Robin Ganev

I had a lot of misgivings when I started reading Julie Angus’s Olive Odyssey: Searching for the Secrets of the Fruit That Seduced the World. The set-up seemed too much like a reality show: couple with ten-month-old baby sails the Mediterranean coast. The claim that Angus had visited “perhaps the oldest olive tree in the…

The visitors from England were utterly charming except when the kids sat down to eat. The guests were a Sikh family, a couple and their three sons aged 16, 12 and 6. The parents, of course, preferred the savoury food of their ancestral Punjab: roti, dal, subgees, rounded off by pakoras and samosas. So their meals were spicy and…