Many people who have lost a parent will know that strange, intimate moment when you go back to the empty house after the funeral and start sorting through their possessions – the old books, the faded clothes and the odd pieces of broken jewellery. Tirunesh brought her last few things with her on the road […]

Of all the Europeans caught up in this story, the one who deserves our sympathy the most is a young Irishman called Laurence Kerans. He arrived in Ethiopia in the early 1860s in a burst of optimism and adventure and secured a promising job as secretary to the British Consul. But his first mission inland […]