Dayr Dubbān was a small village, now in ruins, near the modern village of Luzit, situated to the north of the main road about half way from Jerusalem to Ascalon.

On May 21 1863, Victor Guérin the famous French explorer of the Holy Land visited a small village (“seven or eight poor peasant families living in half dilapidated huts”) called Dayr Dubbān (a Monastery of the Flies). On the rugged plateau on which this little village was built, Guérin found many round openings in the rocks which looked like openings of wells. In spite of the fact that the local inhabitants called them al-biyār, these were not wells but round apertures giving access to, and lighting huge underground cavities dug into the white limestone.

In 1076, some twenty years before the First Crusade was launched, Pope Gregory VII wrote to al-Nāşir, Sultan of Bougie in what is now Algeria:

For there is nothing which Almighty God, who wishes that all men should be saved and that no man should perish, more approves in our conduct, than that a man should first love God and then his fellow men … Most certainly you and we ought to love each other in this way more than other races of men, because we believe and confess one God, albeit in different ways, whom each day we praise and reverence as the creator of all ages and the governor of this world. For, as the Apostle says: “He is our peace, who hath made both one”.

This enlightened view of Islam was not widely shared in Latin Christendom at that time, nor was it rooted in any very profound knowledge of the Muslim religion. B. Z. Kedar is, I think, correct in his view that a good deal of information about Islam was available in the West before the crusades, both in written and oral sources, but because there was a general lack of interest in the subject, no attempt had been made to coordinate this knowledge.

On an October day in 1869 Lord Houghton, friend of Thackeray and Tennyson, appeared in the cemetery at Kensal Green, in West London. He was there to unveil a tomb memorial to the poet Leigh Hunt; this was surmounted by a bust, and bore the legend:

It is not really surprising that place of honour on Leigh Hunt's tomb is taken by a quotation from “his exquisite little fable ‘Abou ben Adhem’” which “has assured him a permanent place in the records of the English language”,1 and whose “touch of glory, like a sacred flame on a clear and graceful altar, has captured the succeeding generations”.2 The poet himself, Leigh Hunt, regarded this poem as one of his best.3 It is recorded that a friend presented to him an illuminated copy of it, which he hung above his writing table.4

The Persian inscriptions of India, which constitute an important source, particularly for the local history of a region, a district, a tehsil, a town and a village, have received inadequate if not scant attention from our historians. Worse and far more regrettable is the neglect of visitors' or travellers' records on the walls of sarais, tombs or mosques, and similar buildings which they passed and where they made a halt, overnight and otherwise. Against the commemorative stone tablets set in a monument to perpetuate the name of the builder, visitors' or travellers' records or graffiti, as they are also called, were written usually in ink and hence were of comparatively much less durable nature. Many of these graffiti have disappeared in the natural course with the passage of time.

In the course of my research into the character, role and influence of the British officials in Tibet during the 1904–47 period, it became apparent that previous scholarship had failed fully to confront an issue which would explain the clear decline in Anglo-Tibetan relations during the latter half of the 1920s. There is considerable evidence to suggest that the British officer then in immediate charge of Anglo-Tibetan relations attempted to promote a coup d'état in Tibet, in order to transfer secular power from the Dalai Lama and his court to Tsarong Shape, the forward-thinking Commander-in-Chief of the Tibetan Army. This possibility has been rejected by the leading European historians of the period, but their conclusions are, I will argue, in need of reassessment.

The development of the Prester John legend and matters associated with it are complex, and no significant work of book length in English has appeared on the subject since V. Slessarev's Prester John. The Letter and the Legend (1959). The recent publication of a collection of texts and interpretive essays will therefore be warmly welcomed. The texts are among those published by Zarncke in the Abhandlungen der königlichen sāchsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, vii (1879), and include the famous “letter” of Prester John, together with a note by Hamilton on additional Latin manuscripts that have since come to light. The essays comprise both reprints of work that has appeared over the past five decades and six fresh studies that now see the light of day for the first time.