There was more praise at the weekend for Lyse Doucet’s The Finest Hotel in Kabul, in which she offers a history of Afghanistan through the stories of the hotel’s staff. Laurie Bristow, who was Britain’s ambassador to Afghanistan from June to November 2021 (and witnessed the fall of the republic to the Taliban in August that year), said in The Observer that “This is a beautifully written and observed book by one of the finest journalists of her generation.”

While I’ve been away from the desk, Lance Richardson’s biography of that restless traveller Peter Matthiessen, True Nature, has featured on Literary Hub, where the author was interviewed by Terry McDonnell, and in The New Yorker, in a review by Maggie Doherty. And I see that Jeremy Bassetti’s interview with Richardson, for the Creative Journeys podcast, is also now online.