Marrakech Express

Peter Millar embarks on a literally reverse-engineered train journey through this still exotic, diverse and challenging North African country, struggling to maintain its unique blend of tradition and tolerance in the turbulent winds of the Arab spring. From the snake charmers and food stalls of Jamaa el Fna, Millar takes us to the ancient walled city of Fez, the wineries of the Meknes valley, cosmopolitan Casablanca, tacky Tangier, and the anomalous Spanish exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, squatting on Morocco's Mediterranean coast like a counterpoint to British Gibraltar. "The culture and landscape of Morocco are showcased in this frequently humorous chronicle of Millar's journey by train through the country."--World Literature Today Jan./Feb 2015 "A well-experienced, well-written account of one of the few remaining stable countries in the Arab world."--Library Journal, Feb. 01, 2015

Peter Millar was born in Northern Ireland and educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read French and Russian. He worked for Reuters news agency as the sole non-German correspondent in East Berlin in the early 1980s, also covering the Solidarity movement in Poland before moving to Warsaw, where he pressed the button to tell the world of the election of Mikhail Gorbachev, a defining moment in Soviet history.In 1985 he joined the Sunday Telegraph in the newly created role as Central Europe Correspondent - a title he invented to anticipate the dramatic changes about to overtake the continent - before moving to The Sunday Times, in early 1989, just in time to catch the climactic final stages of The Cold War. Millar was seized by the Volkspolizei on the streets of East Berlin during the demonstrations which accompanied Gorbachev's visit in October, interrogated by the Stasi and expelled from the country. Nonetheless he managed to get back by November 9, the dramatic night the Berlin Wall came down.