Mark Muller Stuart uses the historical weight of his Scottish home to boost cross-cultural understanding
Read moreby Clare Hammond
Journalist Clare Hammond interviews participants at this year's festival of literature and thought, Books, Borders & Bikes, including controversial historian David Starkey, Palestinian surgeon Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, and war correspondent Marie Colvin.
Read moreThis year's Books, Borders & Bikes, at Traquair House, has a star-studded line-up, including David Starkey and Mariella Frostrup.
Read moreField Culture
Galleries and outings, by Field Culture.
Read moreBorders audiences, it transpired, were quite prepared to find out more about Zimbabwean culture, Palestinian landscape and identity, or what it's like to spend ten years in a Turkish jail for daring to speak Kurdish. Nearly all the events in the tent were packed out, and those that weren't were 90 per cent full. Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, Do We Look Like Refugees?, one of three plays on the Fringe backed by Muller's Beyond Borders organisation, won a Scotsman Fringe First and has gone on to a successful run at London's Riverside Studios. So this year his plans are even more ambitious. In the middle weekend of the Edinburgh Book Festival he has put together a programme so good that it even stands comparison with Edinburgh's own.
Read moreThere were two men in the back of the hired car as it crossed the border into rebel-held Libya in at the end of March. Both lawyers, both mavericks, and both taking a risk.
One of them was Jason McCue, a solicitor married to Mariella Frostrup. Two years ago he won a landmark ruling after a nine-year campaign to get justice for the relatives of the 29 people killed by the bomb planted by the Real IRA in Omagh in 1998. Going into rebel Libya three weeks after an SAS platoon had been arrested for trying to do the same thing was his idea.
Read moreInternational mediator Mark Muller Stuart QC and human rights lawyer Jason McCue are spreading the rule of law in Libya and beyond, explored David Robinson
Read moreBook lovers should check out Traquair's impressive festival
Read moreGazan surgeon to join festival of ideas at Traquair House this August.
Read moreSri Lanka’s Killing Fields went out at 11.00pm but was a flagship news programme for Channel 4, presented by the great Jon Snow and pitched as a clarion call for the world to wake up to the war crimes that allegedly took place during the final months of Sri Lanka’s 25-year-long civil war, in 2009. The UN’s own report on the subject, published earlier this year, has already described what it terms “credible reports” of war crimes perpetrated by the Sri Lankan government’s army against the country’s Tamil civilians.
Read moreThis film contains very disturbing images," warned Jon Snow at the beginning of Sri Lanka's Killing Fields. It would, he continued, depict "death, injury, execution and evidence of sexual abuse and murder". He was right too, though when the final credits rolled you couldn't help but feel that the worst lay somewhere off screen, less in the atrocities shown than in the moral debasement that had led to them being filmed in the first place, and the terrible banality of the conversations that went on as they were filmed.
Read moreIf you're the Sri Lankan government, then you probably want Jon Snow's Sri Lanka's Killing Fields (Channel 4) to go away [...] Much of the footage, which documented the summary executions, rape, torture and bombing – all apparently sanctioned by the Sri Lankan government – of tens of thousands of Tamils in the last days of the civil war after the UN pulled out of the country in September 2008, was shocking.
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