Category Archives: Published work

The Scotsman recently carried my obituary of Mary Bell, a remarkable woman who received the MBE for her work promoting Scottish businesses abroad with the Scottish Council Development & Industry. She also happened to be my much-loved aunt.

It was on a cold February morning in 2010 that I first knocked on the door of Martha Steedman’s beautiful Fife home. A tall, impeccably dressed woman opened the door and ushered me in. It felt like we’d known each other for years.

I was there because I had an idea that I’d like to write a book on Sikkim, a tiny Indian state perched between Bhutan and Nepal that had once been a Himalayan Kingdom. A year earlier, I had retraced a journey that my grandfather had made in 1922, walking 120 miles into a hilltop Buddhist monastery in the heart of Sikkim. Continue reading →

I wrote an article for The London Library Magazine’s summer 2013 issue on the remarkable tale of four Tibetan boys educated at Rugby School during the First World War. You can read a preview below.