzi said it was a must-read: “Haunting, hopeful and occasionally harrowing, [it] is much more than a history. It is a love letter to Afghanistan and its people.”